This Just In

Red Sox on the silver screen

Virtual reality

By VALENTINE HART | July 12, 2006

For those of us who can’t get enough of the Red Sox, but who can’t beg, borrow, or buy a ticket to Fenway Park, there’s good news: the Sox are now playing at the movies.

At the just-opened Westbrook Cinemagic on County Road, and its older sibling on Route 1 in Saco, you get not only first-run Hollywood films, but also 14 Red Sox home games this season. The ultimate in large-screen live viewing — you’ve never seen Big Papi so big! — comes at you in digitally projected high definition, with the NESN commentary in cinema-sound.

The June 27 opening game against the New York Mets revealed just how close to a Fenway experience a Cinemagic Red Sox event can be. Fans streamed in haphazardly before, during, and after game time. They stood for the playing of the National Anthem. They broke into rhythmic clapping and chanting when the Sox loaded the bases, and erupted with cheers loud enough to be heard in faraway Fenway when Jason Varitek delivered a two-run single. They lunged and grappled for numbered ping-pong balls tossed among them by promo people hawking free Fenway tickets. They booed just as lustily and knowingly as the Fenway crowd when Julian Tavarez began to warm up in the bullpen. Between innings, they filed out of the theater in mini-droves and returned moments later bearing ballpark-style franks and popcorn from the concession stand, or stayed in their seats and were served by vendors patrolling the aisles. They sang along at the seventh-inning stretch. And with a Red Sox victory easily in hand, many of them left before the game was over, as the Fenway Faithful do, though out on County Road in Westbrook, no one could credibly claim they were trying to avoid a post-game traffic jam.

Showcase Cinemas in the Boston area have been showing Red Sox games for about three years, but the screenings in Westbrook and Saco are the first outside of Massachusetts. Bob Collins, marketing director for Zyacorp Entertainment, Cinemagic’s parent company, was satisfied with the turnout for the new venture, which filled about three-quarters of the available seats. The theater, he said, gets “a small percentage” of the ticket sales, while the Red Sox take the lion’s share.

Andy Nichols of South Portland was in the crowd with his wife Diane and their grandson Cameron, age 5. Huge baseball fans, they have tickets for a Sox-Yankees game at Fenway in August. That’s as good as it gets. But Nichols would forsake his home TV to see the Cinemagical Red Sox again. “It’s more fun watching the game with a crowd,” he said. “It’s like being in your own section at the game.”