Field of Schemes

by Neil deMause

  As for the option of renovating the old ballpark, Sox execs insisted that it would be far too expensive, if even possible at all. “It would be easier to straighten the Leaning Tower of Pisa,” Harrington declared; HOK architect Earl Santee added, “You can’t renovate Fenway because the footprint is too small to fix what needs to be fixed.” Mayor Tom Menino, who had recently jumped on the Sox stadium bandwagon, added: “I love Fenway Park and I was an advocate of renovating it right where it is, too. But I was educated and I now realize it’s just unrealistic.”

  When word got out that Mayor Menino was questioning the Hagenah plan because it didn’t include a cost estimate, Save Fenway convinced a local firm to do one pro bono, on the grounds that Menino wanted it. The resulting figure came to $395 million, less than three quarters the cost of the Red Sox’s new-stadium plan. “The mayor was absolutely furious,” says Wilson. “The last thing he wanted was for us to go out and get a cost estimator.” The mayor later announced that a draft study by PricewaterhouseCoopers found that renovation costs “would exceed $500 million,” but Save Fenway later got the consultants to admit that they had likely overstated costs. And in any case, even a $500 million price tag would be less than the Sox were budgeting for a new stadium.

  The team’s main public argument for a new stadium, though, was not cost but comfort. A four-page paid “advertorial” insert that ran in both the Globe and the Boston Herald the Sunday before the Sox home opener in 2000 not only touted the economic benefits of a new stadium but also promised “10,000 additional affordable seats without a single obstructed view.” Sox fans may have loved their “little lyrical bandbox,” as Sox fan John Updike had famously called it, but they also griped about cramped seating and high ticket prices, and the team was determined to capitalize on this angle. “If we could get a 45,000-seat ballpark in the city,” Red Sox vice-president John Buckley told business leaders on one occasion, “I could assure you that ticket prices… would fall back into the middle of the pack.” Starting in the summer of 1999, Red Sox game telecasts broadcast ads that featured computer-generated flybys of the new stadium and made the spatially dubious promise of “seats that are closer to the field, not to the fan next to you.”

  Of course, expensive tickets and tight legroom could also be seen as a reflection of Fenway’s popularity and intimacy, but that wasn’t how team officials saw it. “Somebody who had been working for the Red Sox for years said he thought it was just that Mr. Harrington was just tired of fixing the leaky pipes,” says Wilson. “He wanted something new that was easier to maintain—you didn’t have to put a coat of paint on it every year.”

  There was another theory as to why the man running the Red Sox was so eager to leave Fenway behind. Though Harrington was in charge of the team, he didn’t actually own it. He was, rather, the head of the nonprofit Yawkey Trust that had inherited the team after former owners Tom and Jean Yawkey died, and as such, he had an obligation to maximize the value of the team. It was an incentive, notes Wilson, for short-term thinking: “All you had to do was get a new stadium deal through the legislature, as had been done in other places, and the value of the franchise went through the roof.”

  To the State House

  On May 19, 2000, the Red Sox owners finally proposed a detailed financing plan for their new stadium: The team would spend $352 million to sell the stadium proper, while the city and state would put up $275 million for land acquisition and infrastructure. Many in the city, though, warned that the land cost would likely be higher than projected, with the weekly Boston Phoenix (whose offices just happened to be in a building marked for demolition for a new Red Sox parking garage) predicting the total price tag could end up being as high as $900 million.

  It was not the best time to be asking for public funds. First off, the highway-construction project known as the Big Dig had just blown a $14 billion hole in the state budget. Then there was the presence of Thomas Finneran, the same powerful state house leader who had held the line on funding for a new stadium for the Patriots. Early in 2000 Finneran had remarked about the Sox plan, “I saw the number and was somewhat staggered by the amount. I don’t think it’s a taxpayer responsibility or obligation to subsidize professional-sports operations. Nor is it an obligation of taxpayers to chase down free agents and pay them extraordinary sums to pay them to come and play ball.” If the state were to build the team’s parking garages, insisted Finneran, it should get all parking revenues.

  As the stadium controversy grew, eight of Boston’s thirteen city councilors sent a letter to Governor Cellucci saying they had “grave reservations” about using city money to acquire land for the project. Even Mayor Menino, the project’s top backer, felt obliged to begin talking of taxpayers getting a “return on [their] investment,” saying, “I’m not going to risk mortgaging the city’s future. I want to make sure whatever I invest in the Red Sox comes back to the city. I can’t stop building schools and fixing playgrounds.” To achieve a “100% return” on the $110 million he was offering toward the project ($30 million less than the team was asking), Menino proposed various solutions, from a special baseball lottery to hotel taxes to a citywide parking surcharge.

  With time running out before the state legislature wrapped up its session at the end of July, Cellucci, Menino, Finneran, and state senate leader Tom Birmingham—plus the CEOs of financiers FleetBoston and John Hancock, and high-powered ad exec Jack Connors—huddled with Harrington in the governor’s office at the State House on July 25. By late in the evening, the deal was done. The team would put up $352 million for stadium construction, while the state and city would spend $312 million in public money: $100 million from the state for infrastructure, and $212 million from the city to acquire land and construct a 3,000-space parking garage. To meet the mayor’s “repayment” requirement, the political leaders cobbled together a mishmash of revenue streams that would be shared with the city, some coming from what would otherwise be team revenues (surcharges on tickets and luxury box sales, and $7 million a year in parking fees), others money that the city would be effectively “repaying” out of its own pockets (sales tax revenue from within the ballpark, plus a commitment of one quarter of 1 percent of the city’s hotel tax), and others where it was harder to interpret whose funds they would ultimately tap (a $5 parking surcharge at garages within one mile of the new stadium on game days).

  Wrote Bob Ryan in the next day’s Globe: “Yesterday’s announcement represented the necessary go-ahead rally. Messrs. Harrington, Menino, Cellucci, Birmingham, and Finneran are standing together on the mound, signaling for the closer. The Save Fenway types are firing off the e-mails even as we speak, but it’s too late now. The countdown will soon begin. The Red Sox will build a new park that will pay homage to baseball tradition while acknowledging a little concept known as progress.”

  By the end of that week, opponents and supporters of the new stadium had packed a room at the State House on Beacon Hill for a daylong hearing on the $100 million in state funds for the project. The day began with presentations by the team, the mayor, and the governor, all of whom argued that a new stadium was vitally important to the future of the ballclub. When Senator Dianne Wilkerson asked how the thriving Fenway district could be described as “blighted”—a necessary designation in order for the city to seize the land by eminent domain—the mayor responded, “We don’t mean ‘blight’ in the real sense of the word ‘blight.’”

  Save Fenway and the experts it had brought to testify, meanwhile, cooled their heels for hours as stadium proponents monopolized the podium. “I’ve been to a lot of these hearings,” marveled Rob Sargent of MassPIRG, part of Save Fenway’s Coalition against Stadium Subsidies, “and I’ve never been to one where five hours into it, not one member of the public has gotten a chance to speak.”

  Before the hearing, Wilkerson had been skeptical of the Sox proposal, telling reporters, “This is a community that has never had a plan formally presented to them. A vetting and an opportunity to ask questions
has never occurred. This is hardly a done deal. I’d say we’re in the seventh inning.” Yet the next morning, Wilkerson joined a majority of the legislature in voting for the Red Sox subsidy. As one of the few “no” voters remarked at the time: “It looks like a deal in progress.”

  For Save Fenway Park! members who had been meeting regularly with their elected officials to urge them not to provide money for Fenway’s demolition, it was a bitter pill to swallow. Tarlin says it was the first time she’d ever made an appointment to visit her state senator in his office. “He assured me there would be no taxpayer money. He would not vote for the $100 million in ‘infrastructure’ for a stadium. Oh, no, no, no, no.”

  Just a few days later, Tarlin was sitting in the State House gallery watching as her senator cast his vote to grant state funds for a new stadium. “This huge naivete lifted up,” she recalls. “Even when they say they’re going to do the right thing, they still don’t.”

  Fenway and Wayfen

  Even as the state legislature voted to supply money for a new stadium, Save Fenway and the Fenway Community Development Corporation, which represented Fenway community members angered at the Sox project encroaching on their neighborhood, were already hard at work assembling a charrette, a weeklong gathering of architects and urban planners that would hash out new ideas for reusing the existing site. It would be led by Philip Bess, the erstwhile designer of Chicago’s Armour Field, who had brought in several architects he knew from his previous work. Along with the Boston activists, this group would pile into a room at Simmons College’s Library Building for nine days in August to develop two proposals, one “reconstruction” plan, where Fenway would be effectively rebuilt in place, and one “preservation” option, which would retain and improve on the existing structure—as Wilson calls them, “a modest proposal, and a less modest proposal.”

  The charrette began by discarding the Hagenah plan’s premise of matching the Red Sox’s demands for more seats and luxury boxes. “We realized that probably a better renovation would be a smaller renovation,” says Wilson. Instead, the assembled architects prioritized finding a way to retain and enhance Fenway’s charms, while being a good neighbor to surrounding residents and businesses.

  The reconstruction team was led by Miami architect Rolando Llanes, who’d previously consulted for the Marlins on that team’s stadium plans. It proposed a rebuilt Fenway that would seat from 38,200 to 40,000 fans, with at least 4,500 club seats and 67 luxury boxes. The Red Sox could even play at Fenway during the work by using phased construction over several off-seasons, combined with what was dubbed the “Wayfen” option: Home plate would be relocated to the existing right-field corner for a year or two, making the Green Monster the right-field wall, while reconstruction of the third-base grandstand proceeded beyond the new centerfield fence.

  “I laughed when he showed that drawing because it was brilliant, and it was perfect,” recalls Bess. “It was such a fabulous idea, because it actually made it possible to phase the reconstruction that way, and it would have provided two seasons of statistics that would have just become legendary. People would have talked about that forever.”

  The preservation plan, put together by a team led by former Illinois Landmarks Preservation Council president Howard Decker, was both more conservative and in some ways more daring. Up to 4,000 new seats would be added, including additional rows in the park’s tiny upper deck, along with 2,700 club seats and 75 luxury boxes—all without dramatically altering Fenway’s existing structure. Concession and fan circulation space beneath the nine-decade-old grandstand would be dramatically increased by relocating the team’s administrative and service facilities to adjacent buildings.

  One element that was in both plans was the addition of seats atop the Green Monster, suspended between new pillars running behind the wall along Lansdowne Street. It was an idea that Bess and Llanes had discussed some years earlier, and “a no-brainer,” according to Bess. Both plans also would retain the existing field dimensions, the Green Monster itself—and yes, the pillars, which Bess noted kept the seats on Fenway’s roof (like the upper-deck seats at the late, lamented Comiskey Park) far closer to the field than in modern stadium designs. Quipped Hartford architect Patrick Pinnell, a charrette participant: “Even in Boston, they can’t suspend the law of gravity.”

  Both plans costed out at far less than the Sox’s price tag for a new stadium: Llanes’s reconstruction plan came to $266 million, whereas Decker’s preservation option would be a mere $165 million to $180 million—some of which, the architect noted, could even be recouped by applying to have Fenway placed on the National Register of Historic Places, making the team eligible for federal tax breaks. Best of all, promised Bess, following the charrette’s conclusion: “The Red Sox and their architects could pursue either of our approaches immediately and probably be playing baseball in a renovated Fenway Park well before the first shovel of dirt is turned for their current proposal.”

  That shovel of dirt appeared much further off than it had the day of the state legislative vote. Even if the mayor’s “repayment” demands were less than airtight, they still represented a cap on the amount that the city was willing to spend—any cost overruns on land acquisition, for example, would now fall on the team, not the city. And though the state had committed $100 million to the project, Finneran had made clear the Sox wouldn’t be getting a dime more. That left at least $350 million to be covered by the ballclub, an amount that, even as he celebrated the victory at the State House, Harrington had to worry would be too rich for his blood. Wilson noted that in news photos of the stadium announcement, Harrington “looked like he had just lost a child. He knew that it was not going to work.”

  By October, just three months after the Sox’s triumph on Beacon Hill, the Boston Herald reported that the team was having trouble finding private bankers willing to loan it its share of the project, and was mulling rebuilding Fenway Park in place. The team denied the report, but it was becoming clear that the momentum was beginning to shift.

  Then Harrington dropped a bombshell. The Yawkey Trust, he announced, was putting the Red Sox up for sale. “The team is in strong financial shape; we’ve had record-breaking attendance this year; we got a ballpark bill passed on Beacon Hill with $312 million in public aid; and the economy is booming,” declared Harrington. “It’s the right time to sell.” On the city council, where nine of thirteen members would need to vote to approve the eminent-domain land takings for the new stadium, even some undecided councilors began backing away from the plan: “It would be irresponsible and reckless to turn around and commit public financing to a new stadium today only to find out tomorrow the team’s being purchased by an Internet multibillionaire,” councilor Michael Flaherty told the Globe. “All bets are off.”

  Things only got worse for the Sox in December, when the team signed slugger Manny Ramirez to a $160 million, eight-year contract—then promptly declared that it would be seeking more money from the state or city to pay for $60 million in anticipated land-cost overruns. Though team GM Dan Duquette asserted that “the fact we have to compete on the open market for players of this caliber… points to the need for a new ballpark,” the rest of Boston didn’t see it that way. “Santa Claus is fully engaged right now with schools, health care, and a host of other concerns,” snapped Finneran. The Boston Herald’s more succinct editorial reply: “The Red Sox have got to be kidding, right?”

  The Tide Turns

  Thus began a yearlong media circus as focus shifted from the future of Fenway Park to the future of the team itself. A long line of bidders soon formed, with the leading candidates including television producer Tom Werner, who as owner of the San Diego Padres in the 1990s had overseen the team’s fire sale of players to cut costs; Cablevision chief Charles Dolan, whose brother Larry owned the Cleveland Indians; Miles Prentice, a Wall Street lawyer who had been blocked in previous attempts to buy the Angels and Royals; Boston developer Frank McCourt; and Boston concessionaire Joseph O’Donn
ell and mall developer Stephen Karp, widely seen as the “local guys” favored by the mayor and other Boston officials, who were talking of reviving the old idea of a new stadium on the waterfront.

  By mid-December, the word was out: The winner would be a group pairing Werner with then-Florida Marlins owner John Henry, which had bid a staggering $700 million. (Henry would also receive $158.5 million for the Marlins from Montreal Expos owner Jeffrey Loria, who would in turn sell his club to the league for $120 million.) Though Henry’s group was not the high bidder—Dolan and Prentice had each bid about $90 million more—it was made up of current and former baseball owners who were friendly with MLB commissioner Bud Selig. Harrington explained that he had wanted to ensure that new owners could be in place by 2002, leading to speculation that Selig had indicated that only Henry, a current member of the baseball cabal, would receive quick approval from MLB.

  As the losing bidders fumed and the Massachusetts attorney general threatened an investigation, the Save Fenway activists breathed a sigh of relief. “That,” says Wilson, “was our first victory.” Henry, it had been reported, had been on the verge of joining up with the Karp–O’Donnell team but couldn’t agree on who would be in charge of actually running the club. (”If you want me to cook the dinner,” O’Donnell told Henry, quoting former New England Patriots coach Bill Parcells, “you’ve got to let me buy the groceries.”) Instead, the “local guys” were locked out, and the fate of the Red Sox—and Fenway—rested in the hands of a billionaire investment banker from Illinois who’d spent most of his life in California and Florida.