Dan's Defender

It Was Never About the Babe received a terrific review this week in the Booklist publication, a periodical published primarily for the tens of thousands of librarians who select which books to purchase for their institutions.

Although the author ultimately termed the book "excellent," he did take umbrage with my exorcising of one Dan Shaughnessy, the abrasive Boston Globe columnist, who's done more than any man alive to perpetuate the mythical "Curse of the Bambino," not to mention the gobs of moolah ol' Danny Boy ran off to the bank with...

That said, here's what reviewer Wes Lukowsky had to say:

"After the Red Sox blew the World Series to the New York Mets in 1986, Boston sportswriter Dan Shaughnessy wrote The Curse of the Bambino (1990), which facetiously laid the Sox woes since 1918 on the sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees.

"There was never a curse, but there was mismanagement, bad luck, and racism. Gutlon, who grew up outside Boston, seems genuinely annoyed at Shaughnessy for perpetuating the myth of Babe's curse on the Sox. His vitriol toward a fellow scribe aside, Gutlon provides a fascinating chronicle of Sox management's endless missteps until the 2004 World Series win. At the heart of Gutlon's critique is the Sox refusal to integrate, long after the rest of baseball. The Sox were the last to add a black player, waiting a decade and a half after Jackie Robinson's debut.

"Other than the Shaughnessy quibble, Gutlon has written an excellent history of a franchise that has transformed itself from being an object of ridicule to a model of sports excellence."

Thanks, Wes!

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