The 50 Greatest Red Sox Games would be better used as a reference book rather than the sort of book you would read in order – that becomes tedious after a while.
Cutting down over 100 years of games down to 50 memorable ones was, I'm guessing, not an easy task. There is a list of games at the end of the book that didn't make the cut, and any one of them would have fitted right in to the final 50. Not all of the 50 games featured here ended well for the Red Sox, but they were still games that are etched in Sox lore.
One of the chapters I appreciated was the chapter that highlights game six of the 1986 World Series, a game that before 2004 memories led to nothing but anger for Sox fans. What I appreciated was how it talked about how messed up it was that Buckner ended up being the goat for the whole thing, when really he should have never been in the game in the first place. That I knew, what I didn't know, but learned from this book, was that immediately following the loss, Buckner didn't take the blame. Actually, it was years later, after endless re-showing of that ill fated play, and yahoos talking about that stupid 'curse' (which I never believed), that the play became something bigger than the game. Overnight, it seemed, people forgot about all the blunders that led to that play, and the fact that the manager refused to take an injured Buckner out of the game.
I would recommend this to people who are new fans, or just baseball fans in general that don't know much about the history of the Red Sox. It covers from the 1903 Boston Americans (before Fenway even existed) to the 2004 World Series Champs.
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