In which Red Sox owners take their pun-ishment

The Little Red (Sox) Book, A Revisionist Red Sox History, by Bill "Spaceman" Lee, with Jim Prime. Published by Triumph Books, Chicago.  $19.95 in hardback.

Reviewed by Chris Braithwaite

 Since the fall of 1918, summer in New England has been punctuated by the groans of grown men (not to mention women and children) who are fans of the Boston Red Sox, a baseball team.

This summer, however, that sound will be drowned out by the deeper, louder groans that can only be occasioned by a truly bad pun. 

The cause of these latter groans is, unjustly enough, an individual who was responsible for his share of the former.

The puns can be found in The Little Red (Sox) Book by Bill Lee of Craftsbury, formerly a southpaw pitcher for the Red Sox.  To say they are bad puns should not be taken as criticism.  Since the pun is the lowest form of humor, the worse they are the better.

If that's too confusing a concept, the reader had best not dip too deeply into Mr. Lee's new book.  He is almost as deceptive with the pen as he was with the baseball (lacking a fastball, Mr. Lee made do with a bewildering sequence of  junk that led teammate Dennis Eckersley dub him Sherwin Williams, for the way he painted home plate.)

 The book is subtitled "A Revisionist Red Sox History," and it is certainly that. 

Here's the idea:  Red Sox history is full of good stories, not only for baseball fans but for anyone who likes the kind of stories of individual heroism, high suspense, crushing defeat and moral clarity that this odd American game can tell so well.

In the peculiar case of the Red Sox, however, these stories all have unhappy endings.

They have endings so tragic, indeed, that to inflict them on the chronically depressed baseball fans of New England would be to invite mass suicide. 

Bill Lee turns out to be much too nice a guy to do that. 

So he changes the stories just enough to give them happy endings. The result, for the serious Red Sox fan, can only be therapeutic.  Only suspend disbelief for the few hours it takes to absorb Mr. Lee's compact volume, and the depression born of years of disappointment will be, at least momentarily, swept away.

To begin with the big one, suppose Red Sox owner Harry Frazee (may he continue to rot in Hell) didn't sell Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees in 1919.

Actually it's more complicated than that.  Mr. Lee would have us first suppose that Frazee, a theater impresario from New York City, suspiciously enough, had lost his 1916 bid to buy the Red Sox to another bidder, Joe Kennedy.  (That is the Joe Kennedy who sired JFK and who, Mr. Lee tells us, really did try to buy the Red Sox.)

Joe Kennedy would never have sold The Great Bambino to the Yankees, Mr. Lee assures us.  Thus Boston and generations of its long-suffering fans would have been spared the Curse of the Bambino.

Aside from creating a baseball dynasty as formidable as those damn Yankees, only nicer, Mr. Lee suggests, Ruth's presence in Boston would have had a few modest consequences in the world at large.  Avoiding the Cuban missile crisis, for example, not to mention the war in Viet Nam. 

The Little Red (Sox) Book also clears up the mistaken idea that slugger Ted Williams refused to tip his cap to the fans because he didn't care for them.  In Mr. Lee's version of history, Williams was preventing the Second World War.

Bearing the nickname Spaceman as he has for years, Mr. Lee probably doesn't need a reason for his playful approach to reality.  But I want to suggest one anyway.  I think it's because he earned his bread on the pitching mound.

It's a job unique in the world, in that pitchers get to live in a statistical counter-reality of a sort.  The trick lies on that peculiar statistic they are judged by, the ERA  (earned run average).

Here, for the baseball challenged, is an example:

With a 4-0 lead in the bottom of the ninth, the pitcher has two out, but the bases are loaded.  He throws a good pitch that generates a routine grounder to the third baseman, who throws the ball over the first baseman's head.  Error.  One run in, bases still loaded.  The pitcher gives up a home run to the next batter.

In the real world, the game is lost.  But for the pitcher, those runs don't count.  His ERA will show that he did his job, got the third out, and gave up no runs.  We should all have such a statistic.

But it's not just a matter of statistics.  Watching (or more often listening to) games that have gone this way, I wonder how the pitcher copes with an error like that. In the real world, he's still on the mound, the bases are still loaded, and there's a dangerous hitter at the plate.

But part of him must surely dwell in that counter-reality where he deserves to be, tossing his glove into the air, surrounded by happy teammates, accepting their congratulations for his shutout.

It's enough to drive a man crazy, and in Mr. Lee's case, it apparently has.

It is interesting that the personal story Mr. Lee chooses to revise for The Little Red (Sox) Book involves just such a situation.

When it was finally his turn to chat with Mr. Lee at Saturday's book-signing at Stardust Books on Craftsbury Common, Frank Krasofski of Westmore had a very specific question about the book he was about to buy:

Would it explain that slow curve he threw to Cincinnati's Tony Perez in game seven of the 1975 world series?

Mr. Lee was able to report that he not only tells that story, but also gives it a happy ending.

The Red Sox returned to Boston in that series in bad shape, down two games to three.

Very early in the morning of October 22, Carlton Fisk won game six for the Red Sox with a home run in the bottom of the twelfth.

That gave Mr. Lee his chance to end the Curse of the Bambino; to pitch the Red Sox to their first world championship since 1918.  He started game seven, and carried a 3-0 lead into the top of the sixth inning.

Pete Rose, "that annoying automaton," led off with a single.  Joe Morgan flied out.  Johnny Bench hit a double-play grounder to Rick Burleson at short.  Burleson threw to Denny Doyle at second for the force, and Doyle, aiming for Carl Yastrzemski at first, threw the ball into the Boston dugout.

At that, the Spaceman should have been in the dugout, gathering his strength for the seventh.  Instead he was on the mound, facing Perez, "the Big Red RBI machine."

"I had been very effective with Tony," Mr. Lee writes, "throwing him that slow, arching curve ball.  It was a pitch that mimicked the St. Louis arch.  I thought it would be a good idea to throw it to him again.  Unfortunately, Tony and I thought alike, and he proceeded to hit the ball over the left-field screen and several other Boston landmarks.  Our lead was cut to 3-2."

That didn't settle the matter, of course.  The Red Sox are famous for drawing their debacles out into a leisurely sequence of exquisitely painful lost opportunities.  A blister put the Spaceman out of action early in the seventh.  Cincinnati won the game, and the series, in the ninth.

Mr. Lee is not one to blame his teammates for such painful mistakes, but he never hesitates to blame management.

In this case, he writes, the coaches moved Doyle too far off second, into a defensive position.

An aggressive defense would have put Doyle closer to the bag, with enough time to set himself for the relay to first. 

The second mistake, he writes, was the pitching coach's failure to come out and talk to his pitcher, who was visibly upset at the missed double play.

The Spaceman writes something like he pitches (as he still does, in the local senior baseball league).

The pure, often very funny, fantasies early in the book are his curve balls, setting the reader up for a rare fastball that lies at its heart: a chapter entitled "Fenway's Other Wall."

The true story gets off to an ugly start.  In 1945 the Sox gave a special tryout to three African American players.  One of them was a shortstop named Jackie Robinson.

"They were there to show the press that the Red Sox were an open-minded, progressive organization dedicated only to fielding the best team possible," Mr. Lee writes.

"In the midst of their tryout, however, an anonymous cry came from the smattering of team personnel gathered behind the dugout to watch: 'Get that nigger off the field.'"

Instead of being the first team to bring an African American into the major leagues, the Red Sox became the last, maintaining the racial barrier until 1959.

Mr. Lee compares the team's "white wall" to the famous green wall that distinguishes Fenway from all other ballparks:

"It has often been said of the Green Monster that 'it giveth and it taketh away.'  The white wall of Fenway gave us nothing and took away so very much."

He permits himself the satisfaction, of course, of providing the counter-history: a Red Sox team anchored by Robinson and his good friend, Ted Williams; a team that attracted enormous black talent and dominated baseball for yet another glorious decade. 

Ah, well.

As a player, Mr. Lee made his frequent disagreements with baseball owners and management painfully (to the owners) and gloriously (to the fans) obvious.  It was an expensive habit.  Owners sign paychecks, and they stopped signing his well before his career would have come to its natural conclusion.

But if they could stop Mr. Lee from playing, they couldn't stop him from writing.  And, take it from this baseball fan, that is a very good thing.