By Madison Butkus
Hometown Weekly Reporter
Sponsored by the Ashland Public Library, the Needham Free Public Library shared an online event, ‘Red Sox Nation with Boston Globe Sports Writer Chad Finn.’ This event took place both in person and virtually on Wednesday, June 28th.
Chad Finn is the online sports and sports media columnist at The Boston Globe. He grew up in Maine where he and his dad were avid Boston sports fans.
For this event, Finn chatted about his most recent book, “The Boston Globe Story of the Red Sox: More Than a Century of Championships, Challenges, and Characters.” Released in March of this year, Wednesday’s event was the last time that Finn will be promoting this particular book.
When putting together the 300+ stories that are found within this book, Finn explained that he pulled from The Boston Globe archives which ultimately took him nine months to do. Overall, the book is 432 pages long and includes stories from an array of Red Sox eras.
Finn also went into great detail about how he felt like the ideal person to write this book, stating, “As someone who has cared about the Globe and the Red Sox since I was eight years old in 1978, I almost feel like I was sorta the ideal person to do that, to put this book together. I think that a lot of people at the Globe probably feel the same way. There’s a lot of sorta common background with the passion for sports and the addiction to journalism. I feel like putting this book together and being the person to pull all of these stories from the Globe archives was sorta something I was predestined to do in a weird sorta way.”
Once Finn discussed the book a bit, he moved on to taking questions from the audience. Many attendees seemed to ask similar questions about this year's team and the disappointment felt by fans in part to losing such good players recently.
In response to this, Finn mentioned, “I think ownership understands [just how sad fans are to see these players go]. If they sense that people like you don’t care about the team as much as they did before, he [owner of the Red Sox, John Henry] won’t make a change. But we have no sense as to how long that road is. … It’s going to be a turn off to fans and that’s when you start seeing ticket sales go down and the ratings on NESN go down. The way to bring them up is to win ball games and have players the fans like and right now their players the fans like but they aren’t winning enough ball games.”
No matter how fans may feel about this season’s Red Sox team, Finn exclaimed, “This generation has been really lucky to have four teams that have won the World Series. And there is still a lot of hope ahead even though this season might be mediocre at best right now.”
Even though this was Finn’s last promotion of this book, he is currently working on a new book that will be coming out in 2024 and is centered around the Boston Celtics.
