Maybe They Can Replace It With a “Godzilla” Wall

Baseball teams love their new, faux retro parks that have been a boon to attendance, but what about teams that have authentic retro parks?

That’s simple. They’re knocking them down so they can put up new fakes.

Detroit’s Tiger Stadium has a date with a wrecking ball after next season. Even in Boston, fans are braced for the worst, the end of their beloved Fenway.

Red Sox management wants a new park, although fans are staging demonstrations to protest.

“Hillary Clinton is at work saving American landmarks, like that [Colonial] theater in Pittsfield,” Andrew Pate, a salesman from Melrose, Mass., told the Boston Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy. “This is the same as that. And I will lie down in front of a bulldozer when they come to raze Fenway.”

Flattened fans notwithstanding, the experts consider a new park inevitable. Kiss your Green Monster goodbye, or as Shaughnessy notes sadly:

“I have seen the writing on the left-field wall.”

*

Trivia time: Which NFL player spent the most seasons with one team?

*

Money talks: Also, the Globe’s Bob Ryan wonders why they couldn’t have taken a moment at a recent luncheon promoting the 1999 All-Star game in Fenway to talk baseball, rather than the money the event would generate.

Mayor Tom Menino: “$40 to $60 million.” Boston Convention Bureau head Pat Moscaritolo: “Over $50 million.”

American League President Gene Budig: “Significantly better than that “

Writes Ryan: “Baseball? What’s that?

“Let’s just hope we get through the day without anyone being forced to acknowledge that there will be no public sale of tickets for the game in question, or that there is not even a guaranteed seat for every current season-ticket holder. There would be if the game had anything whatsoever to do with baseball. It does not. The game itself has to do with taking care of sponsors.”

*

Sniff: In a recent stay here, the Pittsburgh Pirates learned, to their consternation, that the water wasn’t running, nor the air conditioning working, at their downtown hotel.

Keith Osik used a glass of water he got from room service to brush his teeth. Jason Christiansen took four bottles of water from the mini-bar, poured them in the ice bucket, brushed his teeth and combed his hair before coming to the park.

Of course, showers were out of the question.

Said broadcaster Steve Blass: “It’s true, the Pirates stink. But that has nothing to do with their ability.”

*

Trivia answer: Jackie Slater, who spent 20 seasons with the Los Angeles and St. Louis Rams from 1976 to 1995.

*

And finally: Baltimore deejay Kirk McEwen, hosting a test of the plumbing in the Ravens’ new stadium, in which fans were invited to flush all 1,067 toilets at the same time: “Baltimore loves stuff like this. I mean, all these people want to come and flush a toilet. You couldn’t get away with this in L.A.”