AMERICA AT LARGE: Founded a century ago, the Boston Red Sox won five of the first 14 World Series played. The last of these victories came in 1918, when they defeated the Chicago Cubs, four games to two.
A year and a half later, the team's owner and president Harry Frazee sold the team's best player, George Herman "Babe" Ruth, to the New York Yankees for $125,000. Ruth had recently undergone the conversion that would transform him from the American League's best left-handed pitcher to the most fearsome slugger in baseball history, but in 1919 he had already set a single-season home run record.
The commonly accepted version has it Frazee was a duplicitous playboy who consummated the transaction to raise funds for the Broadway production of a musical called No, No Nanette. The fact remains the sale immutably affected the future of two franchises: over the next 83 years the Yankee dynasty would win 26 World Series. The Red Sox never won another. That they have come close only to fail under improbable circumstances has buttressed what has come to be known as "The Curse of the Bambino". According to legend, Ruth accompanied his departure with an imprecation that has haunted Fenway Park to this day.
Two nights ago in Boston, HBO Sports premiered its documentary exploring "The Curse". As the film's opening shot pans an ancient and crumbling New England cemetery, Boston radio personality Eddie Andelman intones, "Here's what I want on my tombstone: he never lived long enough to see the Red Sox win it all." Old footage of Red Sox failures is layered with commentary from tormented fans (comedians Denis Leary and Steven Wright, actor Michael Chiklis, critic Jeffery Lyonsj, and author Robert Parker) and chroniclers of the sport from my end of the business.
The Sox lost in the seventh game of the 1946 World Series when the normally unflappable shortstop Johnny Pesky held the ball, allowing the Cardinals' Enos Slaughter to score the winning run from first base. The 1967 "Impossible Dream" Sox lost in the seventh game when manager Dick Williams tried to go to the well too often and started his best pitcher, Jim Lonborg, on two days' rest. (Lonborg was not only shelled by the Cards, but the following winter broke his leg in a skiing accident, and was never the same pitcher again.) In 1975 the Sox led in the seventh game, only to be overtaken when Bill Lee served up a 20-m.p.h. curve ball to Cincinnati's Tony Perez, who hit it out of the park.
And in 1986 the Sox were one strike from victory. A father recalls having awakened his sleeping baby to hold him up before the TV set just to watch the historic event. Chiklis remembers climbing on top of the bar at his local pub to shout "I've waited my whole life for this!" With Boston leading by two runs in the bottom of the 10th inning with two out and two strikes on the batter, an incredible sequence of tormenting events unfolded: three consecutive base hits, a wild pitch, and then a slow rolling ground ball that trickled between the legs of first baseman Bill Buckner as the winning run scored. (The New York Mets would win game seven two nights later.)
Those post-season failures were seemingly eclipsed by the frustrating events of 1978, when Boston blew a 14½ game lead in the final month of the season and wound up tied with the hated Yankees for the AL East title. The issue was determined by a one-game play-off, in which the Red Sox led 4-2 with two out in the seventh inning, when light-hitting Yankee shortstop Bucky Dent hit a three-run homer over Fenway Park's left-field wall to seal the issue, earning himself a new name.
(In one of the sequences of the film, director George Roy cuts from a tormented lady fan muttering "Bucky bleeping Dent" to which Parker adds "Bucky bleeping Dent," to Boston Globe columnist (and "Curse of the Bambino" author) Dan Shaughnessy, who alters it to "Bucky F Dent". "The 'F' stands for a word you can't say on television," explains Shaughnessy, who after a moment's contemplation adds: "Well, maybe you can say it on HBO." Instant cut to Denis Leary: "Bucky fucking Dent." Leary, like many other figures interviewed in the documentary, comfortably ascribes everything that has happened since to the 1920 Ruth sale.
"(Harry Frazee) took the money and produced a musical called No No Nanette," says Leary. "Not only do I hate that musical, I hate all musicals. I remember as a kid, I hated Nanette Fabray just based on the first name."
But, as baseball historian Glenn Stout points out, No, No, Nanette hadn't even been written at the time of the Ruth sale, and didn't appear on Broadway for another five years. And despite the outrage of contemporary Boston fans, there is evidence the sale of Ruth, regarded at the time as an unmanageable malcontent, was not roundly excoriated at the time of its consummation.
For all its exploration of the supernatural, the "Curse of the Bambino" suggests many of the Red Sox woes may have been self-inflicted, particularly in the matter of racism. Owned by a native South Carolinian, Tom Yawkey, the Red Sox were the last club in the major leagues to sign an African-American player (Pumpsie Green, in 1959) when they could have been the first.
In 1945, fully two years before his Brooklyn Dodgers debut, the Red Sox auditioned a recently-discharged Army Lieutenant named Jackie Robinson, along with two other black players, Sam Jethroe and Marvin Williams, at Fenway Park. Not only did they not sign any of the trio, but during the try-out the players heard a voice say "get those niggers off the field".
Everyone seems to concur if the Red Sox won a World Series the celebrations would end all celebrations, but, as Andelman points out, the Job-like existence of the Red Sox fan has become such an integral part of his identity he might be lost without it. "It would be the greatest celebration ever," says Andelman, "but just think about the next day. What would we do then?"
