Sox Appeal

Outside a shopping mall in Warwick, Rhode Island, the Red Sox bus is ready to roll. It's a gray Tuesday in January, Day 2 of the team's annual Winter Caravan, a promotional event in which players meet and greet children around New England. Infielders Kevin Millar and Bill Mueller and catcher Jason Varitek are on the bus, waiting along with members of the team's front office. PR chief Charles Steinberg hurries onboard with a distraught nine-year-old who missed the autograph session. The child lights up. Steinberg has delayed the Caravan — again — but made the child's day and, just as important, may have made a fan for life.

Back at Fenway Park a short time later, more than two dozen fans who wrote to the team last season with complaints or suggestions are gathered for a reception with owner John Henry. Steinberg invites the fans to try out a prototype for the 220 proposed new seats for the top of Fenway's right-field roof and to talk about anything, positive or not, in their experiences with Fenway and the Red Sox. The responses are heartfelt: Do you think that new safety rail is high enough? How about putting bike racks outside the park? Could there be more nights where families get a break on ticket prices?

It's an extraordinary gathering. The fans can't believe this is the same Boston Red Sox they've known over the decades. On top of everything else, Steinberg actually thanks them for coming.

When Charles Steinberg joined the new Red Sox management team in the winter of 2002, he discovered bags of unopened mail in the community relations offices. "What's this?" he asked. He was told that letters of complaint were answered only if the writer followed up by phone.

As Steinberg was learning, he had joined an organization that, though never warm, had turned downright icy under Dan Duquette, the general manager from 1994 through 2001. Duquette's corporate style of secrecy and mistrust set a tone that rippled all the way down through the staffs of the six minor league subsidiaries. But so what? The previous season the Sox had drawn 2,625,333 fans to the smallest stadium in the majors, a club record — and 97 percent of capacity — despite charging the highest ticket prices in the game.

"There's such a thing as institutional arrogance," says Steinberg, 45. "We had a lot of work to do."