A consumer’s guide to the best and worst of sports media and merchandise. Ground rules: If it can be read, played, heard, observed, worn, viewed, dialed or downloaded, it’s in play here.

What: “Our House: A Tribute to Fenway Park,” by Curt Smith

Publisher: NTC/Contemporary Publishing Group

Price: $30

Boston Red Sox fans usually don’t have much to cheer about, but they do here. This 290-page book is a winner.

It’s about the Red Sox and Fenway Park, the historic Boston ballpark that opened April 20, 1912--the same week Titanic sunk, which may tell us something about the ghosts of Fenway.

The Red Sox, after winning five of the first 15 World Series, have not won one since 1918. Near misses have come in bunches--1946, 1948, 1967, 1975, and, the worst of all, 1986.

The book revisits those bitter memories, but there are also plenty of fond memories about the ballpark that plays host to next month’s All-Star game.

Curt Smith, the author, grew up a Red Sox fan. In the foreword, he writes about attending his first big league game at Fenway on Aug. 30, 1960--Ted Williams’ 42th birthday. Smith went on to become a Smithsonian host, a Saturday Evening Post senior editor, a speech writer for President Bush and one of the nation’s foremost baseball historians. He lives in Rochester, N.Y., where he is a radio commentator and an English lecturer at the University of Rochester.

This is his eighth book, and fifth about baseball. His four previous baseball books were about announcers--”Voices of the Game,” “The Storytellers,” “Of Mikes and Men,” and “America’s Dizzy Dean.”

Williams, naturally, is a big part of this book, beginning with his days at Hoover High in San Diego through his six major league batting titles, including his .406 average in 1941, two triple crowns, 18 All-Star games, .344 lifetime average and 521 home runs.

But there is much more. Besides Smith’s text, there are essays by Bush, Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, novelist John Updike, baseball writer Peter Gammons, former commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti, and others. There are also historic photographs, plus contemporary photos and lithographs.

Of course, it helps if you are a New Englander, but this book can be enjoyed by baseball fans everywhere.

Who can forget Carlton Fisk’s home run against Cincinnati in Game 6 of the 1975 World Series? An NBC camera at Fenway made it memorable because it caught Fisk motioning the ball fair. Had the cameraman not been spooked by a rat right at the moment, he would have followed the ball, as he was supposed to do, and television history would have been altered.

A memory dealt with in-depth in the book that is locked into many Southern Californians’ minds is Game 5 of the 1986 American League playoffs. That was when Dave Henderson’s two-strike, two-out, ninth-inning home run off Donnie Moore capped a four-run rally that led to a World Series appearance for the Red Sox instead of the Angels.

“This is supposed to happen to us, not for us,” Smith quotes a friend as saying.

But in that year’s World Series, Bill Buckner’s muff kept the Red Sox from winning it all again.