The Green Monster is the nickname of the 37 foot, two inch left field wall at Fenway Park, home to the Boston Red Sox. It was not painted green until 1947. Prior to that it was covered with advertisements.
Part of the original ballpark construction of 1912, the wall was made of wood, but was covered in tin and concrete in 1934, and then hard plastic in 1976. Encased in the wall is a manual scoreboard.
The wall is the highest in professional baseball, and has the characteristic of preventing home runs on many flyballs that would clear the walls of other ballparks. A side effect of this is to increase the prevalence of doubles, since this is the most common result when the ball is hit off the wall (although some Red Sox leftfielders have become adept at fielding caroms off the wall to throw runners out at second base or hold the batter to a single). However, compared to current major league parks, the wall is placed fairly shallow, allowing a high but short flyball to clear the wall for a home run. The most famous instance is a home run by Bucky Dent of the New York Yankees in the last game of the 1978 season (see: Curse of the Bambino).
In 2003 additional seating for spectators was added to the top of the wall, though the seating area was considered home run territory and "out" of the playing field.
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2 Art Arfons' Green Monster 3 External link |
The Green Monster was the name of several vehicles built by Art Arfons who was often described as the "junk yard genius".
They were either Dragsters or vehicles build to break the speed records on ground or water. The first "Green Monster" was a dragster painted with left-over green tractor paint. The later cars had various paint schemes were green was not necessary the dominant color. The most famous "Green Monster" was a car powered powered by a U.S. Government scrap Starfighter jet engine that broke several times the land speed record in 1964 and 1965, when Art Arfons was competing with his brother Walt Arfons and Craig Breedlove.External links
Art Arfons' Green Monster
