Boston Red Sox

Yes, it's yet another fan-based website for the Boston Red Sox, baseball in general, and the players. However, I'm not going to repeat the same statistics and images that can be gotten on fifty thousand other websites on the same subject - I've got a links page aiming at sites which have that information, and which will expand as I spend many obsessive hours surfing the web for them.

Almost everything that I include on this page will be a personal comment of some sort, an essay or thoughts about baseball, about the Bosox, about the players. I'll include a few things that I can't find anywhere else as I get around to writing them down, for my own amusement, and the odd creative project. I'm willing (if anyone should send me such things) to add well-written essays by other people to this page and give due credit for them, but at least at the moment, everything listed here is my own work.

Over time, I probably will expand and add diversity and images (even some of the same old images we can find everywhere, if I like them well enough), and I certainly expect my links list to eventually spiral completely out of control, because there are a lot of baseball fans out there, and a lot of loyal, devoted Sox fans.

This site is listed on several catalogs and has been submitted to a handful of webrings. Please note that I don't have the webring links and other backlinks on this index page; they're all filed on my Backlinks page. This is for the very simple reason that I don't want my index page to grind to a slow, painful halt loading all those graphics from off-site; I've got a personal grudge against slow-loading index pages.

So, here's what I have up so far:

• Essays:
  "All baseball fans believe in miracles; the question is, how many do you believe in?" - John Updike
  • Baseball and Me: An autobiographical commentary on my growth as a baseball fan and a Bosox fan. I am, incidentally, a third-generation fan of the Boston Red Sox, which frightens me a little in a sense of continuity.
  • Rants: Baseball: An earlier writing about baseball and its beauty, which is recapped slightly in the above essay. Includes a poem.
  • The Curse: And other superstitions. There is something about the Red Sox that attracts them. Superstitions, superstitious people, whatever. Fnord.
  • Beauty: Baseball is a beautiful game to watch. It's epic lyric poetry. I'm a little cracked. Doesn't matter.
  • The Sox vs. the Yankees: Why we need the Yankees and they need us.
  • Remembering Roger: Why I sing with the rest of Fenway's Faithful.
  • On Ballparks: Written 22 November, 1999. I didn't grow up with Fenway... but it's still right.
  • History in Self-Defense: Text of an email from the Bosox mailing list, about why Sox fans know their history, and who my 'favorite' team would have on it.
• Season Commentaries for 2000:
  "People say Boston's a tough place to play, but it's not a tough place to play if you work hard in your craft." - Tommy Harper
  • Oakland at Boston, 15 April, 2000
• Articles for the Sox Fan Magazine:
  "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball." - Jacques Barzun
  • Looking Ahead to the 2000 Season: With hope and prayer.
• Collected Words:
  "This used to be my playground; this used to be my childhood dream." - Madonna, from the closing credits to A League of Their Own
  • How I Played Third: A collection of stories from alt.sports.baseball.bos-redsox.
• Creative Work:
  "Baseball is beautiful... the supreme performing art. It combines in perfect harmony the magnificent features of ballet, drama, art, and ingenuity." - Bowie Kuhn
  • Artwork: The Base Runner: A slightly silly drawing I did. Have a look, and mail me which player it reminds you of and I'll tabulate the results.
  • Artwork: The Fly Ball: Another silly drawing; since I can't draw seriously, I tend to draw humorously.
  • Artwork: Offler, the Crocodile Infielder: Yet Another Silly Drawing. This one I blame on Usenet.
  • Artwork: The Dragon in the Bullpen: Another one of my critter-players; this one mythological.
  • Poetry: The Perfect Game: Spring Training game reminiscence, 14 March 2000.
  • Writing: The Chrysalis: Fiction. This is actually a fragment of a novella I'm working on; it's a fantasy set in a gaming universe (White Wolf's World of Darkness, Changeling: The Dreaming). A young fan's awakening to his magical nature as one of the fae (called a 'Chrysalis') is sparked by a game at Fenway....
• Player-Specific Pages:
  "There ain't much to being a ballplayer - if you're a ballplayer." - Honus Wagner
  • The Revelation: My answer to the Pedro Martinez Bible. Don't bother reading it unless you've had a poke at that site; I'm not sure it's capable of making any sense, but it definitely doesn't make sense without that background.
• Information:
  "In baseball, you don't know nothing." - Yogi Berra
  • Review: The Baseball Tarot: Not really much of a review, but more a commentary; I found it in Borders, bought it on a lark, and have been overall more impressed than I expected to be.
  • Game Scoring: I learned it at my father's knee. Sportscasters use it. But a number of people I know couldn't decipher '6-4-3 DP' if their life depended on it.
  • Physics: Pitching: After spending a vast amount of time being frustrated by sportscasters analyzing pitches without quite giving me enough information to figure out what the differences between the pitches actually are, I now know. And in case anyone else is as frustrated as I was, I summarize.
  • Coventional Wisdom: Batting: Similar to my pitching frustration has been my batting frustration - now that I actually have some logical basis for judging why certain positions are known for certain levels of batting ability, I wrote it down for the similarly irritated.
  • The Designated Hitter: My contribution to the ongoing rabid rules debate on everyone's favorite shouting point.
• Misc.:
  "Don't pray when it rains if you don't pray when the sun shines." - Satchel Paige
  • BaseballBoards.com: Baseball and Sox bulletin boards/discussion forums. This is an affiliate site.
  • Site Store: Includes a link to Pedro's salsa, posters, and magazines.
  • Baseball Quotes: An ongoing and ongrowing list of baseball quotes. It'll update occasionally.
  • Links: Links to other websites. Will update.
• Site stuff:
  "It ain't nothin' 'til I call it." - Bill Klem
  • Site Updates: List of updates and changes to the site as they happen. Will include the minor cosmetic things as I do minor cosmetic things as well as page additions and modifications.
  • Search Engines and Back Links: Search engines, sites, webrings, and other places that link to this site.