Two lifelong fans relive and savor a deliciously sweet Red Sox triumph

08:37 AM EST on Thursday, March 31, 2005

BY RICK MASSIMO
Journal Arts Writer

On Sunday night, the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees will lead off the major league season and renew one of American sport's oldest and bitterest rivalries.

Newark Star-Ledger

Red Sox pitcher Pedro Martinez, left, throws Yankees bench coach Don Zimmer to the ground in an altercation during Game 3 of the American League Championship Series on Oct. 11, 2003.

Of course, this season starts a new chapter in the long history of the rivalry. Last year the Red Sox overcame a three-games-to-none deficit in the American League Championship Series against the Yankees and advanced to the World Series. It was the first time any team in any sport came back from the brink of a sweep to win a playoff series. From there, they swept the St. Louis Cardinals to win their first world championship in 86 years.

And if you read that last paragraph three or four times, just to savor the delicious triumph all over again, Bill Nowlin and Jim Prime have written the book for you.

In 2003, Nowlin and Prime thought they had a brilliant idea: a book on the rivalry between the Red Sox and the Yankees, argued in point-counter-point fashion. Since 1999, the rivalry had only intensified, since a change in the format of baseball's playoffs allowed the teams to meet in the post-season. And both teams have fans nationwide, even worldwide. And the rivalry hits at what Nowlin sees as an American dichotomy: We love winners, but we also love underdogs. It was a great book idea.

There was only one problem.

"Jim said, 'OK, you take the Yankees' point of view; I'll take the Red Sox' point of view,' " Nowlin says. "I said, 'Jim, why don't you take the Yankees' point of view and I'll take the Red Sox' point of view.' We had a real discussion about that -- it didn't last too long -- and in the end, we just decided to be truer to our colors. Because that's who we are -- lifelong Red Sox fans."

The result is Blood Feud: The Red Sox, the Yankees & the Struggle of Good versus Evil. There have been several books recently on the Sox' championship season as well as on the rivalry with the Yankees, but Blood Feud is a book by, and for, fans -- it combines history with the slow savoring, and reliving, of the Red Sox' ultimate triumph.

The book starts off in darkness -- the first three games of last year's ALCS. Then Nowlin and Prime recap all the classic Red Sox tribulations -- the collapses (against the Yankees) in 1949 and 1978; the World Series losses in 1946, 1975 and 1986 -- but the meat of the book is the battles against the Yankees. All the 2004 meetings are here -- regular-season as well as playoffs -- with particular gleeful emphasis on the Sox' comeback.

"It was the greatest comeback in the history of major league baseball," Nowlin and Prime write. "And, for the Yankees, so accustomed to winning, it was the biggest shock (we'll be gracious for a moment and not say "CHOKE") in franchise history, to lose the way they did and to the team they did."

NOWLIN AND PRIME make their case clear in the foreword: "Boston is akin to Paradise, and New York is so bad it makes Sodom and Gomorrah look about as wicked as Minneapolis-St. Paul. . . . This book is an attempt to teach some moral lessons about Good and Evil, using the Red Sox as a symbol of good and the Yankees as the essence of evil."

Despite all that, in conversation Nowlin's a lot more level-headed. He doesn't hate the Yankees and can't stand the semi-profane chant heard all over New England from April to October, sometimes even longer.

"I used to hate [the Yankees] as a kid; I don't hate them anymore. But, of course, I always want the Red Sox to beat them; a Red Sox-Yankees game is always something special. . . .

"You think about the Yankees coming into Fenway April 11 [for the Sox' home opener], and Red Sox fans standing up and giving them a rousing ovation for their valiant efforts over the years. I don't think that's going to happen, somehow."

For years, Nowlin says, people asked him what winning a World Series would do to the psyche of the Red Sox and their fans. His response was always to say he was ready and willing to find out.

Now that it's happened, he's philosophical. The Sox' title can only change the nature of the rivalry, "but it's hard to know, until we live it out, what it'll be."

Nowlin is vice president of the Society for American Baseball Research, and as a student of the game, he knows that it's futile to make hard-and-fast predictions.

While he's quick to point out, in an interview as well as in the book, that the Red Sox have won more World Series than the Yankees in this century, he's equally quick to point out that "all you have to do is look at the Yankees with 39 pennants and 26 world championships, and there's room for improvement."

BLOOD FEUD INCLUDES a foreword by former Sox pitcher Bill Lee, an afterword by Sox great Johnny Pesky, an analysis of every trade the Red Sox and Yankees have made, going back to 1903, and a table of players who played for both teams. There's a form for Yankee fans to apply to become Sox fans, an analysis of the Curse of the Bambino (hogwash, the authors say) and an attempt to find the Mason-Dixon Line of the rivalry -- the border where Red Sox Nation and Yankee territory meet.

Though it was fun to entertain the notion that there was a bright line, and that it ran through Chippy's Bar, in Bristol, Conn., Nowlin and Prime found that New England is dotted with pockets, sometimes strong ones, of Yankee fandom.

"We tried to find a geographic line, because one of the things that makes this rivalry better than Boston and -- I don't know, Seattle or something -- is that you can drive from one place to the other."

Rhode Island is one of those battleground states, the authors found. One reason is local media: Some newspapers and radio stations in the in-between areas broadcast, and write about, the Red Sox, some the Yankees. There's also the Italian heritage of many of the Yankees' old stars: Joe DiMaggio, Phil Rizzuto, Yogi Berra and more. That's prevalent in Rhode Island, and in Worcester as well, Nowlin says.

That was generations ago, but "you talk to people, and that still pops up sometimes."

NOWLIN IS ONE of the founders of the Cambridge, Mass.-based Rounder Records, but spends more time writing books these days. (Blood Feud is out on the new imprint Rounder Books.) "We've got some great people running Rounder Records, who've kept up with trends in today's business better than I ever could have," Nowlin says.

" . . . I spend almost all my time doing books. I go to a weekly meeting; people still ask me questions about this and that; I still know lots more about our back catalog. People say 'we need some piece of music like this for a film' or something like that, and I can often come up with some ideas. But it's pretty much full time, trying to write; I'm working on several more right now."

This is Nowlin's 10th book on the Red Sox, the fourth in the past year. It seems that interest in the Red Sox is bottomless. "I don't think it's going to go away anytime soon, no matter what they do in the next few years. If they came in last for six years in a row, I don't know what we'd see then, but that's just not going to happen."

Nowlin is quick to make a prediction for the Red Sox' season, but as a baseball scholar he's equally quick to know that no one can say. After all, the Red Sox looked dead in the water last July, not to mention after Game 3 against the Yankees.

"Ninety-five wins. I figured they might not do as well as last year. I think the Yankees have an edge in pitching, and the Red Sox have an edge on offense and team spirit. But you never know what's going to happen because of injuries."

Nowlin went to this year's Red Sox spring training camp for about a week, and saw a pretty tranquil bunch. "There's no Nomar brooding in a corner, there's no Pedro doing whatever he was doing. There are personalities, like Kevin Millar, but they're almost all positive personalities. Which may not be a good thing. No way to know. . . .

"I'm optimistic, but I'm always optimistic at this time of year."