They call it 'Fenway South,' but JetBlue Park is no carbon copy of Fenway Park (2024)

FORT MYERS, Fla. — It is a magnificent, sun-splashed morning at JetBlue Park, the spring training home of the Red Sox, and Jonathan Gilula, the team’s chief operating officer, is standing on the warning track just beyond the third-base dugout where the fence juts out and practically kisses the left-field foul line — just like at Fenway Park.

That we are here makes for a perfect jumping-off point to our story. For it was on this exact spot, seven years ago on another postcard-perfect Florida morning, that Red Sox principal owner John Henry pointed out that the re-created Green Monster in left field is actually about six feet taller than the original back in Boston.

“Heads will roll,” Henry quipped that morning. But jokes aside, Henry wasn’t pointing out a design blunder, but, rather, the execution of a vision — to put seats insidethe Green Monster at JetBlue Park, and not just on top. That, coupled with the fact that the vast home clubhouse at JetBlue Park is actually located on the other side of the wall, is why this is a bigger Monster than the one that hovers over Fenway.

But it also brings home a point that Gilula often makes: JetBlue Park, even though it is part of a 106-acre training and player development complex that the Red Sox have dubbed “Fenway South,” was never intended to be a “replica” of the original.

“I like to say it was inspiredby Fenway,” says Gilula, a California native and Princeton grad who is in his 17th season working for the Red Sox, and now carries the fancy title of executive vice president/chief operating officer. “The reason I say that is because it’s impossible to replicate Fenway. What we tried to do is bring some of the unique, defining characteristics of Fenway down here. You have outfield dimensions and most of the geometry of the walls, and you have the same geometry of the seating bowl in the field-level seats, albeit it at a lower scale.”

To stand at home plate at JetBlue and assume the role of make-believe batsman, there’s a lot about this place that’s mindful of Fenway. Look down the right-field line and you’ll see a fence that practically runs parallel with the foul line before ending at Pesky’s Pole South, just 302 feet from home plate. From there, the fence takes a perilous swing to the left where it’s suddenly a whopping 380 feet from the plate, which means that this park, like Fenway, is a death trap to untrained or unsteady right fielders. Keep following the fence and you’ll see the side-by-side bullpens, one for visitors, one for the Red Sox, just as they’ve been at Fenway since back in the day when management installed them to accommodate the power and pull of a young lefty-hitting masher named Ted Williams.

Look to center field and you’ll see where the back fence of the Red Sox bullpen moves in a near straightaway line from home plate until it connects with the center field wall — 420 feet from the dish. At Fenway, guys like Jackie Bradley Jr., Fred Lynn and Jimmy Piersall are on the list of players who have made sensational catches out there; it’s a short list.

Follow the center-field wall to where it meets JetBlue’s incarnation of the Green Monster, and that’s where you’ll see the big difference: Some 250 seats in the belly of the Monster, with protective netting separating fans from balls hit in play.

End of similarities with Fenway Park. If, for instance, you’ve never been to JetBlue Park but plan to take in a Red Sox spring training tuneup over the next month, don’t expect a recreation of the ancient brick walls on Jersey Street. Don’t look for the dark, cramped Fenway underbelly where fans collide in their quest for beer and bathrooms, usually in that order. Whereas Fenway’s dugouts are about the size of a Red Line car, JetBlue’s dugouts are long and spacious, all the better to accommodate both veterans and the many high-numbered, non-roster kids hoping that Red Sox manager Alex Cora will call on them for a late-inning at-bat.

There’s lots of white everywhere — white walls, a white, undulating canopy that covers most of the seating bowl, white sidewalks in the plaza outside the park. The seats, all green, are wider than those at Fenway, all the better to accommodate the ever-expanding 21st century backside, and with more leg room. And here’s some wonderful news for those who have fought and lost the Battle of Section 3 at Fenway Park: The seats in the right-field corner at JetBlue Park are angled toward the infield rather than looking directly into the visiting bullpen. It’s a spiffy, open, one-level ballpark with seating for 9,900 that can accommodate another 600 standees, and there’s a grassy knoll between the home bullpen and the bleacher section that has room for a couple hundred fans to set up blankets and watch the game as though they’re stretched out on Revere Beach.

“From the outside, it looks and feels different,” says Gilula. “The inspiration for the exterioris for it to look and feel more like its natural surroundings in southwest Florida. And people seem to like it, considering we’ve sold out every Grapefruit League game since it opened in 2012.”

The place was designed by Kansas City-basedarchitectural design firm Populous, once known as HOK Group, which ushered in the era of the modern, old-timey-looking ballpark with its design of Oriole Park at Camden Yards, which opened in 1992. Since then, practically every professional baseball team from the big leagues to the minor leagues has clamored for what the Orioles have: A efficient, modern ballpark that would have you believe Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth played in it.

The difference is that many of the new ballparks were designed to look like they were shoehorned into the urbanscape, such as the way the old B&O Warehouse in Baltimore was incorporated into the design at Camden Yards. The beauty of JetBlue Park is that no such trickery was put in play: When you have more than 100 acres to work with it doesn’t make sense to push your ballpark up against a building and call it cool. That wouldn’t have flown here.

And as someone who is as much of a traditionalist as anyone and yet happens to believe Boston needs a new ballpark — sorry, Fenway lovers — what the Red Sox have done with JetBlue Park offers hope for the future. When Boston doesget a new ballpark, it won’t just be another Fenway. There is, after all, only one Fenway Park, whether or not you want a new yard.

It is a little after 2 p.m. — it’s actually getting close to being a lot after 2 p.m. — and the final JetBlue Park tour of the afternoon is being delayed because a shuttle bus transporting some of the attendees to the ballpark from a nearby hotel is running late.

As he waits for the stragglers, tour guide Steve Hall is regaling the gathering with small talk, such as how, “When they hired me, I had to learn the right way to pronounce the Monsta.”

A retired school superintendent from Ashland, Ky., who has settled in Fort Myers, Hall, now a Red Sox fan, admits he lived close enough to Cincinnati back in the day to have rooted for the Reds over Red Sox in the 1975 World Series, And yet as this jovial, bearish fellow begins the tour, you’d think he grew up in Eastie and spent his childhood selling hot dogs on Lansdowne Street.

There isn’t a lot of actual baseball history at JetBlue Park — no Babe Ruth pitching the Red Sox to a 3-2 victory over the Chicago Cubs in Game 4 of the 1918 World Series, no Jim Lonborg laying down a season-saving bunt on that fantastic final day of the ’67 Impossible Dream campaign, no Pudge Fisk denting the foul pole in Game 6 of the ’75 Series — so a lot of what Hall talks about is borrowed from Fenway. But he does his borrowing in a way that expertly marries the old and the new, and every now and then he stops and asks for input from the group. After a few fits and starts, the gathering of about 20 tourists gets sufficiently comfortable to pepper him with questions.

It’s less a tour now and really just a bunch of people walking around, and after a while you almost forget you’re inside a seven-year old toddler of a ballpark, such as when Hall begins talking about the late Earl Wilson and the no-hitter he pitched against the Los Angles Angels in 1962.

“He was the first African-American to pitch a no-hitter in the American League,” he says. “And he hit a home run. All in all a pretty good day for Earl Wilson.”

When we leave the concourse and walk up the ramp to the seating area, the first thing we see is JetBlue’s Green Monster. And for a second, a split second, OK, less than that, you’re allowed to believe you’re at Fenway Park.

“Except when you sit down,” Hall says. “We like to keep you snug at Fenway. Not here.

“And now,” he says, “if you take a look at the Green Monsta…”

But the larger question about Steve Hall’s Green Monstais this: Since the entire point of spring training is to prepare ballplayers for the rigors of a 162-game season, how do the outfield dimensions at JetBlue Park compare to Fenway?

Do the similarities help? Hurt? None of the above? To answer these questions, we asked three experts in the field — left fielder Andrew Benintendi, center fielder Jackie Bradley Jr., and right fielder Mookie Betts.

Left field (Benintendi): “Well, there’s the net on the left-field wall here, and obviously there’s not one in Boston. And the scoreboards are different. There’s less stuff going on with the scoreboard here than at Fenway. It does help a little bit playing here for one important reason: the distance to home plate. The throws to the cutoff man and to home are the same here as they are at Fenway.”

Center field (Bradley): “It has a similar look, but a much different feel when a ball is hit off the wall. You have the net in left field, and that changes things. No net in Fenway, so that makes left field here completely different. The sound is different. Here, when the ball hits, it’s like a powwww, because there’s metal out there. In Boston, it’s not as loud, though there are some beams that go through it on the inside and if the ball hits there it’ll make a different sound. When the ball hits the netting it falls straight down, but sometimes on the way down it’ll hit a corner and shoot way out. One of the good things is that you can get the same foot work in as you’re chasing balls, and the same movements, things like that. But once you get back to Boston you still need to get used to the bounces off the wall.”

Right field (Betts): “Right field (at Fenway) is obviously hard to deal with, but I think it’s pretty close to the same here. Left field is different. Right field can be beneficial here because it helps you understand how much space you have to cover, and what to give up and not give up.”

Beginning with Friday’s scrimmage against the Northeastern Huskies, JetBlue Park kicked off its eighth year as the spring training home of the Red Sox. As you approach on Daniels Parkway and JetBlue comes into view, never in a million years would you think the place has anything to do with Fenway Park.

But as you walk up the ramp and look out upon the expanse, you believe — for a second, a split second, OK, less — that Teddy Ballgame himself played here. That’s the joy of this place: It has its very own identity, and yet you don’t feel like you’re too far from Kenmore Square.

(Top photo of JetBlue Park: Joe Robbins/Getty Images)