King’s Sox journals to hit shelves Novelist team up to anthologize letters as season retrospective

It wasn’t enough for Aaron Boone – a Yankee, no less – to hit the home run that squelched the Red Sox hopes last year.

He doesn’t even wear pinstripes anymore, but that didn’t stop Boone from picking on the boys from Boston last Wednesday, before the deciding game between the Sox and the Yankees for this year’s American League Championship title.

“It’s a Stephen King novel every night, and it just so happens Stephen King is a Red Sox fan,” Boone told ESPN radio host Dan Patrick. “So if you believe in the curse and the ghost, it’s a perfect script right now when the Yankees win tonight.”

As it turns out, the truth was scarier than fiction – for Yankees fans, anyway. But Boone did have one thing right: It was a Stephen King novel every night.

King, 57, and Stewart O’Nan, 43, both die-hard Sox fans, have teamed up for a book that chronicles the 2004 season through diary entries and e-mails to each other. It’s called “Faithful.” And everyone in Red Sox Nation hopes it has a happy ending.

The authors had high hopes for this season long before it began – not just the blind faith that Sox fans are known for.

“We came so close last year, and then we added Schilling and Foulke in the off-season, so we knew we’d have a contender,” O’Nan, author of “A Prayer for the Dying” and “Wish You Were Here,” said in a recent e-mail. “We had no idea we’d make it to the Series, given that the Yankees outspent us by $60 million, but we had hope. This is back in February. I think a lot of Sox fans felt that way, too. And it’s happened.”

O’Nan, who lives outside Hartford, Conn., and King, who calls Bangor home, have been going to the games together for several years. Last year, when the season started heating up for the Sox, they started e-mailing each other about the games, “going back and forth, discussing the players and the plays, the managing – the usual bones Sox fans gnaw on,” O’Nan said. King was unavailable for comment.

Editors at Scribner thought those bones looked pretty tasty, so they signed on O’Nan and King to pen “a fan’s notes for the ages.”

Sometimes they went to games together. Other times, O’Nan would sit wherever he could find a ticket, which was tough because all 81 home games were sold out. King has season tickets on the first-base line, but O’Nan said, “I’m lucky sometimes to be 30 rows back in the bleachers.” For the games they couldn’t attend, they either listened to them on the radio or watched them on TV.

But nothing beats the loud, raucous atmosphere at Fenway, even in the bleachers. The “What Would Johnny Do?” posters. The chants of “Who’s your Papi?” to hordes of frustrated Yanks fans.

“I’m always up for the steam rising out of the hot dog vendor’s steamers, and the yeasty smell of two beers, and peanut shells all around my feet,” O’Nan said. “‘Sweet Caroline’ in the eighth, and the old Hartford Whalers theme song, “Brass Bonanza,” when the Sox rally, and of course, the dulcet strains of the Standells’ ‘Dirty Water’ when we win. ‘Aw, Boston you’re my home.'”

O’Nan didn’t start rooting for the Sox until he went to Boston University. Until that point, he rooted for the Pittsburgh Pirates, which have “now suffered through 13 straight losing seasons.” Even if they break his heart, he figures the Sox have a chance, at least.

“They’re winners,” he said. “Every year they’ve got a shot at it. … The Sox are consistently entertaining. Even in our lean years we have a few players worth watching. And lately we’ve been an exciting team with bona fide stars – Mo Vaughn, Nomar, Pedro, Manny, Papi, Johnny, not to mention last year’s batting champ Billy Mueller – and tons of personality.”

The characters that make up the Sox roster are like something out of fiction. Pitcher Pedro Martinez brought the world’s third-smallest man into the locker room as a good-luck charm and later called the Yanks his daddy. Lead-off hitter Johnny Damon, with his flowing hair and scruffy beard, earned the nickname “Johnny Jesus” in some circles. Curt Schilling talked trash, suffered an embarrassing loss, and finally shut up Yankee Stadium with a stunning, bloody-ankled pitching performance.

“Like I said, this team has tons of personality, dozens of separate and intertwined story lines, and it’s all happening in a very special year,” O’Nan said. “As writers, we just lucked into a great situation.”

As for favorite players, O’Nan loves Johnny Damon, “not just for his play but because he’s a genuinely nice guy, always polite and kind to the fans, whether they’re kids or adults.” King’s partial to Kevin Youkilis, who filled in for Bill Mueller earlier in the season.

The 2004 Sox are an author’s dream team, and King and O’Nan couldn’t have asked for a better plot. The season has all the elements of great fiction – colorful characters who overcome adversity to triumph over evil forces (or, in this case, the evil empire). But this is a work of nonfiction, and they’re not sure how the story will end.

Regardless, they’ll remain faithful. That’s what being a Sox fan is all about.

“The best part is going to the games with Steve and following the team so closely day by day,” O’Nan said last Friday. “The worst thing is that in 10 days or so the season’s going to be over. I don’t want it to end.”