In Fenway, Frustration Brews
A beer policy treats first-class fans like second-class citizens.
On a cool afternoon, the Red Sox are losing and it's enough to make me want to cry in my beer -- if I had one. But I don't and the prospects aren't looking good. I'm in the middle of a long row, even if I went the lines are long (behind or not, I still came to see a game), and the return trip would be fraught with the embarrassment of a misstep spilling suds on those around me. I gloomily contemplate my beer-less life when in front of me I see - can this be! - a man with a case of Heinekens on his head, hawking beer as if it were Coke. I wave, trying to attract his attention, but no luck. I'm in the grandstands, he's in a box section, and he won't come to me.
In fact, he can't. Those are the rules. Beer vendors at Fenway Park can ply their trade in the field boxes, the dugout seats, and up in the pavilions, areas where customers pay more for their tickets. Fans elsewhere have to fetch their own. Curious. Other Major League teams allow seatside beer sales throughout their parks. So too does Gillette Stadium. But Daniel Pokaski, chair of Boston's liquor licensing board, says he's not inclined to allow expanded seatside vending; he worries, for instance, about checking IDs. (Hmm, doesn't seem to be a problem in Foxborough.) Nor do the Red Sox want to push the matter, telling me, not very credibly, that more beer vendors would congest the aisles. (Come on, now. Congestion comes from those getting their beers. Seatside service would reduce that.) Moreover, says team spokeswoman Susan Goodenow, "fans don't mind getting up" to buy their beers. Right. If that were true, then why is seatside service considered such an amenity in the few areas where it's allowed?
What's really going on here? It's all about money. Not making it, but who has more of it. The beer polloi, those of us sitting in the (relatively) cheap seats, are out of luck. "It's elitist," Pokaski frankly admits. Indeed, it is, with the somewhat outrageous subtext being that only the rich can be trusted to hold their liquor.
Beer vendors used to roam Fenway Park until the 1970s, when increasingly drunk and rowdy fans provoked the team to put in place tough new rules: Beer would be served only at concession stands, patrons were limited to two beers with each purchase, and sales would stop after the seventh inning. Interestingly enough, those new rules didn't stop the misbehavior. In fact, things seemed to get worse (the early 1990s saw several cases of blowup sex dolls being batted around the stands). The Fenway we now think of as "family-friendly" emerged only when the team started strictly enforcing rules of behavior, tossing out patrons who got out of line (including even those who used profanity).
With the sale of the team to John Henry and company in 2002 (the Globe's corporate parent, the
So far, the rowdiness hasn't returned. But that's not surprising. There are two schools of thought about how best to encourage appropriate public behavior. One, a prohibitionist approach, bans or regulates access to products (beer, guns, drugs) that are thought to cause misconduct. The second imposes consequences for misbehavior. I'm a believer in the latter, and the Sox experience seems to validate it.
But that applies to everyone, not just the rich. I understand the Sox taking the baby step of experimenting with seatside service in a few areas, but now they should be pressing to make it available to all. The excuses I get for not doing so just don't cut it, especially when other sports teams seem to make it work.
Granted, this is not the world's most momentous issue, but it is illustrative of a disturbing prejudice about those without wealth that runs though society. I don't mean to sound too much like a Marxist on this. It doesn't bother me that those with more money get to sit closer to the field. But to use wealth as a marker to deny beer sales to one's seat? Ridiculous. Beer drinkers of Red Sox Nation, unite! You have nothing to lose but your thirsts.
Tom Keane, a Boston-based freelance writer, contributes regularly to the Globe Magazine. E-mail him at tomkeane@tomkeane.com. 