Generally speaking, I’m not a fan of the oft-asked question of who are the smartest fans in baseball.
We Red Sox fans tend to think it’s us. This seemed to be a particular point of pride in the pre-2004 years. If we couldn’t have a championship team, we’d have championship fans, damn it! I have a distinct memory of a Sunday notes column in the late ‘90s in which Peter Gammons waxed lyrical about how amazing it was that a smattering of fans behind the Red Sox dugout once gave Darren Bragg a standing ovation as he jogged in at the end of a defensive half inning because he had held a runner at second with a strong throw from right field. No other fans in the world would even notice such an effort, Gammo implied.
Maybe Gammons is right about that particular mini standing ovation. But as I’ve grown up and met baseball fans from all over the world, I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re pretty much all the same. Every fanbase has fans who can list each member of the 500-home run club. And, on the other end of the spectrum, every fanbase also has fans who think every shallow pop-up behind second base is going to be a home run. People are people.
Having said that, though, there is something different — and dare I say special — about the fans in Fenway Park specifically. This is less a product of baseball nous being passed from one generation to the next, and more a product of physical geometry. Fenway Park is tiny. It has by far the smallest built footprint of any big league ballpark, forcing 37,000 fans to cram in with each other like bickering kids in the backseat on a road trip. There are no wiffle ball fields to roam around in beyond the centerfield fence. There are no foot-thick concrete walls separating the hoity-toity from the hoi polloi behind the dugouts. And there are no rows of giant lounge chairs behind homeplate, where the one-percenters take in a few innings here and there while they spend the rest of the game sampling nigiri inside. (Those nigiri-eaters are in Fenway, of course, but the built geometry of the ballpark forces them up high and away from the field.)
To put it plainly: there are more people in the 100-foot radius around your seat at Fenway Park than at any other ballpark. It’s denser. And it’s this simple fact of geometry, this density of people, that creates Fenway’s special buzz, that forces everyone to pay closer attention to the action on the field. This is what creates Tom Werner’s infamous “Fenway Experience,” not the brickwork or the piss-stained cement in the concourse.
I was reminded of this when I witnessed (in-person) the fan reaction to Payton Tolle’s immaculate inning against the Royals on Sunday. Below is a video of the inning in full. And, as you watch this, remember the context. This the first inning of a more or less meaningless game that had been delayed by rain for over three hours. The stands are still only about 60% full. Throngs of people are still buying beers and hot dogs, or stuffing napkins into their shirts to wipe off soaking wet seats.
Despite all of that, the crowd reacts to every single pitch. A buzz starts to build after pitch #5 to Bobby Witt, Jr. Fans are rhythmically clapping leading into pitch #6. By the time he’s thrown pitch #8, the standing ovation starts. Almost everyone in the ballpark is making some kind of noise, clapping, whistling, cupping their hand over their mouth and yelling. Then the ballpark, still not even close to full, erupts when he finishes the job, like he’d just closed out the 9th inning instead of the first. It’s Fenway at its finest.
There have been 125 immaculate innings in baseball history dating back to 1889. But, commensurate with game-wide strikeout trends, they are increasing in number. There have already been 5 this season. Of the other 4 thrown in 2026, 3 of them were thrown in the pitcher’s home ballpark. Let’s take a look at those and compare the crowd reactions.
The first immaculate inning was thrown by Michael Soroka of the Diamondbacks way back on March 30. This was actually the DBacks home opener, which is important context to consider since we’re talking about crowd reactions here. It’s the 5th inning and DBacks are already up 5-0. It’s a completely packed house and sprits are high. Moreover, Soroka has been dominant so far, striking out 7 hitters through the first 4 innings.
The first thing you might notice is that the fans barely react to the first two pitches of the first two at-bats at all. This is a major difference between the crowd at Fenway. At Fenway, you can sit there with a blindfold on and still know the outcome of each pitch because the crowd tells you if it was a ball or a strike. In Arizona, the pop of the catcher’s mitt is the only audible evidence you have that a pitch has even been thrown; the crowd otherwise sounds disinterested in the first two pitches. The crowd makes a little more noise after pitch #7. After pitch #8 a few people whistle. Leading into pitch #9 we finally get some noise. But hardly anyone stands up. Soroka doesn’t even get an ovation when he’s finished the deed.
The next immaculate inning came in July in Cleveland. The Guardians are 54-50 and in second place, and it’s the fourth inning of a scoreless game. Like Soroka, Guardians starter Gavin Williams has been dominant on the mound. He already has four strikeouts and has given up just one hit.
As with the crowd at Chase Field, there is almost no audible reaction to speak of to the first two strikes of the first two at-bats. There’s a small golf clap after pitch #6. The crowd response leading up to pitch #9 is non-existent. No one standing, no one whistling, no one clapping. Absolutely no one even seems to realize what’s going on. He finishes the job to a smattering of applause.
The third home immaculate inning of 2026 happened, again, at Chase Field. It came just two days before Tolle’s, in fact. It’s another big crowd in Arizona and another DBacks lead, as they’re up 4-1 in the 6th. They are 10 games over .500 in third place and fighting for their playoff lives, just a half a game out of the third Wild Card.
Unlike the other three immaculate innings, this one is thrown by a reliever, Justin Martinez, owner of an electric right arm.
Let’s give some credit to DBacks fans here: we do hear the crowd react to the very first strike. They’ve learned since March. The crowd is mostly silent after pitches #2, #4, and #5, though. We can see a number of people fanning themselves behind home plate, so maybe it’s inexplicably hot in a domed and air conditioned stadium. Pitch #6 gets the crowd going a bit more, and the reaction to pitch #8 shows us that many in the crowd do at least recognize what’s happening. There is significantly more buzz than we saw in Cleveland. But, still, absolutely no one stands up leading up to pitch #9. There are only a few audible whistles. And we even got one guy behind home plate doing that dopey thing where you wave to someone watching on TV as you’re talking to them on a cellphone. Fenway Park this is not.
My wife is neither a New Englander, nor a baseball fan. But the first time I took her to Fenway — for a freezing cold Sunday night game in mid-April — she said something about that night that I still remember: “I didn’t realize a run-of-the-mill regular season game could feel special.”
As loathe as I am to engage in fan wars — as much as I don’t want to sound like Peter Gammons overreacting to few fans behind the dugout saluting Darren Bragg — I have to admit that she’s absolutely right. Fenway is special, and it’s special because of an alchemical reaction between place and people, the hard science of physical geometry creating emotional magic.
And thank god we have it. Modernity increasingly disconnects us from each other. And this isn’t just the fault of the internet, it’s how we build our physical world. Bigger houses, bigger cars, more suburban sprawl, fewer shared spaces. Fenway is the rare place that forces people to live with each other for three hours every night, that reminds us that we are a society, not a smattering of loosely connected individuals.
I hope it stands forever.
