Encyclopedia
The
Curse of the Bambino was an urban myth or
scapegoat cited as a reason for the failure of the
Boston Red Sox baseball team to win the
World Series for 86 years after they sold
Babe Ruth, sometimes called
The Bambino, to the
New York Yankees. The flip side of the curse was New York's success—after the sale, the once-lackluster Yankees became one of the most successful franchises in
North American professional sports. While some fans took the
superstition of the Curse seriously, many others used the expression in a tongue-in-cheek manner.
Talk about the curse effectively ended in 2004, when the Red Sox came back from an 0-3 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.
History of the phrase
The phrase first gained wide currency in 1990, when
Boston Globe is the most widely circulated daily newspaper [i] in Boston, Massachusetts [i] and ...
writer Dan Shaughnessy used it as the title of his team history . This book brought it to national attention and triggered widespread usage by the national media. The phrase was also used as the title of a
musical play in 2001, directed by Spiro Veloudos.
Prior to 1986, a few passing references to a Red Sox or Fenway-related curse had been floated around by sportswriters, but they tended to be vague and did not feature Babe Ruth prominently. After the Red Sox collapsed against the
New York Mets in Game 6 of the
1986 World Series,
New York Times sportswriter George Vecsey wrote an article connecting the errors that cost the Sox the game, the team's past history of disappointments, and the sale of Babe Ruth. After the Sox also lost Game 7, and thus the series, Vecsey wrote another article expanding on the theme, headlined "Babe Ruth's Curse Strikes Again". These articles were the first explicit mentions in print of a Babe Ruth curse.
Vecsey might have picked up the idea of the curse from other columns that had appeared in the leadup to the Series. Before that year's AL playoffs, an article by
UPI sports writer Frederick Waterman said in its lead that when the Sox traded Babe Ruth to the Yankees "he carried away with him the good luck and winning touch of the Red Sox." The rumor that Frazee had sold Ruth to finance a Broadway musical was also being discussed at the time, including in an article by Times writer Fox Butterfield a week before the Red Sox collapse.
After 1986, as the title drought stretched on, national sports media often made reference to the curse when the Red Sox were doing notably well—or notably poorly. Many serious fans grew annoyed by the constant refrain of the curse and deplored it as media-created fluff, good only for book sales, television networks, and T-shirt slogans.
The lore
Although the title drought dates 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 addition, Ruth was not the only loss to the Yankees at that time. In 1921, Red Sox manager
Ed Barrow left to take over as GM of the Yankees. Other players were sold or traded as well.
Prior to Ruth leaving
Boston, the Red Sox had won five of the first fifteen
World Series, with Ruth as pitcher in the 1915,
1916, and 1918 teams, while the Yankees had never gone. After the sale, the Yankees came to win 26 World Series by the start of the 2004 season, while the Red Sox had been to the Series only four times - and lost each time in seven games.
The Yankees' success rate since the sale of Ruth is stunning: They have won 17 more World Series than the second-most-successful teams, the
Oakland Athletics and
St. Louis Cardinals, who have each won 9 championships. Ruth, by then more known for his batting than for his pitching, was a high-profile part of the 1923, 1927, 1928 and 1932 titles. Even when not winning World Series championships, the Yankees have been a model of consistency, finishing in the first division for a record 39 consecutive years—from 1926 through 1964, all inclusive—and suffering only two last-place finishes since the sale .
Ruth finished his career in Boston as a member of the Boston Braves, and while retired lived in the Boston area for a number of years.
Family members of Babe Ruth claim that he had great fondness for the city of Boston and would not have wanted to be part of any curse.
“You Can’t Blame Harry Frazee!”
In 2005,
ESPN Classic aired an episode in called
The Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame... series in which it examined the sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees and gave reasons why the sale was reasonable:
- 5. World War I. With rosters depleted because of the war, Ruth saw action as both a pitcher and outfielder; the latter made him the home run hitter he would become. After the players returned, Ruth became bigger than the team because he no longer wanted to pitch and his home runs were the talk of baseball.
- 4. Ban Johnson. The president of the American League since its debut in 1901 effectively limited Frazee to the Yankees and White Sox as the only teams with whom Frazee could make a deal by pressuring the other five teams not to make any trades with Frazee.
- 3. Babe Ruth's antics. He often spent evenings out in bars, often drunk only hours before games. He also jumped the team several times, the final straw being in the final game of the 1919 season.
- 2. Ed Barrow. Frazee's right-hand man, Barrow served as general manager and field manager and knew how much of a troublemaker Ruth was. When Frazee wanted to send Ruth to the Yankees, Barrow, for reasons unknown, said the Yankees didn't have any players he wanted. In a bizarre twist of fate, a month after the Ruth sale, Barrow re-emerged as the general manager of the Yankees and built the team to World Champions by 1923 by acquiring as many as seven players from the Red Sox .
- 1. Babe Ruth's holdout. Ruth forced Frazee's hand by holding out after the 1919 season, demanding $20,000 per year—twice as much as he had been making during the season. During the holdout, he planned other ventures, such as becoming a boxer and going into acting. Frazee was upset over the holdout because he had given Ruth bonuses after both the 1918 and 1919 seasons. With Ruth's demands so high and after several occasions in which Ruth had already jumped the team, Frazee felt he had no choice but to ship Ruth out.
Cursed results
In 1946, the Red Sox appeared in their first World Series since the sale of Babe Ruth. They were favored to beat the St. Louis Cardinals. The series went to a seventh game at Sportsman Park in St. Louis. In the bottom of the eighth inning, with the score tied at 3-3, the Cardinals had Enos Slaughter on first base and Harry Walker at the plate. On a hit and run, Walker hit a double to very short left center. Slaughter ran through the third base coach's stop sign and beat Boston shortstop Johnny Pesky's relay throw to home plate. In the top of the ninth, the Red Sox put the tying run on third and the go-ahead on first with one out, but Harry Breechen shut down the next two hitters to preserve the victory.
In 1949, the Red Sox needed to win just one of the last two games of the season to win the pennant, but lost both games to the Yankees. The Red Sox were managed by Joe McCarthy, who had previously steered the Yankees to 7 World Series titles.
In 1978, the Red Sox had a 14-game lead over the Yankees on July 18, but by season's end, the teams were tied. A one-game playoff took place at
Fenway Park on October 2. In the 7th inning, Boston led 2-0, but
Bucky Dent, a .240 hitter with only 4
home runs all season, hit a pop-fly home run over the
Green Monster with two runners on base to secure the Yankee win.
The most dramatic defeat for the Red Sox came in Game 6 of the
1986, when Boston was, literally, one strike from winning the Series. The
New York Mets tied the game, then won it in the 10th on a fielding error by
Bill Buckner. The Red Sox lost the 7th game, again blowing a 3-run lead. The collapses in the last two games prompted Vecsey's articles.
In 2003, the Red Sox were tied with the Yankees at three games apiece in the American League Championship Series, Boston had a 5-2 lead going into the 8th inning. Then-manager
Grady Little opted to stay with a tiring Pedro Martinez rather than call to the bullpen. Two Yankee doubles and a single later, the game was tied. The series was decided in the 11th by a first-pitch, lead-off home run by light-hitting Aaron Boone. Little was out of a job less than two weeks later, though in 2006 he returned to the major-league managerial ranks as the skipper of the
Los Angeles Dodgers.
Attempts to break the curse
Red Sox fans have attempted various methods over the years to exorcise their famous curse. These have included placing a Boston cap atop
Mt. Everest and burning a Yankees cap at base camp, hiring professional exorcists to "purify" Fenway Park, spraypainting a street sign on a Storrow Drive offramp that said "Reverse Curve" and editing it to say "Reverse the Curse" , and finding a piano owned by Ruth that he had supposedly pushed into a pond near his
Sudbury, Massachusetts farm. Some declared the curse broken when, on August 31, 2004 a foul ball hit by
Manny Ramirez flew into Section 9, Box 95, Row AA and struck a boy's face, knocking two of his teeth out. The boy lives in the Sudbury farm owned by Ruth. That same day, the Yankees suffered their worst loss in team history, a 22-0 clobbering at home against the
Cleveland Indians. Some fans also cite a comedy curse-breaking ceremony performed by country musician
Jimmy Buffett and his warm-up team at a Fenway concert in September 2004. Another ceremony also occurred at the Zeitgeist Gallery, then located in Inman Square,
Cambridge, Massachusetts. However, most agree that the curse was only truly broken by the team themselves in the 2004 postseason victory.
The curse reversed?
In 2004, the Red Sox 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, three outs from being swept. But the team tied the game with a walk 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 Sox won the next three games, becoming 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 the series in a four-game sweep. The final game took place on October 27 during a total
lunar eclipse—the only post-season or World Series game to do so. During the eclipse, the Earth's shadow gave the moon a red color, serving for many Boston fans and curse believers as a visible sign of the curse's downfall and of the team's postseason destiny.
The final out of the game was made on Cardinals shortstop
Edgar Rentería—who wore Babe Ruth's old uniform number, 3 . After the final out was made, center fielder
Johnny Damon and right fielder
Gabe Kapler hugged. Viewed from behind, they made the number 1918.
Coincidentally, the last two times that the Red Sox won the
World Series, the following
Stanley Cup finals were cancelled. The 1918-19 Stanley Cup playoffs were cancelled because the
Spanish flu pandemic raging at the time had incapacitated members of both teams in the finals, and the 2004-05 Stanley Cup playoffs were cancelled with the entire 2004-05 season, resulting from a labor dispute between the
NHL owners and the
NHLPA.
Popular culture
After New York's defeat, the Curse was poked fun at during the "
Weekend Update" segment of
Saturday Night Live is a weekly late night 90-minute American [i] comedy [i]-variety show [i] ...
. In the sketch, the ghost of Babe Ruth appears and explains to
Tina Fey and
Amy Poehler that he left during Game Four with the ghosts of
Mickey Mantle and
Rodney Dangerfield to go drinking. Babe says that he drank a few beers, along with
gasoline and
horse tranquilizers, causing him to pass out for the next four days. A week later, after the Red Sox 2004 victory, there was another Weekend Update skit about an obsessed Red Sox fan who hazed both
Tina Fey and
Amy Poehler due to their superstitions. After an exchange of quarrels between them, he ended up hanging around with
Johnny Damon and the rest of the Red Sox players.
- In the movie 50 First Dates, Adam Sandler reminds his girlfriend about what happened in 2003 including a screencap showing the Red Sox winning the world series, until the next clip shows the title 'just kidding'.
- The movie Fever Pitch
[i]
...
, featuring an obsessive Red Sox fan, contains many references to the curse. The film was made during the 2004 world series, which necessitated the filmmakers' reworking of the film's story.
- The Ben Harper song "Get It Like you Like It" includes the reference "But Johnny Damon swung his bat. Grand Slam. That was that. An 86 year curse is gone."
- An episode of the Arthur TV show titled "The Curse of the Grebes" has Elwood City's baseball team losing its first two chances to win the world championship due to events based directly on Bucky Dent's homer and Bill Buckner's error. The episode states that the team hadn't won a championship since 1918 and that their opponent had won 25 since then.
- All curse related materials, including the Curse of the Bambino musical and the HBO
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documentary, had to rename the title with the words 'legend' or 'reverse'.
- In comedian Stephen Lynch's song "Beelz", he sings "I’m in every Zeppelin album / I’m in all Rush Limbaugh’s rants / I’m the reason that the Boston Red Sox even had a chance"
See also
External links
- .
- , a skeptical history of the curse lore, written by Glenn Stout during the 2004 playoffs.
- : an HBO
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documentary- : A musical by Steven Bergman and David Kruh
