SoSH - History
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History
Back in 1998 a small group of diehard Boston fans with a bent on noise-free intelligent baseball conversation assembled at dickiethon.com's Red Sox message board. It was a haven for those who were tired of sifting through the garbage that pollutes most of the larger sports message boards on the 'net. Spirited debate and deep analysis were the daily fare until those forums eventually crashed in February 2000. In an effort to maintain the terrific core group that had formed I set up a temporary message board on the free ezboard.com network. It was crude and I hadn't the first clue about web design, but it worked… and it also needed a name. Simply put, "Sons of Sam Horn" was the first thing that came to mind.
By the middle of our first year we were able to contact and bring aboard most of the original members from the dickiethon.com forum. Much to our pleasure, SoSH stayed far below the radar and the discussion remained fairly private, with the occasional new member coming aboard on a recommendation from one of the old guard. At some point during our second year that all changed, as Digital City's Boston Sports Guy (aka Bill Simmons) submitted the SoSH message board in his daily links section. SoSH was then met with its first real flood of new members: roughly 500 of them, which practically tripled our previous total. Help was needed to maintain the original ideals of the site so I enlisted the aid of six of the original members, affectionately calling this new moderation team the "dopes who run the site."
Despite the unexpected issues that actual traffic caused during these early days, it was then that SoSH truly began to be a community. For the most part, the bulk of the new members we gained during this period respected what it was that made the place tick and worked hard to enhance SoSH's growing reputation as the web's best Red Sox forum. SoSH soon branched out its areas of discussion to include a current affairs and general sports forum. Incidentally, the current affairs forum (Views & News) was only one day old on 9/11/01. Those interested in seeing how 9/11 unfolded at SoSH can find that thread in the Boneyard forum.
In 2001 we also began the popular Game Thread forums, where members can call games as they see them. The game threads themselves are not for the faint of heart; they're SoSH's way of providing an emotional outlet for the more "enthusiastic" posters, myself included.
SoSH has steadily grown ever since. In 2002 we made the tough decision to close membership, requiring prospective new members to submit an application. This was done not to close the community, but to ensure that the quality of the discussions wouldn't suffer due to swift growth. This certainly wasn't the most popular decision we've ever made at SoSH, but it flat-out worked. Over the next two years we saw traffic increase exponentially - mainly due to non-members ("lurkers") stopping in just to read the threads. There are at least a dozen other Red Sox forums out there with anywhere from 3 to 10 times the members that SoSH has but SoSH still gets 5 to 10 times the daily traffic. If the SoSH members are the straws that stir the drink then these lurkers are the drink.
In 2003 SoSH began having more regular brushes with the local media and celebrity. Chats with Gordon Edes, Jerry Remy, Jim Callis, and Bob Lobel were arranged. Steve Silva of Boston Dirt Dogs helped bring new Sox GM Theo Epstein aboard for a chat which produced some fascinating responses. Late in 2003 was -- without a doubt - surreal: Curt Schilling popped into the SoSH chat room the day before Thanksgiving and allowed some of SoSH's finest to help persuade him to choose Boston over New York. For many months thereafter he was a daily fixture at SoSH, making himself available to the fans so long as the media didn't intervene. Gehrig38 still posts on occasion and stops into the chat room from time to time. Red Sox principal owner John Henry has also made better than two dozen posts over the past couple of years.
Early in 2004 I got the chance to meet with Sam Horn himself. Sam had known about SoSH for some time and was pleased that a site bearing his name had garnered such a strong reputation. On May 8th, Sam joined a group of 200 SoSH'ers at Copperfield's for pre and post game festivities. Since that time Sam and I have become partners, so look for a lot more SoSH events and improvements during the coming months.
In the end SoSH is all about the quality of its content. Quality is paramount and it's the adherence to that simple principle that has kept SoSH at the top of the heap.
Those interested in submitting an application for membership should do so to soshapp@gmail.com.
Enjoy the forums!
Eric Christensen Founder, Sons of Sam Horn
Media Coverage
Books and Published Articles
Win it For
Win it for... is a tribute to a most underrated virtue – loyalty. It is a sonnet to a team, the Boston Red Sox, that has been a defining obsession for an entire region of people for more than five generations. The book features a collection of searing and heartfelt postings from hundreds of fans who wanted to dedicate a Red Sox victory in the 2004 American League playoffs and World Series to some unforgettable people in their lives. On the morning of the seventh game of the epic Red Sox-Yankees American League Championship Series, Shaun Kelly, who wrote the book’s preface and is a member of the internet message board called "The Sons of Sam Horn," began pounding away on his computer keyboard crafting his own particular "mojo" that he hoped would ultimately defeat the despised Yankees. He urged other members of the message board, some 1,900 strong, to do the same –urging the Red Sox to win it for the special people in their lives who had loved the team through thick and thin.
From the grateful man who lost his brother in Okinawa 60 years ago to the sibling who dedicated a Sox victory to her brother who perished on September 11, 2001, there were scores of tributes from the populace of Red Sox Nation, young and old. Each of the more than 1,000 postings added something unique to what became a compelling Red Sox mosaic, the best of which are collected in Win it for... In the end, the individual contributors revealed something extraordinary about themselves. The postings would end up being featured in newspapers from Boston to Los Angeles, from Miami to Chicago. Peter Jennings would include it in his nightly news report on ABC, while the gang on ESPN’s "Baseball Tonight" would mention it during a discourse on Red Sox Nation. Featuring a foreword by Red Sox pitching hero Curt Schilling, nearly all of the proceeds from the emotional Win it for... will be split between the Jimmy Fund (the Dana Farber Cancer Institute) and Curt’s Pitch for ALS (Schilling’s charity to help Lou Gehrig Disease research). The reader is invited to settle down into a favorite chair, sit back, and have a box of tissues close by for when the tears start flowing.
For more information, please see the Win It For... Wiki page
2006 Red Sox Annual
Some of our top posters contributed this book. Need to write more on this later.
