Blooks of Baseball - Red Sox

I confess to being mildly interested in White Sox and Cubs games when it looks as though they have a chance at winning ... which isn't often. Guess that's because I am a Chicago Bulls fan. Basketball players MOVE! Baseball players only seem to do so when they've got an itch (most of the time) or need to spit (way too frequently for me), but you can see where I'm going.

I realize that my opinion is my opinion, not necessarily shared by most. Chris Jungheim, one of the fellas I used to work with, tried to explain that baseball was as cerebral as chess. Like I said, your opinion... However, there's a handful of blooks about the great American pastime that I thought we'd take a look at.

The first is Bleeding Red: A Red Sox Fan's Diary of the 2004 Season by Derek Catsam. It was entered into the Lulu Blooker Prize competition with this description:

"On October 27, 2004 the Boston Red Sox won the World Series, capping an improbable postseason run that saw the team exorcise demons and send its fans into paroxysms of joy. Although Bleeding Red chronicles in great depth much of the 2004 season, it is truly a memoir about identity, unrequited love, and almost inexplicable loyalty to a team, to an idea. Even knowing the results, one cannot help but be caught in Catsam's emotions, a blend of humor and passion."

There is little to be found about the blook, just squibs here and there. From lection comes an observation about the author:

"In fact, I became more interested in the personal aspects of the diary, the accounts of a young, single, peripatetic academic life. Bleeding Red truly is a journal, not a crafted exposition, but during the long regular season, Catsam tells the reader a great deal about himself, his family history, and the long night of the Sox fan's soul" (16 march 2006).

I'm glad I found out that he was an academic because when I landed at the History News Network I wasn't sure what was going on. History News Network? Turns out that Prof Catsam posted there:

June 9, 2004
Pedro. Is. God.

"I am currently working on what I am conceiving of as a book on this year's Red Sox team. It carries the working title 'Bleeding Red: A Red Sox Fan's Diary.' We'll see where it goes -- maybe nowhere other than my own shelf, given that if the Sox win it all, there will be a deluge of books by Boston journalists and other writers with more pull and access than I have. And if they lose, the logic of the project somewhat falls apart."

Are YOU blogging with the intention of doing a book? By the way, the post announcing the "possibility of a blook" got 65 comments.

Keep in mind that young professor image because our next stop is the Foreign Policy Association - South Africa. I know. I couldn't believe it either. I'm tracking a guy who wrote a baseball book! Turns out it's an About page:

Derek Catsam is an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin. Derek writes about race and politics in the United States and Africa, sports, and terrorism. He is currently working on books on bus boycotts in the United States and South Africa in the 1940s and 1950s, the Freedom Rides, and South African resistance politics in the 1980s. He has lived, worked, and travelled extensively throughout southern Africa. He is also a lifelong sports fan, with the Boston Red Sox as his first true love. He was one of about three dozen people to write books about the 2004 World Champion Red Sox, and the result is Bleeding Red: A Red Sox Fan’s Diary of the 2004 Season. He writes about politics, sports, travel, pop culture, and just about anything else that comes to mind at his blog, dcat.

[The bold is mine - you'll see why later :-) ]

Back to History News Network for the last scrap I could find:

October 31, 2004

"I wrote a Sox Diary entry for today, but I decided that it is time to let Rebunk return to status quo ante. For those who want to see Sox Diary 10-31-04 click here. I do not know if it will happen or not, but I will let readers know if 'Bleeding Red: A Red Sox Fan's Diary' gets a publisher.

Note that in my wanderings I only saw two references to a blog. The letters "dcat" which presumably stands for Derek Catsam. And Rebunk. This is not the normal situation as the Blooker Blog gives the web reference that the blook is based on. When I followed Derek's it gave me "File Not Found." I figured he had taken it down. Not so. I went back and discovered that there was a typo in the listing. I corrected that and found the blog. Yippee! The correct address is http://www.ephblog.com/ and starts on June 18, 2004.

I found only one item of particular interest to a discussion of blooks:

August 18, 2005

Those of you who followed the Red Sox Diaries either on Ephblog or on Rebunk might be interested in knowing that it looks as if it will see the light of day as a book that should be out by the 2005 playoffs. I will have more details as the publication date comes closer, but it is being published by a subsidiary of a small academic press [Vellum].

I did not give up entirely on this project when it was clear that Stephen King’s and Stewart O’Nan’s seemingly similar book (and several others by folks with names almost as big) had made the market impossibly tight among the major presses. For a while I even had some nibbles, but in the end, the King name and the sheer oncoming glut of quickie Sox books scared off even the most intrepid editors. [Told you we'd get back to the 3 dozen people writing books]

All right. We're at the bottom of the post on our first baseball blook. What do we know/what did we learn?

1. There's no accounting for fan-dom;


2. If you're looking for straight narrative or analysis of the 2004 Red Sox season, this is not the book -- you'll keep getting interuppted by memoir;


3. If you're an academic, don't write a fanatical [see the word fan in there?] sports book;
   

   "There is an irony attendant in all of this of course -- in terms of the historical profession, my Red Sox book does not help and in some circles may actually hurt my marketability" (diary)

4. If you're going to post on something called ephblog, you should tell readers what an Eph is rather than let them keep on thinking that it's a clever way of writing F which stands for ... .

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Blooks of Baseball
Boston Red Sox • St. Louis Cardinals • San Diego Padres

Los Angeles Dodgers • The Hardball Times Baseball Annual