Red Sox Fan’s Little Book of Wisdom
The Boston Red Sox won five of baseball’s first 15 World Series: their last, 1918, the year the Twenty-Sixth (Yankee) Division entered France. Similarly, they have won four world titles since 2004—another fine start in another century. In between was a Death Valley of despair.
Babe Ruth and Harry Frazee. Ted Williams and Grady Little. Carl Yastrzemski and Bill Buckner. The Impossible Dream and Bucky Dent. Years which ring like chimes—1946, 1948-49, 1967, 1974, 1977-78, 1986, and 2003. “They [the Townies] killed our fathers and now the sons of bitches are coming to get us,” a New Haven, Connecticut, bartender said after Dent’s touché. No baseball team has mixed such ghosts, deflations, and heartbreak of the past. None set a grander stage for 2004’s, 2007’s, 2013’s, and 2018’s Nirvana.
The Red Sox Fan’s Little Book of Wisdom (Diamond Communications, its fourth printing 2007, 112 pages) uses fact, quote, and humor to recall more than 100 of the Red Sox most memorable moments. Longtime Sox announcer Ned Martin called this book “a bemused romp through the annual antics of this boundless, confounded team. Read ’em and weep—or laugh—or sing. And wrap yourself in this Red Sox thing.”