Time to put Fenway Park out of our misery

See, here's the thing. You've got a venerable and beloved property that has ceased to be economically viable. It hasn't kept pace with the times. And so it's focused on ever-flashier content, trying desperately to drum up enough interest to keep its sales figures high. I refer, of course, to the Boston Herald.

Buckley thrives on this sort of column. He deliberately takes a position with which he knows most fans disagree. He does it to provoke a heated reaction. His column will be discussed all day (and perhaps tomorrow, too) on the sports talk radio stations. People will go to the website to read it. They'll grab a print copy at lunch break. He's not Shaughnessy, mind you. He's a hack, not a jerk. But I don't for a moment think he actually believes a word he wrote.

Fenway Park is a valuable asset. How do we know this? It has the highest average ticket price in the game. It has the highest fan cost index in the game. Last year, the Red Sox sold premium travel packages to 2,500 fans who wanted to splurge on a three-game homestand. Want to know the Fenway premium? The tickets averaged about $100 more per fan for a Fenway series than for the same series in the away city - not including hotel stays. That, despite the fact that most Red Sox fans are local, so demand is higher for the away series. Remember the 1999 All Star Game? (You can check the fading paint at Kenmore if you don't.) All Star Games generally require copious luxury boxes for corporate sponsors, and since they sell out, as many seats as possible. MLB was willing to bring the game to Fenway because it understood that its high-rollers would pony up at least as much to squeeze into the lyric little bandbox as they would to revel in a glass enclosure in some other town. And they did. And they counted themselves fortunate to be able to fork over the cash.

I refuse to believe that Buckley doesn't really understand this. It's fine with me if he wants to take issue with Theo's player personnel decisions, or with Henry's management choices. But if there's one thing those guys understand, it's numbers. And the choice between renovating and replacing the stadium is a straight numbers game. These guys have looked at their numbers. They know how to generate the maximum return on their investment. This isn't about sentiment, whatever John Henry may say. It's about money. The day that Fenway Park ceases to be a money machine, I'm sure we'll hear management start in with the same arguments Buckley presents. But for now, the fact that they're standing by the stadium confirms one thing - that fans are willing to pay a premium for intangibles, even if most objective metrics say that the stadium stinks. Why would you mess with that?