Before the Boston Red Sox became the 2013 World Champions, there was the season that broke the curse and started it all...Saul Wisnia's Miracle at Fenway tells that story. The players and coaching staff of the 2004 Boston Red Sox are now and forever, legends. After all, it had been eighty-six years since Boston last won a World Series, a fact anybody even remotely associated with the team as a player, executive, or fan was reminded of on a daily basis. For members of the 2004 Red Sox roster, winning that October was one of the greatest experiences in their lives. For fans, the '04 team will always be remembered as the one that finally silenced the "1918" chants. Hundreds of articles and numerous books were written in the immediate aftermath of the thrilling '04 season, but ten years have passed and Miracle at Fenway has a fresh perspective, including the type of analysis and insight that comes with a decade of reflection. As a Red Sox fan since birth, and from having written about and worked alongside the team for his entire professional life, Saul Wisnia has cultivated relationships with people at every level of the Sox organization. From the players to the fans to the upper echelons of team management, he has their accounts of 2004 as they saw it and as they remember it today, now that the memories have had time to take root and blossom. In the winning tradition of baseball oral histories, Wisnia tells the story of 2004 as experienced by the people who lived it, in an engaging style filled with insight and excitement.

"Hundreds of articles and several books were written in the immediate aftermath of the [Boston Red Sox] thrilling '04 season, but 10 years have passed and [this book] has a fresh perspective, including the type of analysis and insight that comes with a decade of reflection ... Saul Wisnia has cultivated relationships with people at every level of the Sox organization. From the players to the fans to the upper echelons of team management, he has their accounts of 2004 as they saw it and as they remember it today, now that the memories have had time to take root and blossom"--

"An autobiography of Joe Castiglione that recounts his years in broadcasting and with the Boston Red Sox"--

Thanks to Kate's mom, a sports reporter, cousins Mike Walsh and Kate Hopkins have tickets to the Red Sox game and All Access passes to Fenway Park. But as they're watching batting practice before the game, the lucky bat of Red Sox star slugger Big D

Over the winter of 1977-78, anyone within shouting distance of a two-mile stretch of Boston's Commonwealth Avenue - from Fenway Park to the trolley curve at Packard's Corner - found themselves pulled into the orbit of college hockey. The hottest ticket in a sports-mad city was Boston University's Terriers, a team so tough it was said they didn't have fans - they took hostages. Eschewing the usual recruiting pools in Canada, Jack Parker and his coaching staff assembled a squad that included three stars from nearby Charlestown, then known as the "armed robbery capital of America." Jack Parker's Wiseguys is the story of a high-flying, headline-dominating, national championship squad led by three future stars of the Miracle on Ice, the medal-round game the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team won against the heavily favored Soviet Union. Now retired, Parker is a thoughtful statesman for the sport, a revered figure who held the longest tenure of any coach in Boston sports history. But during the 1977-78 season, he was just five years into his reign - and only a decade or so older than his players. Fiery, mercurial, as tough as any of his tough guys, Parker and his team were to face the pressure-cooker expectations of four previous also-ran seasons, further heightened by barroom brawls, off-the-ice shenanigans, and the citywide shutdown caused by one of the biggest blizzards to ever hit the Northeast. This season was to be Parker's watershed, a roller-coaster ride of nail-biting victories and unimaginable tragedy, played out in increasingly strident headlines as his team opened the season with an unprecedented twenty-one straight wins. Only the second loss of the year eliminated the Terriers from their league playoffs and possibly from national contention; hours after the game Parker's wife died from cancer. The story of how the team responded - coming back to win the national championship a week after Parker buried his wife - makes a compelling tale for Boston sports fans and everyone else who feels a thrill of pride at America's unlikely win over the Soviet national team - a victory forged on Commonwealth Avenue in that bitter, beautiful winter of '78.

A photo-packed celebration of Boston’s 1967 pennant win. It was a summer that united a city and transformed a franchise. Led by 1967 MVP Carl Yastrzemski and Boston’s first Cy Young Award winner, Jim Lonborg, the youngest Red Sox team since the days of Babe Ruth went from ninth to first place in what remains the closest pennant race in baseball history. Tony Conigliaro, Rico Petrocelli, George Scott, Reggie Smith, Billy Rohr, Jerry Adair, and their teammates became household names to the Fenway Faithful as they carried the Red Sox to their first World Series in twenty-one years under manager Dick Williams—and this book is filled with personal reminiscences and photos of that glorious season.

Loyalty to a great cause raises some of the most profound issues in philosophy, and loyalty to the greatest of all causes, the Boston Red Sox, poses these questions in the sharpest possible way. The Red Sox and Philosophy brings together a team of thirty of America's leading thinkers (twenty-eight of them citizens of Red Sox Nation), to unravel some of the mysteries of the Red Sox. Can we adapt Anselm's proof of the existence of God to prove that the Red Sox are the greatest conceivable sports team? Why are Red Sox fans moral heroes? Can the science of sabermetrics be reconciled with the religion of baseball? Are pink Red Sox hats rationally defensible? These and other challenging problems are solved in The Red Sox and Philosophy. - Publisher.

In modern baseball history, only one team not named the New York Yankees has ever won three consecutive World Series. That team was the Oakland Athletics, who captured major league baseball’s crown each year from 1972 through 1974. Led by such superstars as future Hall of Famers Reggie Jackson, Catfish Hunter and Rollie Fingers, in the final years before free agency and the movement of playersfrom one team to another forever changed the game, the Athletics were a largely homegrown aggregate of players who joined the organization when the team called Kansas City its home, developed as teammates in the minor leagues, and came of age together in Oakland. But it was the way in which they did it that immortalized those teams. For if the story of the Oakland Athletics’ championships is that of one of baseball’s greatest teams, it’s also the story of enigmatic owner Charles O. Finley and how those players succeeded in spite of Finley’s larger-than-life persona and meddlesome ways. Indeed, before the Yankees’ George Steinbrenner, there was Charles Oscar Finley, of the Athletics. Featuring the contributions of 46 members of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), Mustaches and Mayhem: Charlie O’s Three-Time Champions shares the stories of each of the roster players on each of the A’s championship teams, in addition to the managers, coaches, Finley himself, the team’s radio announcer, and even Charlie O, the mule, Finley’s legendary mascot. Summaries of each spring training and World Series, too, will complete the tale of one of baseball’s most colorful and successful teams. Biographies included: Charlie Finley, Charlie O (the Mule), Sal Bando, Vida Blue, Bert Campaneris, Rollie Fingers, Dick Green, Dave Hamilton, Catfish Hunter, Reggie Jackson, Ted Kubiak, Blue Moon Odom, Joe Rudi, Gene Tenace, Jerry Adair (coach), Matty Alou, Brant Alyea, Dwain Anderson, Curt Blefary, Bob Brooks, Larry Brown, Ollie Brown, Orlando Cepeda, Ron Clark, Tim Cullen, Dave Duncan, Mike Epstein, Adrian Garrett, Larry Haney, Mike Hegan, George Hendrick, Ken Holtzman, Joe Horlen, Vern Hoscheit (coach), Mike Kilkenny, Darold Knowles, Allan Lewis, Bob Locker, Angel Mangual, Gonzalo Marques, Marty Martinez, Dal Maxvill, Denny McLain, Bill McNulty, Don Mincher, Irv Noren (coach), Bill Posedel (coach), Jim Roland, Diego Segui, Art Shamsky, Don Shaw, Bill Voss, Gary Waslewski, Dick Williams, Glenn Abbott, Jesus Alou, Mike Andrews, Pat Bourque, Rico Carty, Billy Conigliaro, Vic Davalillo, Chuck Dobson, Ray Fosse, Rob Gardner, Phil Garner, Tim Hosley, Deron Johnson, Jay Johnstone, Paul Lindblad, Rich McKinney, Jose Morales, Bill North, Horacio Pina, Wes Stock (coach), Manny Trillo, Alvin Dark, John Donaldson, Bob Hofman, Jim Holt, Leon Hooten, Bill Parsons, Gaylen Pitts, Champ Summers, Claudell Washington, Herb Washington, Bob Winkles, and Monte Moore (broadcaster).