Kenneth Chora of Seekonk works at removing the old wooden seats at Fenway Park last month. Chora says the seats will be refurbished and put back in place.

AP / Michael Dwyer

BOSTON — Fenway Park is undergoing another of its now-annual offseason face-lifts, adding new seats in right field and sprucing up the pricey seats and old grandstands around home plate. Red Sox ownership, meanwhile, vows that it has no plans to replace baseball’s oldest ballpark with a modern facility.

With construction under way, the 97-year-old stadium has the look of a beautiful older woman without any makeup on. The field is intact, but orange cones sit where each of the bases should be. The loge and field box seats and the infield grandstand have been ripped out, giving the lower bowl the look of a tiered coliseum. Scaffolding hangs along the right-field roof, where new seats and standing-room areas are being added.

The renovations will allow the team to sell between 300 and 350 more tickets per game. Work will be complete by the time the season begins, in April.

Red Sox president and CEO Larry Lucchino called this the “eighth inning” of an over-$100-million, decade-long improvement plan that the Lucchino-John Henry-Tom Werner ownership group had planned for Fenway.

“This commitment is a bold one, it’s a long standing one, and it enables us to finance privately all of the improvements, changes and expansion that you are seeing here at Fenway Park,” Lucchino said.

And, Lucchino said, his group is going to get its money’s worth out of that investment — there are no plans to replace Fenway.

“We are committed to Fenway Park, short term, middle term, long term. No thought has been given or is being given to a new ballpark,” he promised.

Years of work has brought Fenway’s official capacity to 38,928, fully 10-percent higher than when this ownership group took over in 2002. The club never actually sells that many seats, usually releasing just less than 38,000 for games, and the team never wants to have an official capacity of more than 40,000. That’s fitting, Lucchino said –– Fenway’s size is part of its character.

“We think the hard ceiling on seats is necessary to preserve the essential charm, character, electricity, excitement of Fenway Park. Those characteristics generate the demand in part for the ballpark. We think we can operate successfully, competitively and financially with the capacity that Fenway Park is going to leave us,” Lucchino said.

With the size of baseball stadiums dropping, however, Fenway is no longer the 34,000-seat runt amongst 60,000-seat behemoths, as it was in the 1980s. The stadium’s official capacity is on par with parks in Kansas City, Pittsburgh, and for the Chicago White Sox, and would be bigger than planned ballparks for the Florida Marlins, Oakland Athletics, and the Tampa Bay Rays.

The exception in stadium construction is the new Yankee Stadium, which will hold between 50,000 and 54,000 fans. Lucchino says he is well aware of what is happening in New York, where the 44,000-seat replacement for Shea stadium will also open this spring.

“I know that John, Tom and I spend a lot of time thinking and talking about what’s happening in other ballparks in the country, including New York where there is a giant step being taken in New York with the two baseball stadiums. The one at Yankee Stadium particularly affects us, so we’ll be watching with close interest how that new ballpark affects their revenue and financial wherewithal going forward,” Lucchino said.

Fenway’s new seats will come along the right-field roof, a section originally added as a temporary expansion in 1976. The team will add 560 new seats in place of 383 roof box seats.

The team then plans to add dedicated standing-room spaces with drink rails. The right-field roof will feature 75 new stools with drink rails similar to those above the Green Monster, flanked by new concessions areas and restrooms. The nearby Budweiser Right Field Roof Deck will also be expanded with 28 new seats at tables. Wheelchair accessibility and sightlines in disabled seating areas will be improved throughout the park.

The lower seating area stretching from first base to third base –– Sections 14 to 28 –– will be repaired and waterproofed, which prompted the team to replace the 1970s-era red box seats in these sections, and to refurbish the historic grandstand. The new seats will boast seat cushions and drink holders, while the grandstand seats will be widened to 18 inches, to make them consistent with the outfield bleachers.

The wooden grandstand work will be conducted by American Seating, the Michigan company that has worked on the seats at Fenway Park since its construction, in 1912. The Red Sox sold off the box seats to collectors.

The cross-aisle running behind the field box will also be lowered by 11 inches as a result of the renovations, giving fans in the loge box seats slightly better views over patrons walking back and forth to their seats.

Janet Marie Smith, the Red Sox senior vice president of planning and development, said the club was also redoing the roof of the Jeano Building, which houses the team’s front offices, the third-base deck, the third-base concourse, and Game On!. The building’s windows and front entrance will also be redone to bring its look closer to its original 1914 appearance.

“We are always focused on enhancing Fenway Park with the fan experience as a top priority,” she said.

Fenway has seen dramatic renovations over the last eight years, headlined by the addition of the Green Monster seats in 2003, but also the right-field roof seats in 2004, the additions of the EMC Club and State Street Pavilion in 2006, the third-base deck in 2007, and new electronic scoreboards, an expansion of the State Street Pavilion seating and the creation of the center field “Bleacher Bar” in 2008.

Baltimore’s Struever Bros., Eccles & Rouse, the Baltimore developer that is working several major projects in Providence, is overseeing all the Fenway improvements.

dbarbari@projo.com