The Soxaholix

From 2004 to 2013, I wrote a daily comic-blog about the Boston Red Sox under the pseudonym Hart Brachen (say it out loud). The strip followed a group of office coworkers in Boston whose conversations mixed high-brow literary references with low-brow sports takes — think Get Your War On meets Cheers.

The Soxaholix was featured in the Wall Street Journal in October 2005 and mentioned on NPR's All Things Considered in 2007. Deadspin named it the Best Red Sox Blog. It has its ownWikipedia page, which still feels surreal.

The pseudonym existed because I was simultaneously writing another Red Sox blog — Bambino's Curse — under my real name. Running two popular fan blogs at once for the same team, under different names, during a historic championship run, was exactly as unhinged as it sounds.

soxaholix.com →

Bambino's Curse

I wrote the Bambino's Curse blog from 2001 to 2004, and it grew into something I never could have imagined. By the final weeks of October 2004, while the Red Sox made their historic run through the playoffs en route to their first World Series victory since 1918, the site was averaging 300,000 unique visitors a day.

Fox Sports New England picked up the blog for paid syndication — making me one of the first bloggers in the country to get paid for blogging, back when "blogger" still needed air quotes. I also appeared in an HBO documentary about the Red Sox and their fans during that era.

The blog captured a moment. The 86-year drought, the curse, the near-misses, and then finally — impossibly — the win. If you lived it, you know. If you didn't, it's hard to explain how much a baseball team can mean to a city.