New at Fenway, 'the best seats in baseball'

High above Fenway Park's emerald-green outfield, up where the smells of fresh-roasted peanuts swirl toward a blue Boston sky, there stands a new phenomenon in sports spectatorship: stadium-style seats perched atop the famous Green Monster wall.

Sure, the world has other great sports-viewing spots: the hot tub at Phoenix's Bank One Ballpark, the Royal Box at Wimbledon, the rooftops behind Chicago's Wrigley Field. But Fenway's new seats set a standard for sweeping outfield spectators into the glory of the game.

Partly, it's the view: Just 310 feet from home plate, the seats put fans right in the action. Partly it's where the view is from: a roughly 40-foot-tall design quirk that makes this park uniquely asymmetrical - and that plays a unique role in the bittersweet lore of Red Sox fandom. It's like watching the Super Bowl from the end zone. Or the Masters from the 18th putting green.

"These are just the best seats in baseball," says Jeff Fraser, a thick-necked ironworker with a bald pate and wrap-around sunglasses. He's sitting in the front row, swiveling around on his green metal chair, holding court.

He and a buddy camped out overnight in the ticket line - and teamed up to get eight seats for the first home game and four seats for each of the next six games.

At $50 each, the total bill reached $1,600. "It set me back a bit, but it's worth every penny, every penny," he says in his deep, diesel-toned voice.

After all, he's sitting just a few feet from where Carlton Fisk's homerun struck in Game 6 of the 1975 World Series to keep Sox fans' hopes alive for one more game. (It's that game that lives in fans' memories here, not the Game 7 loss.) And he's not far from where Yankee shortstop Bucky Dent's homer landed, thus crushing the Sox in the 1978 American League playoff. Indeed, for Sox fans, the monster is filled with all the holiness and heartbreak of Jerusalem's Wailing Wall.

It's also one of the most recognizable icons in sports. So one of the games people play up here is calling friends via cellphone to say: "Dude, I'm on the Monster!"

The beloved wall was inspired not by an architectect's aesthetic sensibilities or as a clever strategy to carve out a home-field advantage. It was forced on Fenway by the configuration of surrounding streets. Given a shallow left field, a high wall was the only way to avoid intolerable heaps of home runs.

The Green Monster has flummoxed generations of left-fielders with its challenging caroms. And now, it's thrilling fans as a viewing platform. For now at least, these are the hottest seats in baseball.

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