Fenway Park Opens on the Same Day as Navin Field

On April 20, 1912, two ballparks that would define American League baseball for generations opened on the same afternoon. In Boston, the Red Sox christened Fenway Park with a 7-6 extra-inning win over the New York Highlanders. In Detroit, the Tigers beat the Cleveland Naps 6-5 in the first game at Navin Field, which would later be renamed Tiger Stadium.

Rain had delayed Fenway's opener earlier in the week. When the gates finally opened, an estimated 24,000 fans filled the grounds. The game stretched to eleven innings before Tris Speaker drove in the winning run. Speaker, the finest center fielder of his era, batted .383 that season as the Red Sox won 105 games and captured the World Series.

The park cost $650,000 and was built in roughly six months on a marshy plot in Boston's Fenway neighborhood. Its dimensions were irregular from the start, shaped by the surrounding streets rather than by any architectural plan. The left-field wall, later known as the Green Monster, was already an imposing presence, though it would not get its famous green paint until 1947.

Fenway Park opened just five days after the Titanic sank. Newspapers in Boston ran the two stories side by side. The ballpark outlasted the headlines. It outlasted the dead-ball era, two World Wars, the sale of Babe Ruth, and 86 years without a championship. It is the oldest active ballpark in Major League Baseball, still hosting games more than a century after that first extra-inning win.