The Art of the Wall

Would you baseball fans rather spend money to watch a ballgame or visit an art gallery?  See live baseball action, or stare at dozens of small framed paintings amid a few enormous masterpieces?  Well, at Fenway Park you can do both at once.

Fenway Park actually has an art gallery functioning as a backdrop for the game.  It’s The Wall, or if you prefer the Green Monster.  With the exception of the advertisements on its upper half, which are applied decals, everything you see is hand painted artwork.

Everything in white is hand painted. This day saw the debut of the PITTS. sign.

I met The Wall’s artist, Brian, at his Somerville studio, to see where some of this art is created.

Brian told me how it began.  “I got a call in mid-2003, from an assistant of Janet Marie Smith. The new John Henry ownership group had already renewed the manual scoreboard, but the number plates themselves didn’t have a consistent look.”  Smith, former Vice President of Planning and Development, was the visionary whose designs basically saved Fenway Park.  The National League scores were also restored during the renewal.

Since all the plates with numbers and team names were hand painted, who better to contact than a local artist?

“Those plates — some were old, some were new, some were made of vinyl, some were even done in — Helvetica”, Brian related in a disdainful tone.  “They had cans of paint back inside the Monster and the guys would just paint a number freehand when they needed one.  Kind of charming, perhaps, but not consistent. So we took all the plates out, leaned them up against The Wall, and carefully chose the ones that looked the best: the old ones.”  The same approach was taken for the plates with individual letters.

There are many R plates, for rain-delayed games. This one was in a mismatching font.

This R, currently in use, has the correct look.

Brian made stencils by tracing the “good” numbers, and during Sox road trips, he and another artist repainted the number plates under the bleachers.  There are hundreds of those plates, all with numbers on both front and back.  These hand-made paintings look just right when hung in their “frames” on The Wall.

These are the stencils used to make new numbers.  Sometimes the Sox give plates as special gifts, such as a "2" plate given to Derek Jeter before his last MLB game, played at Fenway.

Notice that the "9" and "6" plates are different! The 9's tail is longer.

A few years later, the owners also decided to standardize the team name lettering on the long plates that hang just above BOSTON.  Brian worked on those back in his studio.  By then, some names had already been altered (the original NEW YORK had already been shortened to NY, for example), but some names like BALT remained.

NEW YORK was shortened -- but why?

But in 2013, management decided that all team names should be “consistent” and become the official MLB abbreviations, making more work for Brian.  MINN became MIN, PITT became PIT, BALT became BAL, and CLEVE became CLE.  “I really loved CLEVE.  Loved the aesthetics.  I was very sad to paint it over.  I couldn’t paint it over — I left it, and made CLE on another plate,” he explained.  “So I was extremely happy to be told that CLEVE would be restored last year.”

The iconic CLEVE was never painted over, and was put back in service in 2017 after CLE had been used for a few years.

And that was the result of a letter from me, an ordinary fan, to management requesting a return to the historic format for team names.  One argument was that it was not in fact consistent; true consistency would demand that BOSTON become BOS, which would not look good.  So Brian had some extra work last season to restore the longer team names.  NEW YORK is now spelled out, the way it had been for many years.

NEW YORK was restored in April 2017.

Brian was told to replace PIT with PITTS., which was not the former PITT, but was a throwback to the 1933 scoreboard.  True restoration would specify PITT, but PITTS. is better than PIT.  Anyway, PITTS. made its debut on Opening Day 2017.

I asked Brian what font the lettering has.  “It is no font.  Well, it’s my font.  I based all the letters on the style of the numbers and the style of the old lettering,” he said.  And how about the electronic scoreboard font, that mimics the same style?  “That was made in house, copying my painted letters.”  So almost all the text on the videoboards is, in effect, displaying hand-painted letters!  You may have noticed this year that NESN has replicated the same style in the on-screen text showing scores in other games.

Xaverian Brothers High School needed a plate for their game against St. John's Prep on April 21; Here is the plate freshly painted in the studio.  XBHS won 3-2.

My library has a 1928 book by E. C. Matthews, How to Paint Signs and Sho’ Cards, with a very similar font called Modern Egyptian.  It was a plain and simple lettering style that Matthews recommended a sign painted learn first.  Others can be readily be found on the web.  But Fenway’s organically derived lettering is perfect.  It is much better than the Engravers Gothic font that appeared briefly on the Fenway videoboards a few years ago, and it is arguably the most attractive font of any scoreboard in the major leagues.  Visit other parks, and pay attention to the text graphics.  Almost all of it is b-o-r-i-n-g.

And besides all those name and number plates, Brian also has also painted various large advertising signs on the lower part of the wall, with the assistance of other local artists.  His crew painted the current OPTUM, FW Webb, and CVS signs. Elsewhere in the park, you may have noticed various murals: Remember the Jimmy Fund (under third base grandstand), FDR (under the bleachers), and Go Red Sox / Welcome to the Kids Concourse (inside Gate K).  Those paintings were done by his crew as well.

I wondered if he had painted the scoreboard tin itself.  “I’ve touched it up here and there.  Then there was the Morse Code.  Someone said it wasn’t quite right, and I had to revise it a little,” Brian explained.

And THAT cleared up something that had intrigued me since 1963.  I knew Morse Code as a kid, and saw the vertical code on the scoreboard but had no idea what TAY signified.  I wrote a letter to Ken Coleman to ask what TAY and JAEY meant, and he told me about the Yawkey initials TAY and JRY.

But there was a problem: the “R”, dot-dash-dot, was not painted correctly as the second dot was too far away, and I had read it as dot-dash-space-dot, or AE.  That bothered me for many years.  The Wall at JetBlue Park in Ft. Myers still has the incorrect spacing.  After living far away from Fenway for years, in 2005 I immediately noticed that the Morse Code spacing had been corrected.  And now I know who corrected it!

So the next time you visit Fenway, take a moment to appreciate the beautiful numbers and letters, both hand-painted on the manual scoreboard and duplicated electronically on the videoboards.  And other larger paintings here and there.  Thanks for all you have done, Brian.

Brian with one of his creations in April 2018.