Tenorio: The inconvenient truth is that Fenway Park needs replacement

Members of the “Save Fenway” province of Red Sox Nation ought to take a look at the New York media and see the telling reaction of Yankees fans to the demolition of the House That Ruth Built, which began this month.”Each afternoon,” the New Yorker reports, “a small pack of spectators gathered along the subway platform, pressing up against a fence, to watch ‘the pull'” – referring to the process of tearing down the ballpark downsized in favor of the bigger, bolder model that opened last year. The magazine notes some dissatisfaction (one guy calls the new field “a mallpark”) but the fans’ mood at the end of the article seems like a mixture of resignation and some typical New York enterprising spirit: “The spectators exchanged contact information so that they could send each other their pull photos.”It is this philosophy of discarding the obsolete, however reluctantly, and embracing the future that the Red Sox so desperately need as they find themselves among the dwindling number of Major League Baseball teams – all two of them, just us and the Cubs – whose ballparks’ birth dates are approaching the century mark.You know the history. The Red Sox opened Fenway Park in 1912. They played their first game there against the New York Highlanders – they weren’t the Yankees yet – on April 20, five days after the Titanic sank. Not only has it been 98 years since then, it’s been 12 years since James Cameron made a movie about the Titanic. And Hollywood was amazed at how long it took him to make his next film.If you’re talking with members of the “Save Fenway” crowd, sooner or later they’ll bring up the quote from the late, great John Updike about Fenway being “a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark.” But when Updike wrote that, in 1960, the park was a relatively open space, as only about 10,000 fans showed up to watch Ted Williams hit a home run in what turned out to be his last career at-bat. Can anyone imagine a 21st-century Updike writing the same words after attending one of Fenway’s many sellouts, with some drunk guys spilling Bud Light over your shoulders ? half-hour waits to use the latrines in the restrooms ? and everyone in a row having to do the lambada when someone comes back from the refreshment stand?No matter how big the improvements made by John Henry & Co. since 2002 – and the Monster seats were a nice touch – they can’t compare to the comfortable redesign of Yankee Stadium. “The concourses are broad open spaces, with concession stands set along the perimeter so that they don’t obstruct views down to the field,” the New York Times reported last April. “More seats are concentrated below the mezzanine level, closer to the action. Even the luxury suites ? are discreetly set back so that they don’t detract from the shared intimacy of watching the game.”The “Save Fenway” folks represent a larger problem with Massachusetts. We tolerate inconvenient, outdated systems of doing things, like playing pro baseball in a century-old ballpark ? using a traffic system designed for colonial cowherds and carriage drivers ? and anything having to do with the MBTA.Why? Because it’s “historic.” Because it’s “unique.” And, maybe, because it’s far more inconvenient to actually change things for the better. When we do try to change things, like the Big Dig, they come 20 years too late and cost billions of dollars too much.Yet there was a time, not too long ago, when people in this state embraced setting a precedent for the future. Lynn celebrated being a “City of Firsts,” as it says right there on the sign after the General Edwards Bridge. On the local level, Lynn finally got rid of Depression-era Manning Bowl and replaced it with state-of-the-art Manning Field ? and on the professional level, the Bruins, Celtics and Patriots all found new homes, too.There are ways to accommodate the past. “(The) Yankees have brought back the old manually operated scoreboards in left and right field, a feature that was last used in the 1960s,” the Times reported, an