Carl Crawford and Cotton Mather

Has a city ever wooed an athlete before with the opportunity to open an antiquarian Puritan bookstore? This had to be a consideration when Carl Crawford chose the Red Sox (after the $142 million, of course). RoyalsReview has the scoop:

Crawford's passion for New England history began at Jefferson Davis High School in Houston when he read William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation in the 9th grade. "At Jeff Davis at that time, it was very much the old Bercovitch reading of history that dominated. To prepare, I'd read The Puritan Origins of the American Self in eighth grade. Eventually however, I wanted to return to the primary materials."

"It's not only that most of the old archives, private libraries, research collections, and book dealers in seventeenth century books are on the East Coast... there's also the spirit in the air. Sure, you can run a great bookstore in Tampa. Yea, there's a strip mall out on the highway to Orlando that's perfect," Crawford said, laughing.

Do we give this guy an honorary doctorate instead of an MVP if he has a great year? And has the athletes-supporting-education movement ever had a more convincing black representative? Will he turn out to be a poor fit for the Red Sox because he's always missing practice squirreled away in the Special Collection at Harvard's Houghton Library?

Crawford intends to live in Salem, Massachusetts. Of course.

Hat tip to Soxaholix. A somewhat more truthful story (probably) is here.