Dynasty: The Inside Story of How the Red Sox Became a Baseball Powerhouse

So I guess every member of the Boston media is going to write a book on the current local professional sports scene. Can we expect all the Bruins writers to pen something for next season if the team wins a Stanley Cup? How many more Red Sox books are out there? Having said that, I did enjoy this one, and breezed through it in two afternoons. Though offering no major insights or material that has not been presented elsewhere, I enjoyed Mazz's coverage of the offseasons especially. It is in the period following the World Series and prior to spring training that so many championships are won or lost. These discussions are the strength of the book and well worth reading. So "Dynasty" is heartily recommended for Sox fans.

I have had the chance to read this book as well as Michael Holley's love note to Terry Francona and John Henry. This is by far the better of the two. For one thing Tony Massor does a much better job at proving that the red sox success didn't just begin when John Henry and company took over. He rightly gives proper credit to Dan Duqette who got the Sox players like Tek, Pedro and Youk who are all key players in the Sox success. Massoratti also makes his disdain for Theo Epstein quite obvious. This is nothing new but you can see he is clearly a backer of Sox senior management and has always been that way. The writing could be better, this seems a bit formulaic and dull. What is really needed is for someone to update all those great Red Sox history books written over the years.

Dynasty chronicles the Red Sox from the beginning of Dan Duquette's reign in 1994 through the 2007 World Series. The state and evolution of the Red Sox is examined over this decade, and the result is a good synopsis of how the team got to where it is now and how much things have changed in such a short period of time. Tony Massarotti does a very nice job of evaluating the controversial figure of Dan Duquette, and "inside story," contrary to some other poorly written Red Sox books, does mean exactly that, as this book is full of new and interesting tidbits. The rehashing of some things will be tedious for hard core fans, but leaving them out would be to the detriment of the wider audience, so I will forgive him the pages I skipped. The theme of the Red Sox waffling in and out of dysfunction before finally beginning to settle in recently as a model organization is very well developed, and overall, I enjoyed this book. Massarotti is a Boston Herald reporter, though, and his status as a member of the very media corps he's often writing about makes things awkward at times and prevents him from engaging in fair evaluation. He is unabashedly biased against those players who are less adept at relating to the media, and he appears to have never recovered his sense of objectivity in the wake of the mess of the 2005 offseason. It was bleedingly obvious from his Herald columns then that he hated Larry Lucchino and loved Theo Epstein, and that has carried right over into this book. Lucchino is constantly pigeon-holed and Epstein is either fawned over or irksomely patronized like a precocious toddler. This line in particular bugged me: "Shaughnessy's column came a few days after a Herald columnist had similarly skewered Lucchino, who was similarly engaged by the criticism." That Herald columnist was YOU, Tony, on October 27, 2005! I remember this slam job quite clearly. This is done over and over again, with his own columns attributed to nebulous third persons and no mention made anywhere of who wrote them, as there is no bibliography or index. This strikes me as somewhat disingenuous and tainted the last half of the book in particular. Not enough, however, to prevent me from recommending this book for all Red Sox fans.