Written by Charles P. Pierce at SI.com
There was one old-school moment in the weekend’s hootenanny between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees here, one moment that reminded you that history hangs on these teams like bats from the roof of a cave. It requires a bit of a set-up. In Fenway Park’s centerfield, which apparently was designed by Pythagoras on a very bad day, there is a bit of an angle right at the end of the two bullpens. On this angle, there is a yellow vertical line, one of the few features of the ballpark that is neither named for an old Red Sock nor been sold for advertising space to a local medical technology firm. The line is just a line. It is not the Lu Clinton Line, or the Mendel’s Den Genetic Engineering Line. But it is an important line.
In the seventh inning of Saturday night’s game, which New York eventually would win, 4–3, Boston’s Rafael Devers, the incandescent rookie third-baseman who is rapidly becoming New England’s most beloved semi-millennial, knocked an Adam Warren pitch 420 feet to the exact part of the wall where the line is. The ball rebounded off the wall and into the Red Sox bullpen. Devers rounded the bases with what he believed to be a home run. Yankee manager Joe Girardi challenged the call, however, reasoning understandably that balls that hit walls generally are not home runs. Which is where the old ballyard’s eccentricities come into play. The Fenway ground rules clearly state that a ball hitting to the left of that vertical yellow line and rebounding into the bullpen shall be deemed a home run.
“It’s a place that you have to study a little more closely,” Girardi said later. “It’s like a great old house, with all those nooks and crannies.”
(Devers already had one memorable home run against New York this season. The last time the Red Sox were in Yankee Stadium, he turned a 103 mph fastball from Aroldis Chapman into an opposite-field homer that, according to Statcast, was the hardest hit ball since the tracking system was introduced in 2015.)
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