Mnookin Offers Red Sox Nation More to Munch On

Being tired.  That is one memory that stands out for me when thinking back on the Red Sox baseball playoff runs in both 2003 and 2004.  The excitement and the stress were magnified by dog tired exhaustion.  The recollection I have is that the typical Red Sox-Yankees league championship game lasted 8 or 9 hours and went 21 or 22 innings each.

     Then we were supposed to get up the next day and go to work.  It was almost impossible to function.  Red Sox Nation walked around all day like zombies from Dawn of the Dead, except these zombies wore "B" hats and Big Papi tee shirts.  And all the time part of our brain was tuned in to all things Red Sox.  It was sort of a picture-in-picture for our conscious mind.  Lodged in a corner of our brain while trying to do other things, such as our job, raise children, etc., was this Red Sox channel playing in a continuous loop:  "Can the Red Sox win tonight?  Who's pitching?  I can't believe the Sox won (or lost) last night.  I'll sleep in November."

     So after last year's quick playoff exit, and this year's disappointing ending, being out of the playoff picture in August, the Nation is experiencing its second consecutive relaxing October.  Now is a good time - as casual, unemotional observers of the 2006 playoff action that is unfolding – to examine what had gone on behind the scenes of the Red Sox.  And a good book to do that with is Seth Mnookin's Feeding the Monster.  Although, after I finished I was wishing it had more details and had done a better job bringing the main characters more fully to life.

     As with almost any book covering an entity that has existed for more than a century, we must first get through the perfunctory "History of the Red Sox," which Mnookin does as efficiently as one can.  The problem in these situations is that the writer must assume that the reader knows nothing, or very little, of the background story beforehand.  The reader might be tempted to skip over this part, but even die hard Red Sox fans probably don't know as much as they think they do about their favorite baseball team's past, so it is worth the recap.  Mnookin even tries to perform a Snopes.com type of service by busting some of the urban legends that stick to the team like pine tar.  For instance, Mnookin claims reviled owner Harry Frazee did not sell Babe Ruth to the Yankees to raise money for his Broadway production No, No Nanette as most of us have come to take as gospel.  Mnookin writes:

     "But at the time that Frazee sold Ruth, he did not, contrary to what's become accepted as fact, face serious financial difficulties, nor did he need the money he got from the sale to finance No, No, Nanette.  Frazee's mistake – and the cause of the fossilization of his legacy as the man responsible for the media-constructed Curse of the Bambino – had everything to do with his failure to ally himself more strongly with the local press."

     Mnookin goes on to take aim at the current crop of Boston sportswriters, calling them out as he sees fit.  He is particularly harsh on Dan Shaughnessy, a sports columnist for the Boston Globe, who popularized talk about a Babe Ruth curse with his 1990 book, The Curse of the Bambino.  After a paragraph devoted to spelling out some problems in Shaughnessy's book, Mnookin ends the discussion, and chapter four, with this blunt summary:

     "In fact, The Curse of the Bambino served as an unintentional primer on the ways in which the Boston press was able to inflict itself on players and fans alike.  Forever after, every Red Sox fumble, misstep, or mistake would be attributed to a curse that had been popularized, if not largely invented, by a cantankerous sports columnist."

     At this point I thought: Great here we go, this is what the book is really about.  The monster in the title refers to the Boston sports media and its voracious appetite for conflict and upheaval and drama, especially when it is not found on the field.  How has this ultra scrutiny and negativism affected and shaped the successes and failures of the Red Sox?  But the theme never takes hold, and by the end of the book I'm left thinking that there is enough negativism and conflict imbedded in the clubhouse and in the front office so that the media might as well take a number and get in line.

     (By the way, I spent much of the summer trying to promote a new Babe Ruth curse, but this time the Yankees are the doomed.  My theory is that if the ghost of Babe Ruth was upset about being traded to a team for which he went on to have incredible success and popularity, then how is he going to feel about having Yankee Stadium, the "House that Ruth Built," relegated to the status of a knock down to make way for the New Yankee Stadium?  My guess is he's pissed.  I even warned friends who are Yankees fans how the curse operates: Everything will be going really well with your team, when all of a sudden the legs will be cut out from under.  If that doesn't describe the 2006 playoffs from the Yankees' perspective, what does?)

     In the end, from Feeding the Monster we learn what we already knew: That ball players, especially the really good ones, can be prima donnas and petulant and petty; that the corporate side of baseball is filled with as much competition, paranoia and backstabbing as anything seen on The Apprentice; and the local sportswriters relish a good, juicy story to report on, and they get it right sometimes and they get it completely wrong other times, we just don't know which it is until afterward.

     Among some of the telling details Mnookin does provide, my favorite is a footnote to the famous Jason Varitek-Alex Rodriguez brawl in July 2004.  A photo showing Varitek shoving his catcher's mitt into A-Rod's face came to symbolize the season.  I always thought Varitek wanted to downplay the incident, but I was delighted to learn he used the photo as his laptop's screensaver for the remainder of the season.

     Another favorite part of the book was the description of David Ortiz's lengthy at-bat that lead to a game winning single off Yankee Esteban Loaiza in the bottom of the 14^th inning of Game 5 in the 2004 American League Championship Series.  Mnookin gives a detailed glimpse, two pages worth, into the thought process Big Papi was going through during what Theo Epstein later said "might have been one of the greatest at-bats to end the greatest game ever played."

     For details such as this, and many other interesting facts, anecdotes and insights (for instance, we learn a great deal about the whole process that went into selling the Red Sox to John Henry) this book belongs on any Red Sox fan's bookshelf.  If there was any hope that this book could provide lessons outside the limited world of major league baseball or appeal to those who are not a part of Red Sox Nation – and that certainly might never have been a goal – then it falls short at the warning track.  Instead, for Red Sox fans looking for a peek at what took place off the field, and how some of the fateful decisions leading to the 2004 World Series victory were made, then Feeding the Monster is an RBI single up the middle.  And as David Ortiz showed us in that memorable Game 5 hit, sometimes that's more than enough.

     Meanwhile, members of Red Sox Nation get your sleep now, because come next October I have a hunch we'll be staying up late every night.