There are a lot of things at Fenway Park that make absolutely no sense until somebody explains them, and the ladder bolted to the Green Monster is one of them. It’s just... there. A metal ladder permanently attached to a 37-foot wall in the middle of a Major League Baseball field. But it actually used to have a job. Back in 1936, the Red Sox installed a 23-foot-high net above the Monster to catch home run balls before they sailed onto Lansdowne Street. Somebody had to retrieve all those balls, so Fenway employees used the ladder to climb up and empty the net after batting practice and games. Totally reasonable. Ladder has job.
Then in 2003, the Red Sox added the Monster Seats, the net came down, and the ladder became completely useless. At which point a normal ballpark probably would have removed it. Fenway, obviously, did not. So more than 20 years later, it is still attached to the wall and, even better, it is still in play. If a baseball hits the ladder, the ball is live, which means a completely obsolete piece of Fenway infrastructure can still affect an actual game. It has, too. Balls have taken ridiculous bounces off it over the years, including one that helped Dick Stuart get an inside-the-park home run in 1963. This is objectively hilarious.
But that’s also kind of why Fenway is Fenway. So much of the park exists because somebody solved a practical problem decades ago and nobody came along later and cleaned everything up. The weird angles, the tiny seats, the manual scoreboard, the giant wall in left, and yes, the ladder. You could build a brand-new stadium tomorrow with a 37-foot green wall and it still wouldn’t be the same, because it wouldn’t have a completely unnecessary ladder that has been confusing people since the Roosevelt administration. And now that you know why it’s there, good luck not noticing it every time you watch a game.
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