The Mets Police

...(The Yankees should have) thought twice about changing homes in the first place. How better to explain the Yankees’ sputtering start this season, or the astral winds wafting home-run balls out to right-center field with unnatural frequency? And not that baseball superstition can entirely explain the economic collapse, but the new stadium does seem to be suffering from an attendance jinx. There have been so many no-shows that management recently slashed the price of some of the most expensive seats, especially the embarrassingly visible ones behind home plate, and is offering freebies to many season-ticket holders.

The Red Sox home, Fenway Park, meanwhile, unfailingly sells out, as it has for years. Not the least of the many smart moves made by John Henry, who bought the Sox in 2002, was that he resisted the experts who said the only way the franchise could survive was by abandoning Fenway, which was built in 1912 and held only 33,000 or so, and building a new ballpark with more seats, better parking, executive suites and all the other profit-making amenities thought to be essential. What these visionaries had in mind, only they didn’t know it, was something very similar to the new Yankee Stadium.

Instead, Mr. Henry decided to refurbish the old place, squeezing in additional seats wherever he could, even on top of the left field wall, Fenway’s fabled Green Monster, and adding luxury boxes and an expanded glassed-in area behind home plate where high-rollers could be hermetically sealed off not just from the elements but from the sound of the game. The resulting ballpark, where many seats are not a whole lot cheaper than those at the new Yankees park, is no longer the “little lyrical bandbox” that John Updikeonce celebrated, comparing it to the inside of an Easter egg. It’s more nearly like a summer cottage that some industrious homeowner has winterized and added onto so many times that it now amounts to a McMansion.

But from the street, at least, Fenway still looks like itself.