Books & Biceps is the only weekly e-mail that’s like if your meathead writer best friend sent you a personal newsletter about cool stuff he’s read and written. Amazing, right?

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Introducing: The NEW BOOKS & BICEPS REFERRAL PROGRAM

I’ve wanted to do this for a long time to reward you guys for sharing B&B and the program is finally in place. The concept is simple: share Books & Biceps with friends who you think would like it and win prizes.

1 Referral = Free e-book of my award-nominated short story on basketball, brotherhood & family: The Night the Driveway Legend was Born

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BOOKS

The Story of the Boston Red Sox edited by Chad Finn

Chad Finn is not only one of my favorite sportswriters for my favorite teams, but over the years he’s been kind enough to be interviewed for a few of my books (1996: A Biography) and we’ve become friends.

His new book chronicles the history of the Boston Red Sox through Boston Globe articles going back over 100 years. If you’re a Red Sox fan or baseball fan, it’s awesome. You get inside info as it was discussed during that era, from Ruth and Lefty Grove to Ted Williams, Yaz, Rice, Oil Can Boyd, Greenwell, Boggs, Mo, Nomar, Pedro, Ortiz and all the rest.

Not only that, you’re reading some of the all-time great sportswriters along the way like Peter Gammons and Bob Ryan and Leigh Montville.

I also realize not all of you are Sox fans, so I asked Chad if he’d be down for a Q&A about the writing process for the book, where the idea came from, how he researches projects and more. He’s a great dude so he agreed.

Please enjoy my interview with Chad:

1) Where did the idea to tell the history of the Red Sox through Globe articles come from? Did you pitch it?

It actually came from the publisher, Black Dog and Leventhal. It had produced a book on The New York Times’ coverage of the Yankees back in 2012, and it did well. Frankly, the Globe was overdue on doing something like this – I mean, it has been around since 1872, which is 29 years before the Red Sox (then the Americans) were even founded. And, as I discovered in putting this together, the paper covered the team thoroughly from the beginning, so any significant story of that era – such as, say, the acquisition of a young pitcher named Babe Ruth – was in our archives. My sports editor, Matt Pepin, asked me to take on the project. As someone who started reading Peter Gammons as an 8-year-old in ’78, it’s a dream come true.

2) How did you go about researching the book? Are there physical archives? By player, era, writer?

So once I got the go-ahead on the project, the first thing I did was dig out a couple of Red Sox history books – “Red Sox Century,’’ an incredibly thorough telling of their history by Glenn Stout and Richard Johnson, was particularly helpful – and begin making a chronological master list of every important story in franchise history. I shouldn’t admit this, but Wikipedia’s season-by-season Red Sox team pages were also helpful, as was baseball-reference, as it always is in such matters. During the process of compiling the list of topics, people, moments, etc., I’d periodically send updates to the list to our incredible Globe researcher, Jerry Manion, who would search through our electronic archives and pull the stories that I needed. The book ended up with 300-plus articles; at the beginning, we had maybe 450, and I narrowed down from there. After about two or three read-throughs of a PDF of the book, I realized I had missed one gotta-have-it story: the trade of minor-leaguer Jeff Bagwell to the Astros for reliever Larry Andersen in 1990. I still don’t know how I overlooked that one, but we managed to slot it in.

3) What was the toughest part about weaving the whole history together from a writer perspective?

As Bob Seger says, “What to leave in, what to leave out.” The book was originally supposed to be around 300 pages. It ended up 432, which means that my terrific editor Zander Kim (a Red Sox fan) must have done a convincing job of getting his bosses to agree to expand the book. But there were still some tough cuts. I really wanted to keep in a Neil Swidey profile of Jerry Remy, but it was 5,000 words (no story in the book exceeds 2,000, as far as I recall), but it was so well-done I couldn’t figure out a way to cut it. Sorting out the chapters was easy – you have the Ted Williams era, the Yaz Impossible Dream era, the change in fortunes in 2004. I made a conscious effort to include all important milestones – awards, Hall of Fame inductions, no-hitters – along with major trades, a signature profile of each important figure, and the most meaningful or memorable games and moments.

4) Is there a player you appreciate more now than when he played and why is it my guy Mo Vaughn?

You know, Mo would be near the top of that list. He was a slugger and perhaps the first Black player to be the voice of the team, but he was also a beloved teammate who cared about the community (we have stories about both of those topics in the book, one written by Bob Ryan). But the players I probably learned more about and came to respect even more were some of Ted Williams’s teammates in the ‘40s and ‘50s – Dom DiMaggio, Vern Stephens, Bobby Doerr, Johnny Pesky. I should probably read “The Teammates,’’ huh? 

5) What was your favorite Sox story that you learned about that you didn’t know before?

I would not call it a favorite, but writer Tim Murnane (the Gammons of his day) had an incredibly detailed story on the suicide of Red Sox manager Chick Stahl in 1907. It’s an extraordinary piece of journalism, especially for its time. My favorite stories in the book are ones that were minor at the time but turned into huge deals, such as the five or six paragraphs we dedicated to the signing of David Ortiz before the 2003 season. That worked out pretty well.

6) After all this research, do you have a new favorite Pedro performance?

It didn’t change my list of favorites, but you know what it did? It made me jealous that I didn’t witness any of them in person – the ’99 All-Star Game, the one-hit, 17-K game at Yankee Stadium, his six no-hit innings of relief with an injured shoulder in the ’99 ALDS against the Indians. Every time I went to Fenway in those days, either Frank Castillo or Tim Wakefield pitched. Every. Single. Time.

7) How much more evidence did you uncover to continue to prove that Nomar was better than Jeter?

Fortunately, no further evidence was required in a case that was rested long ago. Otherwise, the book would have been 4,320 pages rather than 432. (In all seriousness … NOMMMMAAAHHH!”)

BUY THE BOOK HERE

BICEPS

I shared this picture from the Flex Factory on Wednesday and a bunch of people wrote in: “Why do you use chains instead of more plates?”

Here’s the simplest answer without getting bogged down in kinesiology, kinetic chain stuff:

They work by giving you variable resistance along the whole strength curve of a muscle.

This way the weight increases at the top of a lift/curl/whatever (more chain off the ground) and resistance decreases on the negative motion. Got it? Good.

QUICK FLEXES

It’s WrestleMania week and my kids (and me) couldn’t be more pumped. Writing this Macho Man biography has put me smack dab back into my nostalgic 90s and sharing my love for pro wrestling with my son and daughter is awesome.

With than in mind…

I loved this story on Cody Rhodes by David Dennis Jr. for ESPN. Really great piece of writing about Rhodes’ exit and return to WWE heading into this mania. If you haven’t been following, check it out. Very compelling storyline weaving real life with wrestling storylines between him and Roman Reigns.

Also, I’ve come across a TON of awesome ads/photos from past manias writing the Macho book and I shared a thread on them here:

Thanks for reading!

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