BOSTON – For a Red Sox fan, coming to see the Sox at Fenway Park has often been compared to a religious experience, but really, what religion packs the pews like the Old Towne Team?

With Curt Schilling and Keith Foulke having been acquired to stiffen the spine of an already strong pitching staff in the bitter aftermath of October’s gut-wrenching Game 7 ALCS loss to the Yankees, the Fenway faithful are set to descend on their 92-year-old baseball cathedral in record numbers this season.

Season ticket sales reached 20,000 for the first time, and the Red Sox, who have Major League Baseball’s highest average ticket price, cut it off there, leaving a waiting list of nearly 1,000, in order to get their few remaining tickets into other eager hands. The Red Sox had sold about 2.4 million tickets by Opening Day.

And that number, Red Sox executive vice president of public affairs Charles Steinberg says, doesn’t include thousands of tickets pledged to groups.

By any Red Sox standard, that’s a record. When you combine the smallest park in the majors (the fire code limit is 36,298) with the most rabid fan base, the law of supply and demand makes Red Sox tickets the hardest thing to come by in baseball.

And after 2003, when the Red Sox were five outs from the World Series, Red Sox Nation, spurred by its fan-friendly new owners and boy wonder (he’s 30) general manager Theo Epstein, runs at such a constant fever pitch that, despite the lack of actual games from November through February, management is beginning to feel as if there’s no such thing as an off-season.

But they like it that way.

“No one here takes (fan interest) for granted,” says Mike Dee, the team’s chief operating officer. “We’re being held to a higher standard.”

Frank Marion, 51, a customer service rep in the Red Sox ticket office for 15 years who grew up in western Massachusetts, remembers when “you could come here any time without a ticket and get in.”

Now, with Fenway nearly sold out for the season before the first pitch, Marion is almost as lonely as the Maytag repairman.

Which raises the frequently asked question: Given the seating and revenue constraints, and the desire to compete with the Yankees, when, if ever, are the Red Sox going to build a bigger playpen?

The unofficial short answer: probably no time soon.

“That fork in the road may be coming in the near future,” Dee says. “Whether something like that can get done in Boston, who knows? The previous ownership had spent three years telling everyone that Fenway couldn’t work. We’ve tried to increase (revenue) in a way that doesn’t disrespect the natural habitat of Fenway.”

The new ownership, led by Wall Street financier John Henry, Hollywood TV mogul Tom Werner and veteran baseball executive Larry Lucchino, has spent the last two seasons mastering the art of the possible. They’ve shrunk foul territory by adding 774 premium seats behind home plate and along the first and third base lines. Last season, they added 274 seats and standing room atop the left field wall, better known as the Green Monster. This season, they’ve added another 200 (four per table) on the right field roof, with standing room for 150 more.

All told, they’ve added more than 1,300 seats/standing room, yielding an additional $12 million in annual revenue. Another $1 million flows from a Legends Suite that rents for $10,000 per game ($15,000 when the Yankees are in town) where fans can mingle and watch the game with former Red Sox greats.

Millions more come from increased corporate endorsements, though Dee won’t say how much. The Red Sox are also opening a Red Sox theme restaurant in the basement of the park’s Yawkey Way office building. And they’re making plans to pitch the park as a year-round destination for corporate meetings and events.

“This is not your father’s Fenway Park anymore,” Dee says.

To compete with George Steinbrenner’s Yankees, it better not be. Although the Red Sox rank second in the major leagues in total revenue, the Yankees are a runaway first.

And the gap is getting wider. Smith College professor and sports economics expert Andrew Zimbalist estimates the Yankees, propelled by their YES cable network, reap $330 million to $340 million in annual revenue, while the Red Sox bring in $210 million to $230 million.

Red Sox executives don’t dispute the disparity. Zimbalist estimates that the Red Sox ownership has brought in $40 million to $70 million in added revenue since buying the team (and 80 percent of NESN) two years ago, much of it coming from moving NESN from a premium channel to basic cable, boosting viewership and advertising rates.

But while Greater Boston is the seventh-largest TV market in the nation, New York is the biggest.

Zimbalist estimates that what Lucchino called “the evil empire” has added about $100 million in revenue because of the YES network, boosting revenue that was about $242 million two years ago.

In an era when the thickness of a major league team’s wallet is tied more to channel-surfing couch potatoes than going deeply into debt to build a new ballpark, the Save Fenway group is resting easier.

“Someone joked that if you could have seats facing up from the ground at second base, we’d probably build them,” Steinberg says. “In most cases, we have simply converted standing room to seating room. To change the capacity of Fenway is a legal issue and a neighborhood issue.

“We’re nearing the decision point (on whether to build a new park). What we’ve tried to do along the way was make improvements where they were obvious. Situations that were right in front of our eyes. The low-hanging fruit.”

The Red Sox have increased fan comfort and convenience by widening concourses, adding restrooms and annexing Yawkey Way during games. And for season ticket holders who want to rid themselves of that evening’s tickets without a hassle, the Red Sox have initiated a program to resell tickets at face value, allowing ticket holders to transfer their ducats electronically.

The $700 million the owners paid for the Red Sox and part of NESN ($660 million plus the assumption of a $40 million debt) in the winter of 2002 may not leave them enough money to pay for a new ballpark, and the current political climate is cold toward a publicly financed stadium. But the owners’ gradualist approach to improving Fenway is welcomed by the Save Fenway crowd, which includes 1,300 dues-paying ($25 annually) members and thousands of non-paying sympathizers.

Steve Wojnar, 40, a technology sales vice president and chairman of the board of Save Fenway, says the volunteer organization was born in 1998, when the previous ownership went public with plans to build a new stadium. In the summer of 1999, the Red Sox announced plans for a $667 million stadium project. Back then, Wojnar says, Save Fenway members met as often as twice a week because there were public hearings to attend, petitions to be filed.

“Initially,” Wojnar says, “it was a Don Quixote thing.”

Now, with their worst-case scenario delayed or possibly even derailed, the group meets monthly or every six weeks. The team’s owners, whom Wojnar says reached out to his group with a phone call as soon as their purchase of the team was official, have met with the preservationists “at least six times” and have even borrowed ideas from the group’s architects.

“Do we as a group feel more confident today than we did five years ago?” Wojnar says. “Absolutely. There is nothing Mr. Henry has done that the previous ownership couldn’t have done 20 years ago. The big thing he has done differently is care. He became one of us in a hurry. … Now we have (Mayor Tom Menino) saying Fenway Park is one of Boston’s greatest treasures, whereas four years ago he was saying Fenway Park couldn’t be saved.”

Wojnar says the public’s response to Save Fenway has changed as much as the attitude of the Red Sox owners.

“It has gone from, “What are you, nuts?’ to “Awesome job,”‘ Wojnar says.

Still, for fans who find tickets nearly impossible to get, awesome is hardly the word.

Steinberg, who, along with Lucchino, came to the Red Sox from the Padres, where San Diego’s 65,000-seat Qualcomm Stadium, which the Padres shared with the Chargers, had 15,000 $5 seats in deep center field that were always empty.

Steinberg says it took six years for the Padres to get approval for a new ballpark, which they christened Thursday. And that was in San Diego. How long might such a process take in Can’t-Do Boston?

Even if a new Fenway were built, Steinberg says he doesn’t envision it a lot bigger than the existing one.

“I don’t think the added capacity that we would seek would be vast or huge or enormous,” Steinberg says. “It’s possible that we wouldn’t even go to 40,000.”

Why not? Camden Yards in Baltimore, where Steinberg grew up and which Lucchino, then the Orioles president, was a driving force in building, seats 47,000. And the Orioles, while certainly popular, don’t have a fan base to match the size and passion of Red Sox Nation. Even so, when Camden Yards opened in 1992 as the first of the great retro ballparks, Steinberg says the Orioles sold out 65 games.

But even as Red Sox tickets are snapped up with record speed, even with fans sleeping in line on the cold sidewalk for a chance to buy tickets, Dee is cautious.

“I wouldn’t say there is a long history of this sort of demand from the business operation perspective,” Dee says. “It would be a great thing to have this sort of unprecedented demand for 20 years.”

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To rephrase “Field of Dreams”: If you build it bigger, what if they don’t come?

“This is a unique model in all of baseball,” says Wojnar, who has been to almost every major league stadium. “Part of what draws it is Fenway. If you take a 45,000 seat arena and put it down, you will lose a big chunk of that (mystique). You know what a big part of the Celtics’ problem is? It’s because they play in a bad, boring building (the 9-year-old FleetCenter). They’ve lost the intimacy, the feeling you had at the Garden.

“The intimacy of (Fenway) is something you can’t replicate. I’ve been to Camden Yards. It’s nice, but I don’t ever want to see a game from its upper deck. I have seen one, and I don’t want to again.

“What’s the difference? If you go to Camden Yards at 2 o’clock in the afternoon on a snowy day in January, it’ll be empty. If you go to Fenway Park at 2 o’clock in the afternoon on a snowy day in January, there will be people taking the tour, Japanese tourists outside taking pictures. That’s the difference.

“If you’ve got the goose that laid the golden egg, give it better feathers. But don’t kill it.”