“Fenway 1912,” by Glenn Stout

For a decade or more, Fenway Park in Boston has been the hottest sports arena in the United States. Since the mid-1980s, when the Red Sox finally shook off nearly a century of lassitude and metamorphosed into one of sport’s most glamorous teams, not merely getting into the World Series but actually winning it twice, in 2004 and then again in 2007, for the first time since 1918, they have been on an incredible roll, one that ended this fall with a sickening thud. In a park with seating capacity of approximately 37,000 — the smallest in the major leagues — they have averaged above-capacity attendance for the past five years. A seat in Fenway is a rare and precious commodity, and as Glenn Stout points out in “Fenway 1912,” it is “now the most expensive ballpark in the country, with the average ticket price topping $50.”

It wasn’t always thus. In 1968, when I saw Fenway for the first time, attendance averaged under 24,000, and the glow of the miraculous 1967 season, when the team came out of nowhere to make the World Series and attendance more than doubled, threatened to wear off. A couple of friends and I bought tickets a few minutes before game time and had the park almost to ourselves. Ditto for later that fall, when I saw the Boston (now New England) Patriots of the American Football League play the New York Jets: plenty of empty seats and lots of leg room. Fenway was charming (it had been immortalized in 1960 by John Updike as “a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark”) but down at the heels; many people in Boston wanted to replace it with one of those circular, multi-purpose stadiums much in favor at the time.

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(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) - ‘Fenway 1912: The Birth of a Ballpark, a Championship Season, and Fenway's Remarkable First Year’ by Glenn Stout

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In the more than four decades since I first saw it, Fenway has been remodeled and modernized to a fare-thee-well, its lovely field and eccentric measurements well preserved but its quaintness shoved aside by “an ever more efficient delivery system for food, beverages, merchandise, and memorabilia,” making it a kissing cousin of Nationals Park and other ballparks of more recent manufacture. Still, it is one of the few truly magical places in American sports — the others that come to mind are Wrigley Field in Chicago, Lambeau Field in Green Bay and Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia — and watching a game there is an experience not soon forgotten, one that I have been privileged to enjoy perhaps two dozen times.

Stout, who edits the annual volume of “Best American Sports Writing,” takes as his subject not Fenway today, however — the quotes above are from his book’s penultimate page — but Fenway as it came into existence in the winter of 1911-12 and as the scene of five games of the 1912 World’s Series (as it was then called), one of the most thrilling in the long history of what sportswriters call the Fall Classic. It’s a fascinating story, and Stout tells it very well. To be sure in “Fenway 1912,” as in almost all books about sport, there’s more play-by-play than is really necessary to the tale, but too many years of reading too many books about sport have accustomed my eyes to glazing over during these passages, and no doubt yours can do the same.