Heroes and Fools

"Fenway Park is a religious shrine. People go there to worship." --Bill Lee

AND SO THE real history of the Boston Red Sox opens with a quotation from the great symbolist himself, William Francis Lee III, now the National League's lefty of the year. There is no man who contains, within himself, all of the triumphs, idiosyncrasies, frustrations and foibles, who can show you, in the final column, that the Red Sox have always been a team of heroes and fools.

And Lee was no fool. The management that traded him to Montreal, that benched him during the gasping stretch of the 1978 season in favor of Pawtucket sweetmeat, was. With more than 50 years worth of cameras and newsclips and Causeway St. anecdotes, there's Tris Speaker, Babe Ruth, Sparky Lyle, Ernie Shore, Dutch Leonard, Duffy Lewis, Cecil Cooper, the heroes whose promise was traded for cash or mediocrity. Back, further into the piles of faded photographs and daguerreotypes of old-looking men in baggy, dusty uniforms, there's Lou Boudreau, Luis Aparicio, Orlando Cepeda, Ellston Howard, the heroes that Red Sox management fielded in the waning years of their lives. The Picture History of the Boston Red Sox has all the pictures, and the folksie, barstool chatter extracts the Bostonese from personages like: Buck O'Brien, Smokey Joe Wood, Sad Sam Jones, Jumping Joe Dugan, and Yaz, to name but a few.

BUT ABOVE ALL, this is a book of fans and their ballplayers, not of people; of the men the fans saw, the media noted, the photographers etched. Rarely does this picture history show the picture that was never printed, the quote that wasn't punctuated by "heck" and "gee" and a series of ellipses...and the closer the history gets to 1979, the less incisive the history becomes.

But Picture History succeeds as a telling--and perhaps unwitting--character analogue of Boston and its baseball team, the team that has been blessed with some of the best baseball talent, and cursed with the worst fate. They haven't won a World Series since 1918, and their three years in the Series since then have been epochs of cold destiny and it makes you wonder if the slave ghosts of the Yawkey family's South Carolina plantation aren't visiting some terrible voo-doo on the owner's Boston plantation. And these days, the ghosts couldn't have found a better city.

Tom Yawkey is as central a figure in the history of the Sox as any of the players in the book; he is shown cajoling with Ted Williams, Reggie Smith, and everyone loved him. After he bought the franchise in 1933, Yawkey renovated Fenway Park and became the constant in Red Sox lore, and surrounding him has been heartbreak, hope and craziness, good and bad.

There is the story of one Gene Conley, pitcher for the '62 Sox and forward for the Celtics during the off-season, who left the Red Sox for 68 hours, contemplating the possibility of going "to Bethlehem, Israel," to get "nearer to God." He was drunk and tired, they said. But Conley was sick of his two-sport grind, and he admitted later that "religion saved me. I became a Seventh Day Adventist. I would have been a first-class drunk. I would have blown everything. I was going pretty fast for a lot of years. So I've kind of settled down, thank heaven."

These are the people who leer through the history of the Red Sox. Like Bill Lee lighting a candle and leaving it on Don Zimmer's desk in memory of friend Bernie Carbo, on the day of Carbo's importation to Cleveland. Like Jimmy Piersall walking up to the pitcher's mound one afternoon during batting practice and firing a limp stream of water at homeplate with a squirt gun.

THESE ARE the memories Sullivan recounts, not with the detached hindsight of recent interviews, or with the purpose of a sportswriter trying to find the real reason why the Red Sox blew it this year, but with the eye of the media, and mostly, the eye of those who have followed the Red Sox, and come back for more.

Sullivan--a former sports columnist for the old Boston Herald-Traveler, offers his most insightful writing in an appraisal of Fenway's fans: How do you describe Red Sox fans? Devoted. Patient. Long-suffering. And perhaps a little masochistic, always coming back for more frustration after having their hearts broken. They have even been rooting for the Red Sox at some road games and you wonder which is the visiting team...Fenway's fans--they're a rare species, some of the world's best...and a few of the worst."

Joe DiMaggio remembers these legions lovingly as they gave him one of the most frenzied ovations in all of sports. The last day of the 1948 season. To force a playoff, the Sox had to beat the Yankees, and Detroit had to beat Cleveland. Thirty years before 1978--the same situation, the Sox and the Yankees, with the former hoping to draw even, walking the edge:

(Joe DiMaggio): "I had charley horses in both legs and the one in my right leg hurt like fury...They beat us, 10-5...I turned and started for the dugout. I guess I was limping pretty badly. "I'll never forget that crowd. It was standing and roaring--like one man...There were more than 30,000 people giving an ovation to a guy who tried to beat them.

AND 30 YEARS LATER this memory couldn't have been farther from George Scott's eyes, or closer to Carl Yastrzemski's. Like one man. One frustrated, effaced, proud, loser of a man, whose endless beers never turn to champagne in the Causeway St. bar after the game, after the seasons, ever since 1918. Up on the wall behind the bartender and mountains of bottles are portraits of Tris Speaker, Babe Ruth, Lefty Grove, Ted Williams, Jim Lonborg, Carl Yastrzemski, and John F. Kennedy. They all got away.

"Wasn't Ted Williams the John Wayne of baseball?" the slouching man asks.

"Ahhhhhhhhh, the Duke's dead." Dead indeed. And dead are the old heroes and fools, the pictures and the stories that live on in books like this, like a Bible to the Red Sox and the people who go to worship all summer long.