Jonathan Yardley

How this came to pass is the subject of Feeding the Monster. Mnookin, previously the author of a book about the various difficulties experienced by the New York Times in the early years of this decade, wrote an article for Vanity Fair about the Red Sox' incredible postseason run to the 2004 World Championship and apparently impressed the powers that be at the team, for they granted him "access to all levels of the organization" during the 2005 season and neither demanded nor received any editorial control over this book. The result is a detailed, knowledgeable account of how a successful sports franchise operates, how it deals with failure and success, how hard it is to turn a profit in a business that seems, at least from the outside, to be swimming in money.

Feeding the Monster is scarcely as surprising or revelatory as its author and publisher believe it to be, and Mnookin's prose infrequently rises above cliché, but no doubt residents of Red Sox Nation will gobble it up, as may others who are interested in the inner workings of professional sports.

Hardly a man or woman is now alive who doesn't know that in October 2004 the Red Sox ended more than eight decades of highly publicized frustration and won their first World Series since 1918. They did so in astonishing fashion, losing the first three games of the American League championship to the New York Yankees, roaring back to win the next four, then polishing off the St. Louis Cardinals -- by most accounts the best team in baseball that year -- in four games that bordered on laughers. It was a triumph that made just about everybody happy, except possibly the Yankees and the Cardinals, and it produced enough feel-good prose to drown the reading public in adjectives.

The season of 2004 was the third in which the team had been owned by a group headed by John Henry, who had made a bundle managing futures funds, Tom Werner, a prominent media and entertainment executive, and Larry Lucchino, a lawyer-turned-sports-executive who had previous success running the Baltimore Orioles (he was a protégé of Edward Bennett Williams, who owned the Orioles from 1980 to 1988) and the San Diego Padres. They took over a team that had been mismanaged for decades -- the long reign of the ostensibly saintly Tom Yawkey was, Mnookin correctly writes, in almost every respect a disaster -- by an "organization that had been infected from top to bottom with . . . paranoia and divisiveness" in the Yawkey years and thereafter. With remarkable alacrity they formed "one of the youngest baseball operations offices in major league history," headed by the 28-year-old general manager, Theo Epstein, and, as the subsequent record makes plain, one of the best.

Thus it is possible to read Feeding the Monster as yet another case study in successful business management, but it really is just one long soap opera. First there is the tale of the sale of the Red Sox to John Henry et al.; Mnookin is satisfied, rumors in Boston to the contrary, that the commissioner of baseball, Bud Selig, did not set up a "bag job" designed to keep the team away from local owners, as "alleged by so many of the city's media provocateurs," though it's hard to imagine that this will interest many except those immediately involved and members of the Boston press. There are the continuing soap operas centered on Manny Ramirez, the gifted hitter and chronic complainer; Curt Schilling, the "big-game pitcher" also known "as a blowhard and an attention hog"; Pedro Martinez, the nonpareil pitcher; and Nomar Garciaparra, the beloved shortstop, both of whom carried hypersensitivity to extremes of excess.

Then there is the "sizable rift" between Larry Lucchino and Theo Epstein. Only in Boston could relations between a baseball team's president and general manager become front-page news day after day, and only in a book about the Red Sox could page after page be devoted to such a stupendously inconsequential matter. That both Lucchino and Epstein are smart and accomplished is a given, but that doesn't make their little sandbox feud anything worth reading about.

Interestingly, the one inside-baseball aspect of Feeding the Monster that really is worth reading is the insidious way that victory can turn into defeat. Bob Kraft, the owner of the Patriots, told John Henry that success -- of which the Patriots have had a lot during the early 2000s -- can turn an organization inside out, creating rivalries and jealousies and bruised feelings. That's just what happened to the Red Sox, in the front offices and on the field. Both Lucchino and Epstein thought the other was trying to take credit while casting blame, and the happy-go-lucky team turned into a bunch of selfish malcontents. "They became the biggest bunch of prima donnas ever assembled," according to a person close to the team. "It's a problem with a veteran team, especially one that's had some success. And winning the World Series makes it worse."

So there are at least two monsters in this story. One is the Green Monster, the left-field wall in Fenway that shapes the course of play as does no feature of any other ballpark in the United States. The other is better known as the Bitch-Goddess, Success. She has been around these parts for a long time, and the Boston Red Sox are scarcely the first to discover the true meaning of her sexy smile.

Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj@washpost.com.