SporTView Fenway pressed for space By Howard Manly, Globe Staff, 07/05/98 Without going into yet another tedious discussion about replacing storied Fenway Park with a shinier, bigger baseball stadium, it's safe to say that next year's All-Star Game presents a problem for Red Sox officials. The media have become necessary evils, and they have become an ever-growing lot, their numbers and needs for space increasing almost exponentially. The press box at Fenway can accommodate perhaps 100 reporters. That is nowhere near the amount of space needed for next year's All-Star Game. It wasn't enough back in 1946, when Fenway hosted its first midsummer classic. Almost half of the 195 writers were sent to the roof to watch the game from temporary seating. Those seats became Fenway's permanent roof boxes. The situation is not as easily solved these days. A Colorado Rockies spokesman said he has received about 600 requests for credentials for Tuesday's All-Star Game in Coors Field in Colorado. That number is sure to grow in the next few days. Last year's All-Star Game at Cleveland's Jacobs Field attracted 950 media members. The press box at Coors has seating for about 160 reporters. The remainder of the press corps will be scattered throughout the stadium. At least 375 seats will be behind right field on the second-highest level of the stadium. Red Sox spokesman Kevin Shea said a similar plan might work at Fenway, but it presents "a double-edged sword.'' One solution, according to Shea, would require taking at least 200 seats, usually occupied by fans, and giving them to reporters inside the park. "We don't have a heck of a lot of room,'' Shea said. Thursday night, for example, when Pedro Martinez beat the hapless Montreal Expos for his 11th victory, the six broadcast booths at Fenway were filled to capacity with the equipment and personnel of two Canadian television stations, two radio stations, and the Red Sox and Expos television stations. Shea said the Red Sox have tried to partition the small booths during playoff series, but the rooms are "not big enough to put two entities.'' Especially when the two are competing for market share. "Fenway is not an immortal building,'' Shea said. "It's an old facility and we have upgraded it as much as we can. It's a beautiful park and there is no better place to hold an All-Star Game, but . . . it's a tough call to take away seats from fans. And it's not a good thing for reporters, either, because they will be cramped trying to work.'' More than likely, the Red Sox will be forced to set up an area where the working press can watch the game on television, much like Patriots officials created a media tent, complete with large-screen televisions, during playoff games or other Big Games, such as the one against the New York Jets and coach Bill Parcells. But being in the tent is not the same as watching it live for most of the media purists, but at least at Foxborough the media was still near the field. Fenway presents a challenge for such an arrangement. Where would they put a tent? Most of the time, television stations park their satellite trucks on Van Ness Street. Red Sox vice president Jim Healy is one of the 25-member delegation of Red Sox and Boston city officials attending the All-Star Game in Colorado. He is in charge of broadcasting games from Fenway. It will be his task to figure out a way to accommodate the media by squeezing every square inch of space out of Fenway to make fans and reporters content. Not an easy job. If the decision comes down to paying fans or freeloading reporters, the answer is simple -- take the money and build a bigger stadium.