Homegrown: How the Red Sox Built a Champion from the Ground Up chronicles how the Red Sox assembled a historically talented core of young players and the many years of successes and failures that it took to help those young players to navigate through the minor leagues and then gain their footing in the big leagues before achieving the ultimate form of individual and collective success, a historic 108-win season and World Series title for the 2018 Red Sox. The book explores not just the growth trajectories of individual players such as Mookie Betts and Xander Bogaerts but also the scouting infrastructure that allowed the Red Sox to identify exceptional amateur talents as well as the coaches and team officials who helped them to emerge as stars.
Today, we welcome a guest post from Alex Speier, author of Homegrown. Alex has covered the Red Sox for the Boston Globe since 2015 and, before that, for a variety of media outlets for more than a decade.
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I always felt at home in libraries—hardly a surprise given that my mom spent my entire childhood as a librarian in the D.C. Public Schools. On days when our schedules were misaligned—when her school was open and mine wasn’t, perhaps due to teacher workdays—I loved accompanying her, sitting in a corner, and piling a stack of books to peruse, while also listening as she did her best to enthrall grade school classes while reading to them. Hers was the voice of my original narrator, and some of her students surely felt the same.
Yet her library at Stevens Elementary School wasn’t just a setting for storytelling. On the days we spent together in her “office,” my mom put me to work—trusting me to help her organize the books on her shelves, an awesome responsibility that I treated with appropriate seriousness. The Dewey Decimal Classification system seemed like the invention of the almighty Oz, and I recognized the weight of accurately ordering the books so that they would not be lost to those who sought them—or, for that matter, me, as I pulled books by the handfuls from the 790s (Sports) during my visits.
Evidently, the combination and relationship of imagination, storytelling, and structure made an impression, permeating my understanding of the sport that represented my foremost passion. The skills developed organizing books in a library translated neatly into the way that I catalogued my baseball cards, and then baseball thoughts, and ultimately baseball writing, while the notion of baseball as an undertaking that translated to the written word possessed an obvious resonance for a kid who always understood the limits of his playing abilities.
This summer, when I received my first copies of my first book–Homegrown: How the Red Sox Built a Champion from the Ground Up—one of the most satisfying moments came when I brought copies to gift to our two neighborhood libraries. The fact that my book is now in circulation is both enormously fulfilling and wondrous, and perhaps excuses the fact that my new favorite number is 796.357.
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Wow! Thanks to Alex for such a moving letter to librarians. Homegrown is available now! We are giving away finished copies to the first 10 librarians who email librarylovefest@harpercollins.com.
-Lainey