About an hour down the Mass Pike from Fenway Park is Old Sturbridge Village, a theme park where it's always the 19th century, and the kiddies can milk cows and watch blacksmiths ply their trade. Nice place to visit, indeed. But stay too long and, barring the odd Amish person, most would find such an environment inconvenient, even stifling. Same goes for dear old Fenway.

	Fenway Park has been charming fans since it opened on April 20, 1912.

Let's face it -- for all its considerable quaintness, Fenway Park just doesn't work, and should be demolished tomorrow.

Yes, the last active major-league artifact, not counting Cal Ripken, should be retired immediately, certain parts sent to Cooperstown and the rest sold for scrap. Rhapsodic baseball writers will have to direct their ponderous prose elsewhere, and misty-eyed baseball purists, the most insufferable lot on the planet, will have to find something else to wax nostalgic about.

Don't get me wrong -- the elegant Sox uniforms, the manual scoreboard nestled in the inimitable Green Monster and the action seemingly an arm's-length away all help turn an ordinary ballgame into a delightful period piece. Hit any one of the bars along Yawkey Way or Lansdowne Street pre- or post-game, and enjoy an ambience that's nearly non-existent in American sports culture. Fenway is a great place to see a game. Once or twice.

The loudest cries to save Fenway come not from hardcore Red Sox fans, but from out-of-towners who want to be assured that a Fenway pilgrimage is forever a possibility. Most fans who attend more than a few Sox games a year will admit they're looking forward to the new park, reportedly to be built next door, in the style of the current Fenway.

Will it be another case of a new stadium desperately trying to reproduce the retro-cool of an old stadium? Very definitely. And that's not been a problem in Baltimore, Cleveland or Houston. If any group of fans deserves a few luxuries while watching their team, it's Sox fans.

	The action seems just an arm's length away for fans at Fenway.

The initial view of the field upon entering Fenway is breathtaking, but it pretty much goes downhill from there. No one wants web access from their stadium seats, or Michael Buffer and a laser show introducing the team; we just want a little leg room. The unforgiving wooden seats were more cramped than those on the Greyhound bus we took to Boston; if you're unlucky enough to be 6-foot or taller, score an aisle seat, or be banished to the standing terrace in the back.

All must rise every few minutes to let any of the 20 or so people in your aisle egress, spawning miniature waves all over the park. Land one of those choice rightfield line seats and, assuming you're not staring into a steel girder, you're afforded a prime view of the right fielder and the fans in the center-field bleachers, the action at home plate a 90-degree head-turn away. Fenway Franks are famous only because both words start with F.

Speaking of words starting with F, there was an announcement at the start of the game declaring the stadium's anti-swearing policy; anyone caught cussing would reportedly be asked to leave (Carl Everett crotch-grabs apparently exempt). I was stunned not only by this audacious proclamation, but that it elicited no ironic blasts of profanity from the spectators. Could this antiquated policy, another spoonful of saccharine Fenway charm, actually work?

	Don't expect to stretch out your legs if you take in a game at Fenway.

Hell, no. New Yorkers tend to think they've got the monopoly on bad behavior -- it's a point of pride, actually -- but the obnoxious Sox fans who sat right behind us were worse than any louts I've encountered in Gotham. At the risk of coming across as a constipated schoolmarm, understand that I believe drinking beer at the ballpark is one of the great pleasures in life. I've unintentionally dumped entire beers on innocent octogenarians before, and might even have been thrown out of a stadium once or twice.

While the other 32,000 fans we shared the game with that day were first-class, even offering Ripken a standing ovation, the Rod Beck-ugly behavior of a few bad apples certainly besmirched an otherwise glorious afternoon. Obnoxious baseball fans have been around as long, to the day, as baseball itself, but only in Fenway do the miscreants -- much like the on-field action -- seem to be right in your lap. Or on your back.

A red flag went up when one of the chowdaheads dumped his beer all over my date's back, as Mike Lansing clocked a three-run dinger. It was almost worth the inconvenience, for me if not for my date, to hear his apology: "I'm sorry, Ma'am. I'm so sorry, Ma'am. I'm wicked sorry, Ma'am."

It wouldn't be the last time they spilled beer on us, as they greeted each inning with a fresh double-fisted round. Predictably, they got drunker and louder, harassing vendors about the price of concessions, belittling ushers, sneaking cigarettes on the down low, then surprising all in Section 16 by sparking up a joint, an apparent homage to former Sox smoke-thrower/blower Bill "Spaceman" Lee. Talk about your Green Monsters -- the Sox weren't the only ones playing on grass that day.

After the usher politely informed them there had been complaints about the smoke, the skells then proceeded to accuse various individuals seated around them of being the "rat," while bragging of their various transgressions to the players a hundred feet away:

Hey, Manny! Smokin's gonna kill me! Hey, Trot! I smoke pot!

But most heinous on the day's rap sheet was their ongoing obliteration of Fenway's no-cursing policy, as they spewed more expletives than Allen Iverson on the mike.

Whether it was these two oafs, the irate man behind me on the beer line who was next up when the taps were shut off, or the guy in the bathroom who, upon finding a succession of empty paper towel dispensers, let a hearty F-word fly, the no-cursing policy -- quaint as it might be -- doesn't work. And the same goes for a ballpark that predates the first World War, and the birth of any living human I know.

As day gave way to evening and the game wound down, we broke off a crumbling chunk of cement from under our feet, both for posterity and to perhaps expedite the ballpark's demolition. We 86'ed Fenway -- pun intended -- and headed to a place where the neon signs beckoned you to spill beer and swear like a sailor.

Michael Malone is a senior editor at Playboy.com, and his work has appeared in New York Magazine, Stuff, Gear, The San Francisco Examiner, Time Out and Rugby Magazine. He never once skipped school after staying up late to watch the All-Star Game.