Book Description
When the Boston Red Sox faced the New York Yankees in the historic 2003 American League Championship Series, the meeting seemed to serve as the climax to perhaps the greatest rivalry in professional sports. Yet, following New York�2s comeback victory
in scintillating Game 7, both the Red Sox and Yankees entered the off-season without a world title--and with renewed conviction to finish the job in 2004.

In A Tale of Two Cities, respected baseball writers John Harper (New York Daily News) and Tony Massarotti (Boston Herald) chronicle the Yankees and Red Sox in parallel story lines through the summer of 2004. The authors take you behind the scenes with the teams, cities, and media during one of the most intense baseball seasons in history.


From the Back Cover
As 2003 was just beginning, Red Sox president Larry Lucchino launched an unprecedented era of cutthroat competition between the two franchises when he off-handedly labeled the Yankees the "Evil Empire.'''' The conflict made for fascinating back-room intrigue, above and beyond the thrills the teams produced on the baseball field.
Longtime baseball writers Tony Massarotti and John Harper tell the tale of two cities in the truest spirit of the rivalry - shouting at each other from opposite sides of press box: Massarotti from Boston, Harper from New York. Each has deep baseball roots and viewpoints shaped by a lifetime of living on opposite sides of the endless debates - or raging arguments - between Beantown and Big Apple sports fans.
Beyond the hows and whys of the wins and losses, Massarotti and Harper capture not only the passion the rivalry generates in the two cities, but give readers a look from the inside - what it''s like to cover these teams and deal behind the scenes with a temperamental superstar such as Pedro Martinez or an outrageous owner such as George Steinbrenner. Six straight seasons of the Yankees finishing first, the Red Sox second, in the AL East provided the backdrop for growing hostility.
So, as always, both the Red Sox and Yankees entered the 2003 off-season seeing ghosts. To the Yankees those ghosts took the form of aura and mystique, the friendliest of supernatural forces. To the Sox they took the more full-figured form of (who else?) Babe Ruth and the countless spirits who made up his legacy. Some things, it seemed, never changed.
Yet, the storied rivalry continued to grow by the minute. In New York and Boston, after all, the baseball season never really ends so much as a new one begins.





About the Author
Tony Massarotti, a Boston-area native and a cum laude graduate of Tufts University,
is in his fifteenth year at the Boston Herald. Now in his fifth season as a baseball columnist and his eleventh year covering the Red Sox, Massarotti was voted by his peers as the 2000 Massachusetts Sportswriter of the Year and was again a finalist for the award in 2003. He appears regularly on WEEI-AM (850) sports radio, Sports Final with Bob Lobel on Channel 4 (CBS), and New England Sports Tonight on the FOX Sports Network.


John Harper has been covering baseball in New York as a beat writer or columnist for twenty-one years, the last twelve for the New York Daily News. A former college baseball player at the University of Bridgeport (Connecticut), Harper has authored three books, including an acclaimed account of the Yankees�2 1996 championship season. He lives with his wife and two sons in Whippany, New Jersey.

FROM THE PUBLISHER