Will Boston Lose Its Baseball History?

The history of baseball in Boston is lousy with triumph and tribulations and soaked in torment, and makes great source material for any number of stories, books, or bar arguments. But what if that history gets tossed to the four winds?

⇥Red Sox history is being sent in exile. The city wants to close the Microtext Department at the BPL which cares for, services and houses newspapers and other collections on microfilm, the department that literally provides access to the history of not only the Red Sox, but the Bruins, the Patriots, the Boston Marathon, the Boston Garden, Fenway Park, the old Boston Arena, the Huntington Avenue Grounds, Harvard Stadium, Boston College, … you get the idea. The city wants to close the department, move some of the film to the hard to reach City of Boston Archive Center in West Roxbury, disperse the rest to other BPL departments, can the staff, squander decades of institutional knowledge, and use the space they recently spent gazillions renovating for the department, for, oh, I don’t know, weddings or cocktail parties. Once they do that the ability to do the kind of research it takes to write a serious book about Red Sox history becomes almost impossible – having the resources you need in one place, at one time, is invaluable and irreplaceable. ⇥⇥⇥I know this not just from my own experience, but because when I was at the BPL I helped local sports writers like Steve Buckley and national guys like Sports Illustrated’s Frank Deford use these resources. I remember one guy in particular I helped – named Halberstam. Won a Pulitzer Prize that helped stop the Vietnam War and wrote a really great book about the Red Sox - Summer of ’49. Ever heard of him? ⇥⇥

It’s Boston writer and longtime editor of the Best American Sports Writing series Glenn Stout who writes these words, and if that isn’t enough to give you a sense of how valuable these archives are, read this paragraph.⇥He could not have written that book without the BPL, and neither could Dan Shaughnessy have written The Curse of the Bambino, Howard Bryant Shut Out, Richard Johnson and I Red Sox Century, Ed Linn Hitter, Leigh Montville The Big Bam or any other author, like Buckley or Bill Nowlin or Bill Reynolds, who have written anything worthwhile about Red Sox history. None of these books – none - could have been done without the newspapers on microfilm at the Boston Public Library. Fenway 1912, which I just finished and comes out next year, would have been impossible.It’s an important historical record -- even if it is just about the vagaries of sport -- and it’s threatened by budget cuts because libraries, in general, are threatened by budget cuts. It’s not easy or cheap to run a library, and hard to see a library’s measurable benefits, and so they’re among the first publicly funded things to go when times are tight. And it would be foolish to assume that the material will be as well-preserved in a handful of smallish suburban libraries as it was in a well-staffed city library: in this case, more hands is better.Stout’s right, though, that the fate facing the history itself isn’t all that ignominious, but the one facing authors is. By introducing what may be wild goose chases just to get to the information needed, on top of the explorations within it, the degree of difficulty for writing complete stories about the Sox goes up. For those of us who enjoy reading the fruits of others’ labor, that’s a downer.

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