Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Curse of the Bambino

The Curse of the Bambino was a superstition cited as a reason for the failure of the Boston Red Sox baseball team to win the World Series in the 86-year period. The curse was said to have begun after the Red Sox sold Babe Ruth, sometimes called The Bambino, to the New York Yankees in the off-season of 1919-1920. The Red Sox had been one of the most successful professional baseball franchises, winning the first World Series in 1903 and amassing five World Series titles prior to selling Ruth. After the sale, the once-lackluster Yankees became one of the most successful franchises in North American professional sports. Talk of the curse as an ongoing phenomenon ended in 2004, when the Red Sox came back from a 0-3 best-of-seven deficit to beat the Yankees in the 2004 American League Championship Series and then went on to sweep the St. Louis Cardinals to win the 2004 World Series. The curse had been such a part of Boston culture that when a road sign on the city's much-used Storrow Drive was vandalized from "Reverse Curve" to "Reverse the Curse", officials left it in place until after the Red Sox won the Series in a 4-0 sweep.
Although it had long been noted that the selling of Ruth had been the beginning of a down period in the Red Sox' fortunes, explicit mentions of the curse are rare before the mid-1980s.[citation needed] The curse was publicized by Dan Shaughnessy in his 1990 book, The Curse of the Bambino, and became a key part of the Red Sox lore in the media thereafter. The degree to which ordinary Red Sox fans ever believed in the curse has been questioned, e.g., by Bill Simmons in his 2005 book, Now I Can Die in Peace.
Although the title drought dated back to 1918, the sale of Ruth to the Yankees was completed January 3, 1920. In standard curse lore, Red Sox owner and theatrical producer Harry Frazee used the proceeds from the sale to finance the production of a Broadway musical, usually specified as No, No, Nanette. In fact, Frazee backed many productions before and after Ruth's sale, and No, No, Nanette did not see its first performance until five years after the Ruth sale and two years after Frazee sold the Red Sox. In 1921, Red Sox manager Ed Barrow left to take over as general manager of the Yankees. Other Red Sox players were later sold or traded to the Yankees as well. Neither the lore, nor the debunking of it, entirely tells the story. As Leigh Montville discovered during research for his book, The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth (Random House, 2006, p.161-164), No, No, Nanette had originated as a non-musical stage play called My Lady Friends, which opened on Broadway in December 1919. His research indicated that that play had, indeed, been financed as a direct result of the Ruth deal. Various researchers, including Montville, have rediscovered the fact that Frazee had close ties to the Yankees owners, and that many of the player deals, as well as the mortgage deal for Fenway Park itself, had to do with financing his plays. Prior to Ruth leaving Boston, the Red Sox had won five of the first fifteen World Series, with Ruth pitching for the 1916 and 1918 championship teams (he was with the Sox for the 1915 Series but the manager used him only once, as a pinch-hitter, and he did not pitch). The Yankees had not played in any World Series up to that time. In the 84 years after the sale, the Yankees played in 39th World Series, winning 26 of them, twice as many as any other team in Major League Baseball. Meanwhile, over the same time span, the Red Sox played in only four World Series and lost each in seven games.
In 2004, the Red Sox once again met the Yankees in the American League Championship Series. After losing the first three games, including a 19–8 drubbing at Fenway in Game 3, the Red Sox trailed 4-3 in the bottom of the 9th inning of Game 4. But the team tied the game with a walk by Kevin Millar and a stolen base by pinch-runner Dave Roberts, followed by an RBI single off Yankee closer Mariano Rivera by third baseman Bill Mueller, and won on a 2-run home run in the 12th inning by David Ortiz. The Red Sox would go on to win the next three games to become the first Major League Baseball team to win a seven-game postseason series after being down 3 games to none.
The Red Sox then faced the St. Louis Cardinals, the team to whom they lost the 1946 and 1967 World Series, and won in a four-game sweep. Cardinals shortstop Edgar RenterĂ­a—who wore number 3, Babe Ruth's uniform number with the Yankees—hit into the final out of the game. The final game took place on October 27 during a total lunar eclipse—the only post-season or World Series game to do so. It also took place exactly 18 years to the day the Red Sox last lost a World Series game. Players on the Red Sox said that the team would never ever hear "1918!" at Yankee Stadium again.
Three years later, the Red Sox would sweep the Colorado Rockies to win another World Series. The "curse" was also reversed in the same year that the Yankees formally announced plans to build a new stadium in the Bronx, and to tear down the original "House that Ruth Built."

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