Word: fenways
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...drawn near-capacity crowds to Fenway throughout the 1975 season, but never such an elegant one as this. During the tense pennant drive, faithful, supportive crowds had come to cheer, fans who cared but didn't take themselves too seriously, good-natured, relaxed rooters. Beer-drinking bleacher sitters; dope-smoking ex-Mets fans; Cub Scout packs from Nashua, New Hampshire; families up from Providence in overloaded Country Squires. A fair mixture of ages and ethnicities had come to Fenway during the summer...
...first Saturday of the Series, the melting pot had been replaced by a fine souffle. The crowd was mostly adult, almost all white, and wealthy. They walked self-consciously into Fenway, nervously ignoring the ticket less Sox fans who hovered resentfully about the gates. Across the street from the park a large tent enclosed a pregame luncheon party; policemen guarded its entrance, allowing the uninvited only a glimpse of white tableclothes and yellow flowers. Inside the tent a dance orchestra played...
...COURSE, THERE were some real fans at Fenway, and even the dignified neophytes grew noisier as the game wore on. But it wasn't a baseball crowd, and it certainly wasn't a Fenway crowd. Why not? Where were the hippies, the highschool kids, the experienced bleacher-sitters? Tickets had been expensive, it's true--$10 for grandstand, $15 for upper box--and fifty or a hundred bucks is a lot of money to spend on one family baseball outing. But this was the World Series; diehard fans should have been willing to pay extra, to go to the bank...
There are about 35,000 seats in Fenway Park. During the World Series by far the largest bloc of those went to Boston corporations; the Gillette Company, the Coca-Cola Bottling Company, and three banks--the First National Bank of Boston, the National Shawmut Bank and the State Street Bank and Trust Company. Each had held thousands of season tickets for the entertainment of favored customers and friends, and the Red Sox front office had offered two Series tickets for every season ticket each company owned. Season ticket holders (including some individuals) collected roughly 20,000 of Fenway...
...Boston Red Sox lost the 1975 World Series. It is possible that they would have lost even if their real fans had been admitted to Fenway. It is even possible that playing in front of an inept, straitlaced and elitist audience had no significant adverse effect. The principle remains in any case. The Red Sox lost the Series, but the people of Boston had lost before the Series even began...