Day 17: 30 baseball books in 30 days of April

OK, so there's far more context to just this game on Oct. 2, 1978 -- 30 years ago this season, after the Red Sox had a 14-game lead in the division over the Yankees early on, wilted as usual and at least got to host the tie-breaker at Fenway -- as if it mattered.
(Think about this: By today's rules, this one-game tiebreaker to decide the AL East probably would have never happened. Both teams, 99-63 when the season ended, would have likely both gone to the playoffs, one as a wild card, along with the West Division winners Kansas City (92-70) and either the Angels (87-75) or Milwaukee Brewers, who were third in the AL East with a 93-69 mark.)
The names involved are historic, when looking back: Reggie Jackson, Thurman Munson, Carl Yastrzemski, Jim Rice, Fred Lynn, Goose Goosage.... Jackson later that month hit his three homers in one game to beat the Dodgers in the World Series. If only ...
Dent's homer wasn't in the ninth inning, for those with short memories. It was in the seventh. Sorry, just stuck on facts here. And there are even more than care to remember.
"I thought I already knwe everything about this game, but Richard Bradley has mined the mountain of Yankee-Red Sox lore and found new gold," writes Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessey, in a short review on the back of the book cover.
Bradley, a former executive editor of George magazine, also did the book, "American Son: A Portrait of John F. Kennedy Jr." and "Harvard Rules: The Struggle for the Soul of the World's Most Powerful University." So you can guess where his allegiance lies.
Although, this is another quip from the publisher's promo:
"Not a book intended to celebrate a triumph or lament a loss, The Greatest Game will be embraced in both Boston and New York, with fans of both teams recalling again the talented young men they once gave their hearts to. And fans everywhere will be reminded how utterly gripping a single baseball game can be and that the rewards of being a fan lie not in victory but in caring beyond reason, even decades after the fact."

How it goes down in the scorebook: A ringing double high off the Green Monster, enough to wake up the echos, Paul Revere style.

UPDATE: The April 21 New York Times piece by Richard Sandomir examines why it seems books these days have to tout something that's "The Greatest" this or that, in order to grab the readers' attention:

There is no prohibition against repeating titles if they meet the marketing mandates of publishers. And there is no central authority to settle, forever, which is empirically the best or greatest game. One game often cited as the greatest — the United States hockey team’s defeat of the Soviets at the 1980 Winter Olympics — was chronicled in 2005 in a book by Wayne Coffey with the superlative-free title “The Boys of Winter.”

Not necessarily to (Adam) Lucas, who disagreed with his book’s title (he wrote “The Best Game Ever,” about North Carolina’s triple-overtime victory against Kansas and Wilt Chamberlain in the 1957 NCAA men’s basketball final). “It wasn’t my choice,” he said. “It wasn’t the best or the greatest game. And the book was about the whole year, not just the title game. I don’t think it helped sales.”