Fenway Flag Ceremony

Posted June 5, 2014 by Gemma Doyle

I am not a sports person, as I’ve mentioned, but I always seem to become friendly with massive sports fans who try to cure my sports apathy with huge infusions of exciting sports… stuff.  Well, exciting for them.  Mostly incomprehensible to me.   I spend a lot of time struggling to look like I care, if you know what I mean.  One of my friends is a huge – and I mean huge – Red Sox fan.  As a way to try to inspire a similar love for the team in my cold, dead heart, she invited me to go to Fenway to help with the giant flag that unfurls from the top of the Green Monster before the game.  (Here’s an image of the flag (not from that day), for other non-Fenway go-ers.  We’re the people who are actually behind it, who you can only see from the knees down.)

Basically, we got to Fenway about two hours before the game started, before the gates were open to ticket holders, and got to walk around the nearly empty ballpark, which was pretty cool, even for a baseball-hating heretic like myself.  Then, as we waited for the the flag to get ready to unfurl, we got to walk on the field while the players were warming up, which is probably a much bigger deal to Red Sox/Fenway fans. 

The flag only took a few minutes to unfurl, and we grabbed the edge and held it down so it didn’t flap around.  Behind the flag the world was red and white and blue, and all you could see were the other people behind it with you.  It only hung down on the field for a few minutes, and then we and military people stationed in front of it (who the flag unfurling was really about) gathered the flag up and marched it off the field.  That was all we had to do – we got free admission to the game from that point on.  No seats, but Fenway has a bunch of standing room sections, and they offer a great view.  (I guess.  A view of baseball people doing baseball things.) 

I have to admit that I really enjoyed the flag ceremony part and being part of it all, but I’m still not a baseball fan.  With this conversion ploy was a failure, I’m a little worried about what the next attempt will be.