"Naw," Mickey said, "I think I ought to sell it for two thousand dollars."

Maybe the greed for Mark McGwire's homerun balls had filtered its way down to Mickey.

But as Mickey capitalized on his catch, another spectator remembered baseball's more idyllic past.

Mary Flemming sat to Mickey's left, quietly keeping watch over the game.

She said she dearly hoped the Red Sox would tie together some offense.

"I feel bad because I come to only three or four Red Sox games each year, and darned if they don't lose three-quarters of those games," Flemming said.

"But I keep score religiously, because it reminds me of when I was younger and kept score for my little brother's team," she said.

Her attitude was echoed many times over among the approximately 20,000 fans on hand on the rainy Friday evening.

From the cheap seats in the bleachers to the expensive boxes hugging the infield, it was clear that the Red Sox game was not cellular-phone territory.

On "Family Game" night, the Red Sox offers discount seats to make the game more affordable for families, and children and their older chaperones fill the grandstand and bleacher seats.

Yet the Fenway of today is not the Fenway of past years.

Baseball is nowhere near perfect. One can point to players' high salaries, greedy owners, overpriced stadium seats and the commercialization of many aspects of the game.

One can dismiss new stadiums as gimmicky misrepresentations of stadiums of old.

One can wonder if any role models exist anywhere among today's 30-odd teams.

Yet a trip to Fenway, despite the rain and the enterprising youngsters, satiates the hunger for memory of many Bostonians.

Catch the fever, as Major League Baseball's saying used to go.