Alex Speier. Homegrown. Morrow, 2021.

It was not a hastily assembled championship team but instead one that had been painstakingly and sometimes painfully forged. (333)

Forging is hot and heavy work. So is the long professional baseball season.

Homegrown is subtitled How the Red Sox Built a Champion from the Ground Up. It begins around 2010 and culminates in the 2018 World Series championship. While Red Sox fans would be especially interested in its contents, because it tells much about the front office of the Red Sox during this time, anyone interested in sports management would probably get a few ideas from this book.

While the concept of a homegrown team might be a little outdated in this era of free agency and thirty major league teams, the author makes a case that the core of the 2018 team had been put together for a number of years mostly from young talent first recruited by the Red Sox. It focuses on the career tracks of three young players who became standouts for the team in 2018: Mookie Betts, Jackie Bradley, Jr., and Xander Bogaerts. Others who signed on a year or two later—Rafael Devers, Andrew Benintendi, Matt Barnes, Cristian Vazquez, Travis Shaw—also made an impact.

We learn about the scouts who travel all over North America, including the Caribbean, assessing young talent. We read about the short-season rookie leagues and various A, AA, and AAA teams. We also note the important Baseball Academy run by the Red Sox in the Dominican Republic. The author describes how changes to the draft system and rules for signing young players have changed over the years and may have made a difference. It is possible that under the present system no team could have signed as many future stars as the Red Sox did in 2010 before the rules changed again.

Frankly, Homegrown also tracks the shorter careers of some promising athletes who did not succeed at the major league level as well as some “minor league prospects” who were traded before reaching the majors. A recurring theme is that pitchers are the hardest to predict. For hitting, baserunning, and fielding, unless there is an injury or Steve Blass disease, there is a sense that a certain percentage of top prospects will have major league careers. Pitching is much harder to predict. While it is true that taller pitchers with longer fingers have a physical advantage, there are enough exceptions to make most scouts and general managers realize that signing a young pitcher is risky. Of course, so is not signing one.

Even though Speier’s thesis about scouting and bringing up players through a team’s own farm system works, he also points out numerous exceptions. In 2013 NESN commentator and Hall of Fame pitcher Dennis Eckersley was excited when Boston traded three top prospects and one current player for Cy Young winner Jake Peavy. It worked for the Sox that year as they won the World Series. However, nearly the only traded prospect mentioned in the book who ended up with any significant major league career was Jose Iglesias, who had brief call-ups with Boston in 2011 and 2012 but was still considered a rookie when he was traded.

Some of the biggest exceptions accounted for the Red Sox record-breaking 2018 season (108 regular season wins, 119 in all). They obtained slugger J. D. Martinez and most of their strong pitchers through trades. The player who ended up as the World Series Most Valuable Player, Steve Pearce, came to Boston in a trade in the middle of the season. The young player he was traded for, Santiago Espinal, is now an All-Star with the Blue Jays. Was the trade worth it? The 2018 World Series would not have been the same without him, even though he was nearing the end of his baseball career.

Readers who follow baseball will know at least some of the names of the players, but the book also discusses in detail the people in the Red Sox office along with officers of other teams. It is men like President of Baseball Operation Dave Dombrowski and his predecessor General Manager Ben Cherington who made many of the decisions. There are also the owners like John Henry and Larry Lucchino investing in money and a stable of scouts seeking talent. Sports is entertainment like the movies. We might know the names of the actors and a few directors and producers, but most of the names in the scrolling credits after a film are unfamiliar to the masses. Similarly, Speier reminds us of the important work the non-athletes do on a sports franchise.

The 2021 edition of Homegrown has an interesting afterword. It describes what happened to the Boston team after 2018. Just as after 2013, though perhaps for different reasons, the 2018 team was broken up beginning shortly after the season ended. The problem very simply was that those homegrown players were all coming to the end of their initial contracts, so they were looking for a lot more money. One could argue whether the Red Sox could have kept a few (especially Mookie and Xander) if they had just been willing to either offer more money or a longer contract. When I checked the Red Sox website the other day, I noted only three players who had played for them in 2018 still on the roster. Already the sports pundits are not expecting much from the Red Sox this year, but they said the same thing before the 2013 season, so you never know.

One book that can compare to Homegrown is Moneyball. Now the author of Moneyball was already famous for financial writings such as Liar’s Poker. Moneyball does have more emphasis on the bottom line while Homegrown has more emphasis on the player development and putting rosters together. At times it may seem like rolling the dice, but if the methodical practice of player development and balance between young players and mature-acting veterans works, you can have a champion.

I was curious if the author was related to the major league baseball Speiers: Chris, his son Justin, and his nephew Gabe. Judging from the author’s acknowledgments which include a significant number of relatives, it appears there is no relation.

The cover attracts attention, too. It is one of the iconic photographs of Andrew Benintendi’s ballet style catch in left field during the second game of the 2018 World Series. The scoreboard in the background with the final standings reminds us, too, of the dominant year the Red Sox had.