Feeding the Monster: How Money, Smarts, and Nerve Took a Team to the Top (Hardcover)

by Seth Mnookin (Author) "IF IT'S TRUE THAT BASEBALL, along with jazz, is one of the great indigenous American art forms, then certainly the story of baseball in Boston..." (more)
Key Phrases: baseball operations department, trade deadline, club option, Red Sox, New York, World Series (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
The soap opera that is the Boston Red Sox is in full bloom in Mnookin's (Hard Times) tale about how the organization coalesced to finally bring Red Sox Nation its first world championship since 1918. After reviewing the dismal bigoted history of Boston—it was the last team to integrate, in 1959, and somehow managed to snub both Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays—Mnookin, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, explains how the sale of the Sox to a group led by John Henry resulted in changing the direction of the franchise. And like a true soap opera, this one is filled with heroes and villains. There are the ballplayers (Pedro Martinez, Manny Ramirez, David Ortiz and Curt Schilling) and the executives (owner Henry, CEO Larry Lucchino and GM Theo Epstein). There are the intangibles like Fenway Park—to stay or not to stay, that is one of the questions—and the highly opinionated sportswriters of Boston, Peter Gammons, Dan O'Shaughnessy and the late Will McDonough. There is enough inside stuff here to send the average Red Sox fan into baseball ecstasy—and put the rest of the baseball world into a coma. Part Money Ball, part Ball Four and all Red Sox, this title was written for one audience—Red Sox Nation—and they will love it. (July 11)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Not so many years ago Boston was, or liked to think of itself as, the Athens of America. The people it most venerated, or claimed to venerate, were the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Dean Howells and Isabella Stewart Gardner: men and women of cultural distinction and accomplishment. Across the Charles River from the center city stood two of America's greatest universities, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and on Beacon Hill lived the city's great aristocrats, who so loomed above the common folk that an otherwise deservedly unknown poet named John Collins Bossidy was inspired to declaim these immortal lines at a dinner in 1910:

And this is good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod, Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots
And the Cabots talk only to God.

That was then. Now, nearly a century later, Boston is a very different place. Its standing in the galaxy of great American cities, once beyond dispute, has changed dramatically. Not merely is it lost in the shadows of New York, Washington and Los Angeles, as Seth Mnookin points out in Feeding the Monster, but other cities to which it once condescended -- Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Seattle, Miami, Tampa -- now wield far greater economic and political influence. Boston remains, as always, a place of great beauty and charm with which it is very easy to fall in love, but its importance is largely limited to New England.

Except, that is, in the world of sport. However improbable it may be, this comparatively small city, which for much of the year has absolutely appalling weather and which occupies a relatively remote location, is the sports capital of the United States, or so at least it can be argued. No doubt this is appalling to those superannuated Beacon Hill aristos who retreat behind the walls of their clubs so as to look down on the rest of the world, but that world now knows Boston not for the high-powered eggheads of Harvard and MIT but for Tom Brady of the New England Patriots and David Ortiz of the Boston Red Sox. Nowhere in the country -- not even in Texas -- does the passion for spectator sports run so irrationally high as in Boston and its environs. America's Athens is now its Rome, with coliseums to which the multitudes flock.

The most famous of those coliseums is Fenway Park. Four and a half decades ago a young writer named John Updike described it to perfection: "Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a park. Everything is painted green and is in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg." That too was then, and this is now: Fenway Park still retains its lyric essence, but it has become a big, booming business, every single game a sellout, every crowd raucous and explosive and hyperventilated. The tiny crowd that saw Ted Williams play his last game there in 1960 -- the occasion that inspired Updike's great essay "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu" -- and the tiny ones of which I was occasionally a member in the late 1960s, are distant memories now. Fenway Park is hotter than hot, and so too are the Red Sox, known universally in New England simply as "the Sawx."

How this came to pass is the subject of Feeding the Monster. Mnookin, previously the author of a book about the various difficulties experienced by the New York Times in the early years of this decade, wrote an article for Vanity Fair about the Red Sox' incredible postseason run to the 2004 World Championship and apparently impressed the powers that be at the team, for they granted him "access to all levels of the organization" during the 2005 season and neither demanded nor received any editorial control over this book. The result is a detailed, knowledgeable account of how a successful sports franchise operates, how it deals with failure and success, how hard it is to turn a profit in a business that seems, at least from the outside, to be swimming in money.

Feeding the Monster is scarcely as surprising or revelatory as its author and publisher believe it to be, and Mnookin's prose infrequently rises above cliché, but no doubt residents of Red Sox Nation will gobble it up, as may others who are interested in the inner workings of professional sports.

Hardly a man or woman is now alive who doesn't know that in October 2004 the Red Sox ended more than eight decades of highly publicized frustration and won their first World Series since 1918. They did so in astonishing fashion, losing the first three games of the American League championship to the New York Yankees, roaring back to win the next four, then polishing off the St. Louis Cardinals -- by most accounts the best team in baseball that year -- in four games that bordered on laughers. It was a triumph that made just about everybody happy, except possibly the Yankees and the Cardinals, and it produced enough feel-good prose to drown the reading public in adjectives.

The season of 2004 was the third in which the team had been owned by a group headed by John Henry, who had made a bundle managing futures funds, Tom Werner, a prominent media and entertainment executive, and Larry Lucchino, a lawyer-turned-sports-executive who had previous success running the Baltimore Orioles (he was a protégé of Edward Bennett Williams, who owned the Orioles from 1980 to 1988) and the San Diego Padres. They took over a team that had been mismanaged for decades -- the long reign of the ostensibly saintly Tom Yawkey was, Mnookin correctly writes, in almost every respect a disaster -- by an "organization that had been infected from top to bottom with . . . paranoia and divisiveness" in the Yawkey years and thereafter. With remarkable alacrity they formed "one of the youngest baseball operations offices in major league history," headed by the 28-year-old general manager, Theo Epstein, and, as the subsequent record makes plain, one of the best.

Thus it is possible to read Feeding the Monster as yet another case study in successful business management, but it really is just one long soap opera. First there is the tale of the sale of the Red Sox to John Henry et al.; Mnookin is satisfied, rumors in Boston to the contrary, that the commissioner of baseball, Bud Selig, did not set up a "bag job" designed to keep the team away from local owners, as "alleged by so many of the city's media provocateurs," though it's hard to imagine that this will interest many except those immediately involved and members of the Boston press. There are the continuing soap operas centered on Manny Ramirez, the gifted hitter and chronic complainer; Curt Schilling, the "big-game pitcher" also known "as a blowhard and an attention hog"; Pedro Martinez, the nonpareil pitcher; and Nomar Garciaparra, the beloved shortstop, both of whom carried hypersensitivity to extremes of excess.

Then there is the "sizable rift" between Larry Lucchino and Theo Epstein. Only in Boston could relations between a baseball team's president and general manager become front-page news day after day, and only in a book about the Red Sox could page after page be devoted to such a stupendously inconsequential matter. That both Lucchino and Epstein are smart and accomplished is a given, but that doesn't make their little sandbox feud anything worth reading about.

Interestingly, the one inside-baseball aspect of Feeding the Monster that really is worth reading is the insidious way that victory can turn into defeat. Bob Kraft, the owner of the Patriots, told John Henry that success -- of which the Patriots have had a lot during the early 2000s -- can turn an organization inside out, creating rivalries and jealousies and bruised feelings. That's just what happened to the Red Sox, in the front offices and on the field. Both Lucchino and Epstein thought the other was trying to take credit while casting blame, and the happy-go-lucky team turned into a bunch of selfish malcontents. "They became the biggest bunch of prima donnas ever assembled," according to a person close to the team. "It's a problem with a veteran team, especially one that's had some success. And winning the World Series makes it worse."

So there are at least two monsters in this story. One is the Green Monster, the left-field wall in Fenway that shapes the course of play as does no feature of any other ballpark in the United States. The other is better known as the Bitch-Goddess, Success. She has been around these parts for a long time, and the Boston Red Sox are scarcely the first to discover the true meaning of her sexy smile.

Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 504 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (July 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743286812
• ISBN-13: 978-0743286817
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #392,708 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but ultimately disappointing, July 28, 2006

By	soxfan87 - See all my reviews

In general, I enjoyed this book; Seth Mnookin is a good writer, if a little bland, and the book flowed nicely. But it had plenty of problems. Let's make a list:

The Good

1)It's easy to understand, even if you don't know too much about baseball. I consider myself an avid Red Sox fan and a baseball connoisseur, so explanations of ERA and batting average bored me, but it does make the book more inclusive to a wider audience. It also includes a brief history of the team for those that are less familiar with it.

2)There are plenty of entertaining anecdotes and side stories in here. The sections on Nomar are particularly well-done. I now have more background information on the Red Sox ownership troika than I would have ever thought possible. What an interesting group of people.

3)The section on the sale of the team would make a new book in and of itself, and is very well-done and interesting, providing you have a rudimentary understanding of economics and finance. If you don't, or hate numbers, prepare to be bored silly and skip about 75 pages.

4)There is a lot of new information on the process that brought about the Schilling trade. I found the tale of Jed Hoyer's ugly Thanksgiving stomach virus to be two of the funniest paragraphs in the whole book, though I'm sure Jed would disagree.

5)And, of course, the famous Epstein/Lucchino rift is very well-documented and traced, to the point that I found myself getting frustrated with the characters for not noticing that Theo was acting increasingly bizarre and doing something about it months earlier. If Mnookin noticed, somebody else should have. A very nice job leading into the final explosion.

The bad:

1)I said there is a lot of background information that makes it more inclusive for casual fans. This is true, but the corollary is that if you are a true Red Sox fan, many parts of this book will drive you batty. The entire history of the team section at the beginning is largely irrelevant to the rest of the book, and Mnookin spends way too much time rehashing information that most respectable Sox fans already know, like descriptions of games and whatnot. It really slogs at times.

2)For a guy who spent all this time with the Red Sox front office, he sure didn't include as much revelatory material as I thought he would. It was a disappointment. Casual fans may be impressed, but hard-core Red Sox fans will recognize many of his insights as already being common knowledge from Boston Globe or even AP stories.

3)The style is easy to follow but also fairly pedantic and dry.

4)Mnookin does a good job with the Epstein/Lucchino fiasco right up until Theo quits, and then after that his analysis is severely lacking. I realize that he was not with the team much after this point, but given that this was one of the most momentous things to occur in the history of the ownership group, which was exactly what he was writing about, you'd think he might put things off a little bit to try to gain more insight into what was going on.

5)The book gives a very sympathetic portrayal of pretty much every character except Dan Shaughnessy. Not that there is a problem with portraying Shaughnessy as a jerk, because he is. But John Henry is not a saint. Tom Werner is not a saint. Larry Lucchino sure isn't a saint (to be fair, his portrayal was more negative). And I got the distinct impression that Mnookin didn't have nearly as much insight into Epstein as he did into the ownership troika. That's not to say there wasn't any, because there was, and I understand that Epstein is not, by nature, eager to open up to someone like Mnookin, but it was noticeable.

5)The pictures. Funny thing to get upset about, I know. But he spent a year there. Did he bring a camera? There isn't one single picture of the Fenway offices or any of the characters at work or with Mnookin or any such thing. No pictures of Joe O'Donnell or any lesser characters. I recognized every single photo from the Globe or AP except the one of Theo against some graffiti-covered wall. Visuals would be nice, thanks.

I'd recommend the book, but be prepared for it not to be quite what you thought it was going to be.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing read, August 7, 2006

By	Alex (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews

I love this book. I was 10 in 1967 when I first joined "The Nation," and your summaries of games of the past is spot on, including things I remember and things I had completely forgotten about. Reading Feeding the Monster was like reading about your immediate family, with parts you want to relive and parts that are painful to think about. I read it through so quickly because I couldn't wait to find out what happened in every chapter, even though I obviously already knew the final results. Then I went back and read it more slowly and savored every page. I'm glad the book sets the record straight for a lot of us about what happened with the team historically, the sale of the team to John Henry, and what goes on now behind closed doors most of us could have never hoped to open. I've never read anything that had such amazing details about a team's makeup, about player negotiations, and about the pressures of playing (and working) in sports (or in Boston). I've also never read such poetic descriptions (and intimate details) about what goes on on the field and how the players do what they do. The chapters on David Ortiz are worth it in and of themselves. I'd recommend it not just to Red Sox fans but to baseball fans, people who want to learn about American business, and people interested in social history. Even Yankees fans will enjoy it.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One I'll Remember , July 16, 2006

By	Pete Higgins (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews

I've followed the Red Sox and loved baseball for more than 30 years. I'm the reason publishers see fit to put out so many baseball books because I'll buy them all. I probably read 20 books after 2004, the Johnny Damon book, the Stephen King book, and a lot written by sportswriters. I also read the Herald and the Globe and their coverage of the Red Sox every morning online. I bought this almost feeling obligated but also thinking it would just be one more book I'd end up having read. Boy, was I wrong. I had no idea John Henry was the type of person he is, and I'll never get the picture of him with shaved eyebrows in a rock band out of my head. Even after probably spending a month of my life following what happened with "Theo and the Trio" last fall, I had no idea about what really happened until I read this. Same goes for "Manny being Manny" and what that really means, and the real deal with Pedro going to the Mets or "Idiot" Damon going to the Yankees. I loved "Moneyball" but I feel like this is more of a real story about a whole organization and about what it's like to run and play for and work for a baseball team in America. This is a book I will probably read again and will give to people so they can understand what is so fascinating about the game I've spent so much of my life watching and following!