Title/Author:
“The Ultimate Boston
Red Sox Time Machine Book” by Martin Gitlin
Tags:
Baseball, professional,
history, Red Sox
Publish date:
February 1, 2020
Length:
208 pages
Rating:
2 ½ of 5 stars (fair) - rounded to 3 for Goodreads, NetGalley and Amazon
Review:
The Boston Red Sox have one of more
colorful histories of teams in Major League Baseball. Early in their existence,
they were the most dominant team in the game. Then an infamous trade that led
to an alleged curse on the franchise became the main talking point for the
franchise until their recent return to glory with 4 championships in 15
years. Their history is condensed into this
fairly short, quick reading book by Marty Gitlin.
The biggest surprise for me reading
this book was the relatively little amount of text devoted to the recent run of
success by the Red Sox. There is very good information on the first Red Sox dynasty,
from the first World Series until the infamous trade of Babe Ruth to the hated
New York Yankees in 1920. While there are
plenty of pages on the 2004 championship that broke the so-called “Curse of the
Bambino” that haunted the franchise for 86 years, there is scant little
coverage, at least in comparison, of the later successful years in 2007, 2013
and 2018. Indeed, there was only one
sentence that mentioned anything about the championship in 2007 and not a lot
about either 2013 or 2018’s successful seasons.
There is more written about the collapse of the team in the final days
of the 2011 season, the “chicken and beer” controversy and subsequent firing of
manager Terry Francona than there was about the last three championships.
Also, the heartbreak of many seasons
in which the team was oh-so-close was on full display many times. Whether it was in 1946 when Enos Slaughter
made his mad dash home when Johnny Pesky still had the ball, losing to
Cincinnati in the 7th game of the 1975 World Series after the famous
Carlton Fisk home run in game 6, Bill Buckner’s fateful error in game 6 of the
1986 World Series, Bucky Dent’s homer in the 1978 tie breaker vs the Yankees,
or Aaron Boone’s home run to end the 2003 playoffs for Boston, a Red Sox fan
will have plenty of material in which he or she can relive those painful losses.
There is some good information on
key people in Red Sox history such as Babe Ruth, longtime owner Tom Yawkey and
many other players. These mini-biographies are placed in the time of team
history when that person played a significant role and they made for decent
reading. These snippets, as well as the description of the team, have the
feeling of a book written by a big fan of the team and there wasn’t a lot of
objectivity. That isn’t necessarily bad
if the target audience is “Red Sox Nation” (a good description of this term and
the fan base starts the book), but much of this information is compacted in a
manner that serious fans of the team will already know it all.
Not being a Red Sox fan and wanting
to learn some more about the team, this book fell short of my expectations for
that as I, as a serious fan of the game, did know most, but not all of, the
material before reading it. It is good
for fairly new fans of either the game or the Red Sox in specific. For that reason, the book does get a passing
grade, but anyone with a more than casual knowledge of the team should look elsewhere
for new information.
I wish to thank Lyons Press for
providing a copy of the book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Book Format Read:
E-book (Kindle)
Buying Links:
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