Martin Gitlin

The Ultimate Boston Red Sox Time Machine Book by Martin Gitlin is a fun read that works well read cover to cover as I did or spread over a longer time with each chapter read as if an essay or short story.

The reason it would work well for those who love baseball but really just want something to read for a short time before bed is because this is not so much a single comprehensive history as it is a bunch of episodes from Boston Red Sox history. As the title implies, this is like a time machine trip, you go back in each chapter to a time, perhaps an important season or an important player. You get a little on either side of this specific time, but each chapter can easily be read as a short essay about that trip in time. Reading it straight through (as I did) it is still episodic but because it is both chronological and covers most of the history of the team it still works well as a cohesive work.

If anyone tries to tell you that none of the championships after 2004 get anything more than a sentence, just ignore them. They didn't actually read the book. The following championships didn't get the same amount of space, but the one that broke the "curse of the Bambino" deserved more space because it is far more important to the history of the Red Sox than the subsequent ones. But they are covered and even some games and winning pitchers and praise from teammates heaped on that pitcher. And trust me, that took well over one sentence. But someone skimming chapter titles to then comment on the book might not be able to recognize those other championships, though one of those titles is "Chicken and Championships" so even someone with mediocre reading comprehension skills should have been able to guess those other championships were mentioned in at least some detail. Sorry for the rant but irresponsible comments from the reading challenged really irritate me.

While Boston fans can either be reminded of or recall the history from this book, I think it works even better for those of us who are baseball fans first and fans of our teams second. I am not nor have I ever been a Red Sox fan and this was a great trip through the history I was somewhat familiar with and the more recent periods I remember very well, pretty much from Yaz until now. Frankly, I would love to find similar books about all of the teams with even 75 or 80 years worth of history. I'd probably enjoy books on newer teams than that but they would need to be much shorter books in order to avoid getting into the types of stories only diehard team fans would care about.

I recommend this to any baseball fan, not just Boston fans.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (més)