Car park

A fan tries to show the Red Sox the way

Urban Eye by Tom Scocca

It is the lot of a visionary to stand apart from the crowd. Some wander the desert. Some wear a hair shirt. Jim Schippers of Millbury drives around with a 1:144 scale model of Fenway Park strapped to the roof of his car.

The car is a dingy white 1982 Ford LTD, with more than 182,000 miles on it. Right now, three hours before game time, it is parked on Boylston Street, within sight of the full-size ballpark. The model of Fenway is leaning against the back window, tipped up so that passersby can see its interior. Observant ones will notice that Schippers's ballpark is not exactly the same building as the big one up the street: it has two decks instead of one, and a clock tower in straightaway center field, and a parking garage out past the Green Monster, where Lansdowne Street and the Pike are now.

As the Red Sox continue their push for a new ballpark, plenty of fans are lobbying to preserve the current one. Schippers, a third-generation bricklayer, Local Three Boston, is lobbying to improve it. His Fenway is expanded from 33,000 seats to 45,000, with luxury-box sections and other amenities of a first-class modern ballpark. "I know this can be done where it sits," he says.

Admittedly, the structure doesn't look quite like the future of Boston baseball. The clock tower is a gold-toned table clock; a new entrance on the park's south corner is made of red, white, and blue Legos. The grandstands are sheet metal and vinyl siding, with adhesive tape marking the aisles. The field is green felt, with an infield of sun-faded corduroy. There is paper and plywood and epoxy and real miniature fired bricks, and there are lots and lots of pieces of plastic toys, supplied by Schippers's children, ages six and nine. The arching, 300-scale-foot luxury hotel over the right-field stands? "That was my daughter's vanity," he says.

But Schippers, an animated, fortyish man with brushed-back blond hair and a goatee, has an actual plan behind the apparent hodgepodge. It begins with the building of the upper deck, which would sit behind the current lower deck on its own foundation. "The structural work has to be done and completed in the winter," he says. "The masonry part would have to be tented in." A veteran of rebuilding ventures, including North Station and the Customs House, he figures it would take two off-seasons to get the new structure in place around the old park, and a third one to tie the whole project together. It would eventually require building over Van Ness Street -- but, he says, "you can't drive down there anyway at game time."

This is the sort of detail Schippers keeps track of. As people driving by whoop and point and yell, he rattles off details from the various sites and plans and land deals that have been bandied about, and he critiques the design of other ballparks. The vaunted new Oriole Park, he says, "is a rip-off of Sportsman's Park," the old home of the St. Louis Browns. Atlanta's Turner Field? "I don't like [it] too much. . . . It's symmetrical, for one thing." The Ballpark at Arlington, he says, "looks like a big office building out in back."

The crown jewel of parks, as far as Schippers is concerned, is right there up the street, where he's been going for longer than he can remember. "My father says I saw Ted Williams hit his last home run, but I don't know," he says. "I went to a lot of football games here when the Patriots played [in Fenway]." He traces the outline of the gridiron on the felt. "The end zone would go right into the dugout, almost."

Not that Schippers is a pure traditionalist. His new and improved Green Monster, for instance, has glassed-in luxury boxes installed in the middle of it, and a restaurant ("this here was the steps from a Barbie dollhouse") perched on top.

But the Red Sox, he fears, are planning to turn their backs on their history altogether. After all that the latest ballparks have borrowed from Fenway -- irregular fence lines, big walls -- the Sox, Schippers says, are "going to start taking from everybody else." He's sent them his drawings, and has watched CEO John Harrington drive by him, but he says he hasn't heard anything back from the team. "If they didn't ignore me on this," he says, "I'd probably go away."

Instead, he keeps bringing his ballpark to the ballpark. He was offered $3000 for it once, he says, but he refused to sell. When the Sox are out of town, he cleans and repairs the model, trying to undo the wear and tear of a daily 80-mile round trip on the Pike. "I want to clean it up nice for the playoffs," he says. And he keeps adding new extras: the clock, the hotel, working banks of lights on the rooftop, whatever strikes his fancy. "Everything's optional on this," he says, reassuringly.