"I don't know anything about the history of this team. We were picked to be last or maybe close to last in this town by everybody and we proved them wrong. So I hope that we can change every- thing else - and that includes that Bambino curse." - Red Sox pitcher Pedro Martinez.

On a dark Boston night three-quarters of a century ago, the noted theatrical producer Harry M Frazee was out for an evening of champagne-doused carousing in the company of a character actor named Walter Catlett. Somewhere along the way the duo fell into the company of a pair of young ladies. Frazee took it upon himself to impress the two debutantes by hiring a taxi to drive them all to Fenway Park, the tangible seat of his baseball empire. The cab driver, overhearing his boasts, enquired whether his passenger might be the same Harry M Frazee who owned the Boston Red Sox. When Frazee replied that he was, the driver knocked him down with a right cross to the jaw.

You may or may not know much about baseball, but curses are something everyone understands.

Sixty years after his death, Harry M Frazee remains the most reviled figure in New England history. In his defence, the stage was his game and not vice-versa; Frazee had built and owned three theatres before he purchased the Red Sox in November of 1916.

The team he took over had just won a world championship, and would repeat that performance in the 1918 World Series, behind the pitching performance of a young lefthander named George Herman (Babe) Ruth. Shifted to the outfield the following year in order to make use of his bat, Ruth set a major league record for home runs in his first season as an everyday player.

The following winter Harry M Frazee sold Babe Ruth to the hated New York Yankees for $100,000, or as Bostonians prefer to describe it, "for 100,000 pieces of silver." Frazee needed the money to finance a new play called "No, No, Nanette." The Yankees went on to become the greatest dynasty (and Ruth the greatest hitter) the sport has ever known. The Red Sox have not won a World Series since.

Whether Ruth himself actually pronounced a hex on the team that dealt him away 80 years ago remains a subject of some contention. What is indisputable is that over eight decades the Boston team's fans have witnessed a litany of improbable near-misses that defy logical explanation. Whether it is real or imagined, the Red Sox have played like a team that was cursed. This summer, the Boston team's management thoughtfully invited Ruth's surviving daughter to Fenway Park, ostensibly to honour the 50th anniversary of The Babe's passing, but deep down inside everybody knew the real reason.

Since the venal Frazee sold Ruth to the Yankees, the Boston Red Sox have played in four World Series. They got to the seventh and final game in each of them, and lost every one.

In 1946 the lost when their normally level-headed short-stop Johnny Pesky "froze," inexplicably holding the baseball in his hand a hundred feet from home plate as he watched, transfixed, as St Louis' Enos Slaughter raced home from second base to score the winning run.

In 1967 they lost, once again to the Cardinals, when manager Dick Williams opted to use star pitcher Jim Lonborg in the deciding game, despite the fact that he had pitched just two days earlier.

In 1975, after winning a stirring extra-inning contest to force a seventh game against Cincinnati, the Red Sox blew a 3-0 lead but still found themselves batting in the ninth inning of a tied game. Although the Reds hadn't gotten a ball out of the infield against Boston reliever Jim Willoughby and Cecil Cooper was 1-for-18 against Cincinnati pitching that October, manager Darrell Johnson opted to use Cooper as a pinch hitter for Willoughby in the bottom of the ninth. Cooper failed to deliver, and with Willoughby out of the game, an untested rookie named Jim Burton found himself facing Hall-of-Famer-to-be Joe Morgan in the 10th inning. Morgan drove home Ken Griffey with the winning run.

In 1986 the Red Sox held a two-run lead and were one strike away from a championship in game six against the Mets when an easy ground ball off the bat of New York's Mookie Wilson rolled between the legs of Boston first baseman Bill Buckner. Sandwiched between a host of other miscues, the blunder cost the game. In game seven two nights later, the Sox blew another three-run lead and the Mets won the World Series.

On two other occasions Boston finished the season tied for the lead, but lost a one-game playoff both times.

Beginning with the game in which the ball rolled through Buckner's legs, the Red Sox had lost 13 consecutive playoff games over a dozen years before erupting for 11-runs to beat the Indians in Cleveland this Tuesday.

Although it had been plain enough for 80 years that supernatural forces might be it work, "The Curse of the Bambino" didn't became a catchphrase until 1990, when Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy articulated the mystique in a book of the same name.

Mo Vaughn, the hulking Boston first baseman who can become a free agent after this season, made a statement of his own with two home runs and seven runs batted in. Although he was voted the American League's Most Valuable Player in 1995, Vaughn had endured a personally humiliating post season that year, going hitless in 14 at-bats as the Red Sox lost three straight to the Indians.

Vaughn thereupon pronounced The Curse history.

Indeed. The next day the Indians' manager and their starting pitcher were both ejected in separate first-inning incidents with the Red Sox already leading 2-0. From this favourable position the visitors from Boston managed to inflict a 9-5 defeat upon themselves.

New Englanders are all too well aware that to be born a Red Sox fan is to be born with an inordinate capacity for suffering. Even should the team manage to squeeze past the Indians, waiting in the wings will be the Yankees. The team to whom Harry Frazee sold Babe Ruth to these many years ago won an American League record 114 games this season.

Meanwhile, the best-of-five series, now reduced to best-of-three, returns to Boston this evening for two straight games at Fenway Park. And although he professes to know nothing of history, sometime this afternoon as he makes his way from his car to the same clubhouse another Boston pitcher named Babe Ruth entered back in 1918, Pedro Martinez will step across the spot on the sidewalk where the cab driver laid out Harry Frazee 75 years ago. Some things never change.