‘To buffer the passage of time’

Center field bleachers at Fenway Park during a 2014 game.

— Photo by Vegasjon

“[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”

— A. Bartlett Giamatti (1938-1989), a lifelong Red Sox fan who served as president of Yale and baseball commissioner

1917 map of Fenway Park.

1919 rally at Fenway for Irish independence from Britain. Boston had a huge concentration of Irish-Americans.