While Kevin Kaduk tells the story of Rays fans thanking their former OF Carl Crawford for his years of service, the LA Times’ Carolyn Kellogg covers the disappointed reactions around RSN once it was learned Crawford was not, in fact, “a rare book collector and a fan of early American writings, including William Bradford’s ‘Of Plymouth Plantation’ and ‘The Puritan Origins of the American Self.’ Hey, just because Todd Benzinger purchased punk rarities at Newbury Comics, that doesn’t mean anything is possible.
Crawford is very good at baseball — he just signed a $142-million contract — and was also such a good high school football player that he’d been recruited by college programs. But he’s not the type to be seen “wearing a heavy fisherman’s sweater and clutching a newly purchased diary of 1655 Connecticut Governor Thomas Welles,” as blogger Will McDonald wrote on Royals Review, a fan-centric site dedicated to the Kansas City baseball team that is under the AP’s SB Nation umbrella.
McDonald confirmed by e-mail that his post was satire.
That’s not how the Harvard Bookstore saw it. Located in Cambridge, Mass. (though unaffiliated with the university, the bookstore responded to the idea that the Red Sox had just brought on a very literary player. “File this under ‘amazing,’ ” the store tweeted, with a link to McDonald’s story. “Holy cow!” added Massachusetts-based book blogger Megan Sullivan when she retweeted it.
Strangley, at 6 p.m. Tueday, Crawford promised — or joked? — that McDonald’s wish might become a reality. Responding to the flood of positive tweets to the (satiric) antiquarian bookseller announcement, the baseball star tweeted, “Yes for those asking, I am going to open a bookstore” from his verified Twitter account. “Details to come.”