Okay, so the Globe has reported the Fenway improvements that I told you about earlier today. And here's their gigantic error: They say that 12,000 wooden grandstand seats have been refurbished with springbacks this offseason. So very, very wrong. Last year, as we real people all know, they started with the springbacks when they did the infield seats. Infield loge and field boxes got new seats with cushions, infield grandstand got refurbished with springbacks. It was announced in last year's improvements, and I mentioned it after going to my first game last year, with some of my commenters talking about the springback chairs. This year, they did the same drill with left field, and next year they'll do right field. The Globe is telling you that this year, they went in and did the entire grandstand--all 12,000 seats.

"Don't lose your S, Jere, they just read the press release wrong." Not the point, tough guy. The point is, the writer proved that he didn't go to Fenway Park last year. Or at least completely avoided the infield grandstand, which is very hard to do, unless you just hang out in the press box the whole game (but at almost every game I'll see press box-level-types walk right from the field up the grandstand to get upstairs--Castiglione, Lucchino, the visiting announcers, NESN people, reporters, etc.). It also proves that every prick who read that and threw in their comment about how shitty Fenway is didn't go there in the past year and doesn't pay attention to things real fans probably wouldn't miss.

So that article was from the Metro section, but then someone on Extra Bases, the Globe's Red Sox "blog," went and repeated the info, proving HE didn't go to Fenway last season either. ("The 12,000 blue wooden seats at Fenway Park have new springs to help them retract" is his opening line.)

It's interesting that the Metro reporter came up with the "12,000 seats" number. As you can see in this pic I took from the '84 scorebook, there are around that many total grandstand seats. (Down from nearly 15,000 a few years earlier, as seen in this pic I took from The Ballpark, a book from a few years earlier.) So he knew the total number of grandstand seats--he just thought all of them were just redone in '10, instead of them being done in three sections from '09-'11. Which he should have known from: reading last year's press release, reading this year's press release, and going to the fucking ballpark.

To me this is like if they'd added four more Monster Seats the year after they debuted, and the headline was "Red Sox put seats on Green Monster."

Also, I understand that you can be a "real fan" and not know about this stuff--like if you lived in Canada or something. All I'm saying is, if you're a news reporter IN Boston, and you're the one who reports on Fenway Park, you should be someone who goes to Fenway Park, preferably as a fan at least sometimes so you can see what it's really like for people who go there.

But regardless of that whole deal, if they had just read the release carefully, they would have known what's going on without even having gone to Fenway last year.