F is for Fenway: America's Oldest Major League Ballpark

Paying well-deserved tribute to 100-year-old Fenway Park—the oldest major-league park still in use—Pallotta proffers both soaring (OK, florid) verses (“It isn’t just a ballpark; it’s Boston’s sacred ground. / From the furthest bleacher seats to the pitching mound”) and side comments on the park’s features, culture, historical highlights, and a handful of its most renowned Red Sox players. Using digital media to give his art a mix of woodcut and silkscreen looks, Dykes contributes generic but bustling scenes of filled stands, crowded outside streets, and distant baseball action on the broad, grassy field. Though the ABC conceit makes for a presentation more arbitrary than logical, and he skates close to the edge of apostasy in suggesting that Ted Williams might have hit more home runs had he been a New York Yankee, Pallotta writes with such infectious enthusiasm about the Green Monster (both the wall and the mascot), the Pesky Pole, Red Sox Nation, and even the Jimmy Fund that readers will join him in appreciating and admiring all that makes Fenway a monument to the great American sport.