Boston’s Fenway Park will host an Army-Navy baseball game April 20, both service academies announced Wednesday ― a first for the iconic ballpark that will come exactly 106 years after its first official Red Sox game.
The game had been part of a three-game series set for West Point on April 21-22, but the schools accepted an offer from the Red Sox to move one of the contests into the shadow of the Green Monster, per the Navy Athletics release. They’ll play two games in West Point on April 21.
First pitch for the Fenway game is set for 6 p.m. Tickets aren’t yet on sale, but all proceeds will benefit the Home Base Program, which assists veterans suffering from “invisible wounds of war,” including post-traumatic stress disorder. The program is backed by the Red Sox Foundation and Massachusetts General Hospital.
The teams haven’t squared off in a Major League Baseball ballpark since 2006, when they split a doubleheader at Baltimore’s Camden Yards. Both clubs begin their 2018 seasons Feb. 16, with Army facing Michigan in Port St. Lucie, Florida, and Navy traveling to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to play Gardner-Webb.
Two years ago, the schools’ basketball teams were set to face off in a doubleheader at another iconic venue, New York’s Madison Square Garden, but a blizzard all but shut down the city, forcing the cancellation of the men’s game. Army routed Navy in the women’s contest.
Fenway Park opened in 1912, hosting an April 9 exhibition between the Red Sox and Harvard College. Eleven days later, the Red Sox played their first American League contest at the park, beating the visiting New York Highlanders (they’d become the Yankees the next year) 7-6, en route to a World Series title.
In between those games, the Titanic sank.
Kevin Lilley is the features editor of Military Times.
