Shut Out; A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston

New York: Routledge, 2002. Advanced Uncorrected Proof--pre first printing. Trade paperback. Very good. vii, [1], 248, [4] pages. Footnotes. No Illustrations, Table of Contents, or Index in this Advanced Uncorrected Proof copy. Inscribed by the author on the title page. Inscription reads: To Rick, Thank you for the support! Howard Bryant. Howard Bryant (born November 25, 1968) is an American author, sports journalist, and broadcaster. He writes for ESPN and ESPN The Magazine, ESPN, and appears r on ESPN Radio. He is a panelist on The Sports Reporters and since 2006 a sports correspondent for Weekend Edition on National Public Radio. Bryant began his career in 1991 with the Oakland Tribune covering sports and technology, before moving to the San Jose Mercury News from 1995 to 2001. In San Jose, Bryant covered the telecommunications industry before returning to sports to cover the Oakland Athletics. He then reported for the Bergen Record, covering the New York Yankees, before joining the Boston Herald from 2002 to 2005. Bryant joined the Washington Post, where he covered the Washington Redskins from 2005 to 2007. He joined ESPN in August 2007. In 2002, Bryant published his first book, Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston, which won the CASEY Award for the best baseball book of 2002 and was a finalist for the Society for American Baseball Research's Seymour Medal. In 2005, he published Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power, and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball, which was New York Times Notable Book of 2005. The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron was published in 2010, won the CASEY Award and was a New York Times Notable Book of 2010. Shut Out is the compelling story of Boston's racial divide viewed through the lens of one of the city's greatest institutions - its baseball team, and told from the perspective of Boston native and noted sports writer Howard Bryant. This well written and poignant work contains striking interviews in which blacks who played for the Red Sox speak for the first time about their experiences in Boston, as well as groundbreaking chapter that details Jackie Robinson's ill-fated tryout with the Boston Red Sox and the humiliation that followed. Derived from a Kirkus review: A withering look at the institutionalized racism of the Boston Red Sox, painted against the larger backdrop of citywide racism, from journalist Bryant. Everyone knows that the Bosox traded away Babe Ruth, but less well known is that they passed on the opportunities to snare Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays. In this scorching and well-documented history of the team's racial attitudes, Bryant describes how the bigotry of the Yawkey family, owners of the club, and such important front-office and managerial figures as Eddie Collins, Joe Cronin, and Pinky Higgins resulted in the Red Sox being the last team—this in a city that cast itself as a bastion of tolerance—to cross the color line. But Boston's image of liberalism, as Bryant neatly sketches, was smoke and mirrors, showing its true face in the busing crisis of the 1970s, and, more insidiously, through "its hidden presuppositions of how black people should act, especially around whites." Kicking and screaming, Boston signed its first black player in 1959, but that was not to be the end of it. From 1979 to 1984, the team had only two active black players, and even the team greats—Reggie Smith, Jim Rice, Ellis Burks—never felt at home in racially tense Boston; black players often referred to their stint with the team as a "jail sentence." Even in the '80s, there was a country-club attitude that allowed the racist Elks Club to entertain Bosox players—whites only. Bryant uses a number of lenses to gain a wide perspective on the situation: those of reporters like Dave Egan, Wendell Smith, and Peter Gammons; players from other sports, like Bill Russell of the Celtics; the ebb and flow of Boston politics; and the racial atmosphere that keeps Boston at a simmer, ready to corral the black community, as it did in the Charles Stuart case. A taut story, lucidly told. That the Bosox hadn't won a World Series in umpteen years is embarrassing; the legacy of racism, though, is poisonous.