THE WRITE STUFF: Rounder Records co-owner Bill Nowlin has penned 15 books about the Red Sox, and has three more on the way.

October 1, 1967. Bill Nowlin, a 22-year-old college student who’d spent the summer bumming around Europe on $2 a day, is at Fenway Park, crouched behind the low wall separating the players from the fans. Two outs, top of the ninth. The Red Sox are about to clinch a tie for first place by defeating the Twins. They’re on the verge of what will be known as “The Impossible Dream,” beating 100-1 odds to win the American League pennant. Jim Lonborg throws; Rich Rollins hits a pop-up to shortstop. Rico Petrocelli backpedals, squeezes the ball, and within moments radio announcer Ned Martin is exclaiming, “There’s pandemonium on the field!”

Nowlin was one of the first people to vault over the wall and rush the mound. “My seats were in the grandstands, way high up,” Nowlin says. “I moved around so I was between the screen and the third-base dugout. They weren’t thinking this mob would go out on the field. When I got out to the mound, I clapped Lonborg on the back and said something inane like ‘good job.’ ”

I was there, too, in the right-field grandstands. I was 11, and before I hit the field with another wave of fans, I checked with my parents. They gave their assent — this was a joyous celebration, no riot — and off I went. It was the happiest moment of my young life. (Keep in mind: the Red Sox, nicknamed “The Cardiac Kids,” hadn’t won the pennant just yet — the Angels needed to beat the Tigers in the second game of their double-header — but it felt like it. The Angels won 8-5.)

Birth of a (Red Sox) Nation
When Nowlin and I meet up nearly 40 years later, at a pizzeria near Fenway, we swap stories. We’d both gathered bits of turf and sand from the field for souvenirs. We’d both lost them over time.

But Nowlin has spent a lot of time going back over 1967. He is a co-editor of, and contributing writer to, The 1967 Impossible Dream Red Sox: Pandemonium on the Field. (Re-edited parts will run throughout the season in Red Sox programs.) Lonborg penned one of the book’s forewords. Of the celebration, he wrote it was “really a special thing and, yes, it got a little scary, but some of Boston’s finest came and helped me. What happened after that came could never happen again.” (See “Cast of Characters.”)

Nowlin’s exhaustive Impossible Dream is published by the book arm of the Burlington-based company he co-owns, Rounder Records. That’s how most Bostonians — at least music fans — know him: as one of the three co-founding Rounders, the folks who championed folk and blues artists back in 1970 and went on to build New England’s largest independent label.

Over the past decade, however, Nowlin’s alter ego has been “Red Sox writer.” He’s written or edited 15 books about the Sox or its players. He has three more in the works. Only one, he says, has sold more than 10,000 copies. And although he expects the 1967 book to be his best seller, Nowlin doesn’t write for the money. Nor does he write for the casual fan. He writes for the kind of fan Bill Nowlin is: someone who salivates over the stories and stats of Red Sox past and present. If a player is traded from Boston or leaves due to free agency, Nowlin loses interest. “Nomar was a real favorite,” he says, “the new Ted Williams, the smiling guy from California, crushed by the Boston media and the attention. He’s a nice guy and I wish him well, but I don’t follow him anymore.” He knows that, in sportswriter Leigh Montville’s phrase, being a fan means you’re “rooting for laundry,” the players that happen to wear the uniform.

Nowlin grew up in Lexington and, as a kid, would spend less than $1 taking mass transit into the city to see the Sox from the bleachers. He saw his hero Ted Williams during his final years. He was there for the doldrums of the early-mid ’60s. What made ’67 so sweet for all of us — the fans who grew up with a lousy team — was the remarkable surge and the turnaround in attitude, in both town and team. It was a year when one player, Carl Yastrzemski, had a near-perfect season, winning the Triple Crown. Bit players chipped in. Regular role players rose above expectations. A perfect baseball storm. It changed the game forever in Boston. It was the beginning of Red Sox Nation. Peter Gammons articulates these thoughts expertly in a 1992 essay republished in Nowlin’s book.

Nowlin secured box-seat season tickets in 1989. At 62, he admits his marriage broke up a few years ago in part because, he says, the priorities he and his wife had weren’t in sync. For him, Rounder and the Red Sox were battling for first place. His wife and his love of mystery novels rounded out the top four. He has one son, nearly 16, uninterested in baseball.