Daily Jolt: 50 More Years at Fenway?

The Daily Jolt is a dose of baseball reality every weekday morning.

What would a new baseball season be without more renovations at Fenway Park. The ownership group of John Henry, Tom Werner and Larry Lucchino has been committed to overhauling Major League Baseball's oldest and most revered ballpark since it took over in 2002.

In an effort to squeeze every penny out of one of the smallest venues in the majors, they have added seats atop the Green Monster and on the right field roof and converted parts of the luxury .406 Club (now known as the EMC Club) to open-air sections. This year, they upgraded a number of the box seats in the lower seating area as well as adding more seats on the right field roof, making it possible to sell roughly an additional 350 tickets at each home game.

Henry, Werner and Lucchino have done a wonderful job of making Fenway a living, breathing museum instead of the gloomy mausoleum it used to be. It's probably a coincidence that the Red Sox broke their octogenarian title drought just as their home park was being made over, but sometimes it doesn't feel like it.

For his part, Lucchino is so confident in the renovations that he thinks the club can call Fenway home for a long time.

"One of Mayor [Thomas] Menino's enduring legacies will be that the Boston Red Sox can play baseball at Fenway Park for the next 40 to 50 years," Lucchino told the Providence Journal.

Again, what the Henry ownership group has done to the home of the Red Sox is nothing short of remarkable. They have certainly extended the life of the "lyric little bandbox" far beyond what anyone in Boston would have imagined just a decade ago. Remember, the previous ownership group wanted to tear down most of the park and rebuild from scratch, a proposal that sparked vocal protests.

But there has to be a limit to what they can do to Fenway Park in its current configuration. It will turn 100 years old in three seasons. Another half century there just doesn't seem very realistic.

Not when the demand to get inside the building so far exceeds the limited capcity that the Red Sox have had the highest average ticket prices for 13 running years until the Yankees bumped them from the top spot this year.

Not when actually getting a ticket could put you in any of the following positions: 1) rubbing your bruised knees because the space between the rows of wooden seats is so tiny; 2) behind a support beam; 3) facing an outfielder and craning your neck just to see the pitcher in his windup.

And certainly not when the modern amenities of a new ballpark are unavailable to arguably the most thorough and detail-oriented organization in the majors. In the home clubhouse at the new Yankee Stadium, each locker has a touch-screen computer at which players can view videos of the night's opposing pitcher. Wouldn't the information-hungry Red Sox like to have the same thing at some point soon?

That's not to say that Fenway Park should be torn down immediately. The Red Sox will certainly get it to its 100th birthday and the owners seem genuinely intent on staying there as long as possible.

But 50 years? That's hard to envision. You can only do so much with the ballpark in its current state, and this ownership group has moved so rapidly to rejuvenate Fenway that they are likely to hit a ceiling in the very near future.

Eventually, probably within most of our lifetimes, the Sox are going to need a new park. Until then, we can enjoy Fenway -- lousy legroom and all.