Thank you McFarland for providing this book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.

Mr. Book just finished They Wore Red Socks and Pinstripes: Players Who Went to the Enemy, by Todd Stanley.

There are a lot of errors in the book. For example, the book says Neal Ball holds two Yankees records, both of them bad. The author is correct that he had a team record 81 errors in 1908, but just leading the league in strikeouts in one season is not a record. The book claims that Wally Schang was the only player to win the World Series with three teams. He would be—but only if we expunge the other 15 who did it. He’s not even the only player to win the World Series with the exact combination of Athletics, Red Sox and Yankees (Joe Bush and Herb Pennock also did that). There were 18 other Babes who played in the majors, other than Ruth, not the 23 that the author claims is the total.

By the time that I got to the entry on Joe Harris, I was starting to lose my patience with the book’s errors. According to the book, “He became the first player ever to win a home run in his first appearance in a World Series game.” No, he didn’t. He was the fourth player to homer in his first World Series game, which is what “first appearance” means. He was, however, the first player to homer in his first World Series plate appearance—but words matter and that wasn’t what the book said.  Then, I saw that at the time of Waite Hoyt’s retirement, he was the winningest pitcher in World Series history, with 6. It should have said he was tied with Chief Bender and Lefty Gomez. On the one hand, we do credit players as league leaders even if there is a tie, but when it comes to records, it’s always acknowledged when a player is tied.

Shortly afterwards, when I got to Roy Johnson, I knew it was time to pull the plug. The book alleges that “He set rookie records for most runs (128) and most doubles (45), that still stand today.” The only problem with that is there are seven rookies with more doubles than him in a season (along with two that he is tied with), while his 128 runs don’t even make it into the top 10!

With the exception of the random fact check on how many other Babes there were in the majors, I was only fact checking things that looked wrong or were questionable. Every single time, the fact check showed the book was wrong. I don’t even know how many other errors I would have found if I did a random note fact check. And, I just barely got a third of the way through the book before the amount of errors made me give up on it.

I was really looking forward to reading this one. I have been a life-long die-hard Yankees fan who of course has strong feelings on the Red Sox as well. A book on all of the players who played for each team could easily have been either an A or A+ in the hands of the right author. But, in the hands of this one, I unfortunately have no choice but to give it an F.

All of the errors were the reason this book a failing grade, but even without them, there was another glaring flaw. The book contained a biography of every player who ever played for both the Yankees and Red Sox, with the following template: One paragraph about the player, his year-by-year Yankees stats, year-by-year Red Sox stats (with the order of the teams determined by which team he played for first) and then a paragraph about which team was he better with. No matter how meaningless a player was, he got the same treatment as everyone else. The notable players got slightly longer paragraphs, but nothing more than that. It quickly became tiresome seeing players who meant nothing to either the Yankees or Red Sox get the same treatment as key players did. There needed to be more paragraphs devoted to the players who mattered.

Goodreads require grades on a 1-5 star system. In my personal conversion system, an F equates to 1 star. (A or A+: 5 stars, B+: 4 stars, B: 3 stars, C: 2 stars, D or F: 1 star).

This review has been posted at Goodreads and my blog, Mr. Book’s Book Reviews

Mr. Book originally finished reading this on July 2, 2024..