Remember when we Rhode Islanders had a Triple A baseball team, a Triple A ballpark, a pipeline to the Red Sox and Fenway Park?
Now, we have nothing. Our beloved PawSox moved 40 miles northwest and call themselves the WooSox. McCoy Stadium near I-95 in Pawtucket gave way to Polar Park near I-290 in Worcester. The Apex site where a new ball park would have dazzled visitors coming out of the S-Curve on 95 remains a vacant eyesore. Tidewater Landing, a riverfront stadium meant to excite us about minor-league soccer? Stalled.
That leaves us only with the Boston Red Sox, a team difficult to love this summer. A team of struggling has-beens and wannabes playing .500 baseball while trying to stay out of the AL East basement. A team lacking a major-league shortstop. A team whose ace pitcher Chris Sale is injured. Again. A team whose 331-million-dollar third baseman Rafael Devers was hitting .241 after the weekend series against the White Sox.
What’s a fan to do? If you are anything like me and can’t watch this error-prone team, then read about it. Grab a beer, grill a couple of Fenway Franks, and sit down with Sean McAdams’s “Boston Red Sox: A Curated History of the Sox” and Chad Finn’s “The Boston Globe Story of the Red Sox: More Than a Century of Championships, Challenges and Characters.”
McAdam knows his way around baseball. This is his 34th season covering the Red Sox for newspapers — he wrote for the Providence Journal for 23 years — and online outlets in Boston. His approach to the history of the Red Sox is different. Rather than a chronological account, he selected specific periods and personalities to fill 287 pages.
He leads off with the basics: a brief history of Fenway Park, a critical overview of Tom Yawkey’s stewardship — he excoriates the longtime owner for being racist and the last to integrate his team — and a review of John Henry and his group that has owned the Red Sox since December 2001.
He writes with affection of broadcaster Ned Martin, Globe baseball guru Peter Gammons, and everybody’s favorite sidekick, Jerry Remy. He covers the bitter rivalry between the Red Sox and Yankees; the heroic trinity of Ted Williams, Carl Yastrzemski, and David Ortiz; the dynamic pitching duo of Roger Clemens and Pedro Martinez.
He reminds us of World Series heartbreak in 1967, 1975 and 1986, and World Series euphoria in 2004, 2007, 2013 and 2018.
McAdam started covering the Red Sox around 1989 and is at his best in writing about the 1990s and 2000s because he was there. He doesn’t quite convey the drama and emotion of many key moments from the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s because he wasn’t there. He was 8 years old in 1967, for example, when his father took him to his first Red Sox game. He did describe the beaning that ended Tony Conigliaro’s season in 1967, but he got the date wrong; it was Aug. 18, not Aug. 11.
And he wrote nothing about Jim Rice suffering a broken left hand in late September of 1975, or of Bernie Carbo’s feeble Little League swing before slugging a three-run game-tying homer in the eighth inning of Game 6 of the 1975 World Series, or of right fielder Dwight Evans’s unbelievable catch to rob Joe Morgan of a home run in the top of the 11th of Game 6, setting up Carlton Fisk’s game-winning homer in the bottom of the 12th.
Still, Sean’s 2002 book is an interesting read, the equivalent of a spring training game on a bright March afternoon in Fort Myers.
“The Boston Globe Story of the Red Sox: More Than a Century of Championships, Challenges and Characters” is as satisfying as a four-game weekend series with the Yankees in September with a playoff spot at stake. Published in March, this history is taken, literally, from the pages of The Globe from 1901 through 2022. Globe columnist Chad Finn edited this treasure, and Globe writers from 12 decades star alongside Red Sox heroes past and present.
Globe sports writers received bylines in the early days of the Red Sox franchise, I learned. T.H. Murnane wrote baseball notes in the early 1900s, 70 years before Gammons launched his must-read Sunday Baseball Notes. Illustrations and photos accompany the prose.
For years, The Globe boasted one of the finest sports staffs in America, and the writers responsible are here in these 420 pages: Harold Kaese, Jerry Nason, Hy Hurwitz, Clif Keane, Bud Collins, Ray Fitzgerald, Peter Gammons, Leigh Montville, Dan Shaughnessy, Bob Ryan, Will McDonough, Nick Cafardo, Larry Whiteside, Gordon Edes. Each of them, and many others at some point, wrote about the Red Sox.
Flipping through the decades with these craftsmen is like sitting in the Globe library and reliving Red Sox history from the beginning. Page after page of stories. Baseball brought out the best in them, as the game has for so many writers.
Roger Angell, author and veteran essayist for the New Yorker who died last year at 101, might have been the finest. His 1977 book “Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion” is terrific reading even now. His account of the epic Game 6 of the 1975 World Series between the Reds and Red Sox puts you in a seat at Fenway Park. After Carlton Fisk’s 12th-inning home run off the left field foul pole fell to the turf and organist John Kiley pumped up the volume for Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus,” Angell remembered his Red Sox friends throughout New England and typed this vivid description:
“I saw all of them dancing and shouting and kissing and leaping about like the fans at Fenway — jumping up and down in their bedrooms and kitchens and living rooms, and in bars and trailers, and even in some boats here and there, I suppose, and on back-country roads (a lone driver getting the news over the radio and blowing his horn over and over, and finally pulling up and getting out and leaping up and down on the cold macadam, yelling into the night), and all of them, for once at least, utterly joyful and believing in that joy — alight with it.”
I was at Fenway Park that night, a 25-year-old kid sports editor for The Woonsocket Call. I recall the electric shock of the moment. Angell’s words, so much a part of Red Sox history, still make me smile today, still make me sigh in admiration and wish I could write like that.
Mike Szostak can be reached at mszostak@ripr.org.
