Is there any team in any sport that has engendered more books by winning fewer championships than the Boston Red Sox? Next time you’re at a book store, try checking out the amount of space devoted to books on the Red Sox; I’ll bet you won’t find half as many books on the last several World Series winners – the Yankees included.

What accounts for this? Surely not any mythical great “rivalry” between the Yankees and the Red Sox.

A great rivalry is exactly what the Yankees and the Red Sox have not been. The Celtics and Lakers are rivals; Alabama and Tennessee are rivals; the Red Sox are merely the Yankees’ opponents. Red Sox fans hate the Yankees; Yankees fans are merely contemptuous of the Red Sox.

Red Sox fans regard their own fate with a combination of paranoia and self-pity. The paranoia is obvious: Curse? Please. From 1918 to 1967, the Red Sox won one pennant, in 1946. They lost one, in 1948, in a close race to the Indians, and another in 1949 to the Yankees. The closest they finished the rest of the time was four games out, but usually they were 10 or 20 behind the league leader (usually the Yankees). For much of the century, the Red Sox simply weren’t competitive.

The self-pity is evidenced by all those books. Does anyone who didn’t grow up in New England really care about all the ways in which the Red Sox have found to blow big game after big game over the last century? Does anyone outside of the Boston area and the many Boston expatriates who infest the New York press corps really care about rehashing all these dreary theories as to why the Red Sox keep finding ways to lose it all year after year? Having recently subjected myself to several new tomes, I will suggest the answer is no.

For instance, in Harvey Frommer and Frederic Frommer’s handsome “Red Sox vs. Yankees: The Great Rivalry” (Sports Publishing Inc., 256 pages, $24.95) there is, from a Red Sox fan’s perspective, too much mention of the Yankees. The absence of a genuine rivalry doesn’t detract from the enjoyment of reading the volume, which celebrates the players, the ballparks, and the great moments in the series. It also has many coffee table-worthy photographs, some of them taken by the authors. But whose coffee table would you put this book on? Surely not a Red Sox fan’s, unless he simply enjoys flip-page references to Tommy Henrich, Bucky Dent, and Aaron Boone.

A companion volume to the Frommers’ work is “The Rivals: The New York Yankees vs. The Boston Red Sox – An Inside History” (St. Martin’s Press, 208 pages, $29.95), though the subtitle is somewhat misleading. The book is a collection of essays on the Yankees and Red Sox over the decades from Boston Globe writers (Bob Ryan, Dan Shaughnessy, Gordon Edes, and others) and New York Times writers (including Dave Anderson, Tyler Kepner, and George Vecsey).They are always intelligent and often fun, but they are seldom “inside.”

Perhaps this is because most of the Red Sox stuff is written by pessimistic home boys, while Yankees writers – especially those at the Times – often feel they have to go out of their way to be “objective” and “fair.” The result is that they often end up repeating not merely the same stories, but voicing similar sentiments – the accounts of Bucky Dent’s home run in the 1978 playoff game make the event sound like some kind of human tragedy. No matter: From a Yankees fan’s perspective, the stories always have a happy ending.

“Few and Chosen: Defining Red Sox Greatness Across The Era” (Triumph Books, 208 pages, $27.95), by Johnny Pesky with Phil Pepe, is the ultimate exercise in Red Sox navel-gazing: describing the all-time Red Sox All-Star team selected by Red Sox fans and former players. Joe Cronin or Nomar Garciaparra at shortstop? Carl Yastrzemski, Manny Ramirez, or Jim Rice as the second-team leftfielder? Cecil Cooper or Walt Dropo as the fourth-best Red Sox first baseman? (What, no Bill Buckner on this list? Like Satchel Paige said, you pays your money and takes your choice.)

I think a much more entertaining book would be “Few and Pissed Off,” about the all-time All-Star team that could be put together from Red Sox players who were traded, run out of town, or who, growing tired of the franchise and its fans, skipped Boston for greener pastures. You could build a heck of a team around Babe Ruth, Roger Clemens, Carlton Fisk, Wade Boggs, Mo Vaughn, and now, Nomar.

One reason the Red Sox may not have won a World Series since Babe Ruth may have been the character of their greatest player, Ted Williams – a fact suggested but never spelled out in Leigh Montville’s disappointing recent biography of the great left fielder (“Ted Williams, Biography of An American Hero,” Doubleday, 528 pages, $26.95). The Red Sox failure to win a championship during Williams’s long career can’t be laid primarily at his Hall of Fame plaque, but it’s fair to ask whether Williams cared all that much about winning: Did he ever do anything to improve his game in any area besides hitting?

I’m afraid to say that, for if you’re looking for good new books about the Red Sox, you’ve got to keep well clear of the fateful period after 1918. Try Bob Ryan’s narrative of the first World Series, “When Boston Won The World Series: A Chronicle of Boston’s Remarkable Victory in the First Modern World Series of 1903,” recently issued in paperback (Running Press Book Publishers, 192 pages, $12.95).

Mr. Ryan’s book manages the near miraculous feat of being a book about Red Sox history – though Boston’s American League team actually wasn’t named the Red Sox till 1907 – that won’t anger Sox fans or bore readers who aren’t. His shrewd, “then vs. now” structure illuminates the game’s past with comparisons to players, managers, and even sportswriters of today. For a moment, it makes Boston’s baseball history seem like something interesting to people who aren’t whining, mean-spirited masochists.

Another compelling recent account of an earlier, forgotten age of Boston baseball, is the story of Mike “King” Kelly, the “$10,000 beauty” (as he was dubbed by Boston papers) in Howard W. Rosenberg’s “Cap Anson 2” (Tile Books, 436 pages, $29).This book is the follow-up to Mr. Rosenberg’s 2003 biography, “Cap Anson 1,” about one of the most celebrated players of the deadball era. I wish Rosenberg had titled his second book “Cap Anson and King Kelly,” since it’s really a dual biography of two of the late-19th century’s most colorful athletes.

Anson and Kelly played ball, hunted, and caroused together from the mid-1880s to the early 1890s,cutting a swath through the Boston demimonde that left legends that have endured to this day. Mr. Rosenberg’s evocation of the Boston nightlife of the period is splendid. (Kelly maintained a duel career as a ballplayer and actor; except for the acting part, he’d be a perfect subject for a Ben Affleck vehicle.) Quirky and immensely readable, Mr. Rosenberg’s book is a refreshing alternative to most that deal with Red Sox history and players. For one thing, there’s not a single mention of the Yankees.

Mr. Barra last wrote for these pages on the Irish.