Authors take Red Sox fans on tragic history tour

Fenway Park has been home to the Boston Red Sox since 1912 and is just one facet of the team that Glenn Stout and Richard Johnson examine in "Red Sox Century"

In this story: 'Truth is better than myth' 'Tradition of heartbreak and agony' RELATED STORIES, SITES

BOSTON, Massachusetts (Reuters) -- You can tell it is autumn in New England: Leaves are changing color, apples are ripe and the Red Sox are driving local fans crazy.

Fall after frosty fall, Boston's beloved baseball team has exasperated its fans with heartbreaking defeats after thrilling them with heroics all summer. Like the autumn leaves, the Sox generally put on a spectacular show before they fall to earth.

"For 100 years, the Boston Red Sox have been the most interesting team in baseball," local authors Glenn Stout and Richard Johnson contend in "Red Sox Century," covering 100 years of the team's emotional peaks and valleys.

Other writers have also found the team interesting; their efforts line bookstore shelves from Maine to Connecticut. But Stout, who edits the "Best American Sportswriting" series, said many Red Sox books contain a lot of misinformation.

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"They're one of the most written-about teams in sports, but I don't think they're necessarily one of the best written-about in terms of their history," he told Reuters in an interview.

For instance, the new book shows how shortstop Johnny Pesky was "hung out to dry" for a 1946 World Series loss when the manager and other executives failed to admit their mistakes.

Stout started poking holes in Red Sox legends in the 1980s when he worked at the Boston Public Library and spent his lunch breaks reading ancient sports pages on microfilm.

"I've made a cottage industry of writing articles about things people think they know about this team, well-known stories that, upon investigation, turn out to be incomplete or totally wrong," he said.

"The truth is so much better than the myth," said Johnson, curator of the New England Sports Museum, who has spent years poring over documents in the museum's collections.

Johnson met Stout in 1986, the year the Sox came within one strike of winning their first championship since 1918 before a grounder rolled between the legs of first baseman Bill Buckner. The two agreed Red Sox fans held too many myths and legends as fact and decided to produce a well-researched history.

"Most books that pretend to be histories about sports really repeat the errors of any previous work in book form," Johnson said in an interview at the museum archive, a Cambridge warehouse crammed with documents and sports memorabilia.

"We used the same methodology that historians would use in doing a book about a treaty or a war," he said. After 14 years of meticulous research, Houghton Mifflin Co. published the book before the 2001 centennial of Boston's American League team.

The tome, more than 450 pages of narrative, guest essays and photos, weighs nearly as much as the memory of the home run Yankee shortstop Bucky Dent hit to beat the Sox in a 1978 playoff. But accounts of the heartbreaks are leavened with forgotten stories about early triumphs, from the first World Series in 1903 to the last Red Sox championship in 1918.

In one episode, team executives commandeer a boat in New York harbor and race out to meet the ocean liner Lusitania in 1915, hoping to sign star center fielder Tris Speaker to a new contract before the rival Federal League grabs him. Johnson dug that story out of catcher Bill Carrigan's scrapbooks.

"Everyone is perhaps too familiar with the Red Sox tradition of heartbreak and agony," Stout said. "We relive their championship years too."

"Red Sox Century" contains enough minutiae to settle 100 years of barroom bets: Who was pitching and what was the count when Ted Williams belted a home run in his final big league at-bat? (Orioles pitcher Jack Fischer; one ball, one strike.)

Which member of the 1967 "Impossible Dream" team saved his parents from a fire in the Bronx, then hit a grand slam at Yankee Stadium the next day? (Third-baseman Joe Foy.)

The book even challenges the central Red Sox myth that owner Harry Frazee brought a curse on the team when he sold baseball icon Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees, dooming the Sox to eternal futility while launching the Yankee dynasty.

The book presents evidence of a smear campaign against Frazee and shows how the curse idea diverted criticism from a later owner, Tom Yawkey, whose memory is revered in Boston. A trust established by his widow still owns the team.

The book gives Yawkey credit for making the Sox competitive and hiring thousands of workers during the Great Depression to rebuild Fenway Park. But it also chronicles decades of bumbling by cronies and drinking buddies he hired to run his team and exposes how his Red Sox fought baseball's integration, passing up chances to sign some of the best players ever -- including Willie Mays and Jackie Robinson -- because they were black.

It recounts how local black and Jewish leaders pressured the team into giving Robinson a tryout in 1945, two years before he broke baseball's color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers. After Robinson impressed the coaches, witnesses heard a racial epithet shouted from the owner's box.

A year later, the Red Sox narrowly lost the 1946 World Series. They folded late in the 1948 and 1949 seasons and fell from contention in the 1950s when Robinson, Mays and other early black stars were helping other teams win.

"The whole notion of a curse being associated with the team, now maybe you can start there," said Johnson. "I think our book connects a lot of dots that have long gone unconnected."

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