Offbeat tales from a Fenway beat man
Behind the Green Monster
Bill Ballou
Ambassador, 192 pp.
In a press box teeming with memorable characters, Bill Ballou commands a place of his own at Fenway Park.
All but unrivaled as an archivist of Red Sox history, statistics, and assorted oddities, Ballou has established himself as one of the most distinct personalities on the Sox beat. No other writer has informed a Sox manager, for example, that bananas are bound for extinction. Or has held forth in the clubhouse on the merits of rhubarb pie.
Ballou, who begins his 20th year on the Sox beat this season for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, is one of a kind, as is his book, ''Behind the Green Monster," a look back at the franchise through one intriguing reporter's eyes.
Collectors of all things Sox may want this paperback for their libraries, not as a comprehensive history but as a montage of anecdotes and personal reminiscences available nowhere else. (A double disclaimer: I count Ballou among the friends I made during 4 1/2 years on the Sox beat, and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette is owned by the Globe's parent, the
Ballou has little patience for phonies, sycophants, and egomaniacs, which helps explains his reverence for one former manager, Joe Morgan, and disdain for another, Kevin Kennedy. Morgan had ''the homespun sincerity and self-deprecation that the rest of the world imagined was inherent in every native New Englander," Ballou writes, while Kennedy was so self-absorbed that he once ''told a group of rather stunned reporters that he took at least six showers a day [because] clinical studies had proven that people who took a lot of showers were successful."
Ballou skewers former Sox executives such as John Harrington and Dan Duquette -- they ran the franchise as if it were ''the North Korea of baseball," he contends -- and provides insight into the psyches of a number of Sox players. Former slugger Jack Clark's descent into financial turmoil seems perfectly logical after Ballou describes him tipping clubhouse attendants $100 every time they walked 20 yards to fetch him a hot dog.
The author dusts off some of the great quotes of his time, such as former manager John McNamara's malaprop -- ''There have been no ultimations" -- and Jeff Stone's reaction to his game-winning hit late in the 1990 season -- ''I'm on Cloud Ten."
Ballou also sheds light on some of his own quirks. He notes that former catcher Gary Allenson agreed with him that ''It Happens Every Spring" is the best baseball movie ever made. He draws an analogy between the evolution of baseball beat writers and the theory that ''all the pet cats with double claws in North America have ancestors that came over on the Mayflower." And he relates saving roast beef sandwiches from the box lunches reporters received before Game 7 of the American League Championship Series and Game 4 of the World Series in 2004.
Ballou has preserved the sandwiches in the freezer of his Whitinsville home. It remains to be seen whether they outlast the banana species.
