How ESPN's Sports Guy Found Salvation, With a Little Help from Nomar, Pedro, Shawshank and the 2004 Red SoxIn the approximately 421 Red Sox books that came out after they won the World Series in 2004, I somehow forgot about this one. That's too bad, because it's one of the best. For some reason, I instead read the horrible diary by Stephen King and Stewart O'Nan, a book that managed to be about the Red Sox winning the World Series for the first time in 86 years and yet was somehow boring. Before reading it, I didn't think that would have have even been possible.*
Simmons, meanwhile, is not at all boring and also very funny. He's great at capturing the spirit of a fan. His columns are strangely much better to read in book form, if only because they don't seem quite so long. Online Simmons' columns seem so long that I get discouraged from reading them. I just don't have any patience reading online. But they were really just a few pages in a book. I think it will be much easier to read his columns in the future, if I think of them as chapters instead of columns.
And it's amazing to relive those games. The four-day stretch at the end of the Yankees series is something I will never experience again. There were so many ways that the whole thing could have ended in shambles, and yet they somehow still won.
Like many New Englanders, I made a lot of ridiculous purchases after the Red Sox won, including the 12-disc collector's edition of the 2004 World Series with all 7 ALCS games and all 4 World Series games. Of course, I've never had enough time to watch any of it, but I'm thinking now that I might pop a few of the games in.
* I also read Johnny Damon's "memoir," which was not my finest moment in reading.
Leave a comment