Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Before the Curse | 1997 | Troy Soos | Buy |
Before the Curse by Troy Soos is a non-fiction history of baseball in New England from 1858 to 1918. The title refers to the Curse of the Bambino, the supposed hex placed on the Boston Red Sox after they sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. The book covers the sixty years of baseball that came before that transaction changed the sport’s landscape.
Soos looks at professional and college teams across New England, not just in Boston. Teams from Hartford, Providence, and other cities get their share of attention, giving a regional picture of how baseball developed in the area during its formative decades. The book ends in 1918, the year the Red Sox won their last World Series of the twentieth century.
Soos is better known for his Mickey Rawlings mystery series, which features a fictional baseball player solving crimes during the early twentieth century. Before the Curse shows the same deep knowledge of baseball history that makes those novels convincing, applied here to straight non-fiction. The book was later revised and republished by McFarland.