Baseball is back; Maple Street's Sox Annual rules

The season has started in a strange way, bursting out of the end of March with the Sox' games in Japan. The usual slowly building anticipation, joined by the preseason previews, has run headlong into the beginning of things. Still, it was pretty great to find a few games on ESPN while channel-surfing last night, so here we go, and the Sox resume regular season action tonight in Oakland.

If you want the best Red Sox preview available, run, don't walk, to get a copy of the Maple Street Press Red Sox 2008 Annual, published by a small press on the South Shore of Massachusetts. It's an authoritative work, with a broad scope, and available for the first time this year in local supermarkets. It's a bargain for $12.99 and will well prepare you for the season ahead.

Seth Mnookin's essay about Overfeeding the Monsters has already been mentioned here.

Some of the other highlights include:

-- Chad Finn writing about the 2008 Sox.

-- Gordon Edes on the World Champion 2007 Sox.

-- Pawtucket's own Steve Mastroyin on the Sox' offense.

This kind of stuff, along with a look at Boston's AL competition, might be expected in this kind of publication. The thing that sets the Maple Street Annual apart is an additional series of accessible yet informed and incisive articles on more esoteric subjects:

-- Mark A. Brown offering a historic comparison of the post-season dominance of Josh Beckett.

-- Mark Armour on Anatomy of a Collapse: the 1978 Red Sox Re-Examined.

-- Vince Gennaro on The Economics of Building a Red Sox Dynasty.

Plus, a whole lot more.