Curse of the Bambino


The Curse of the Bambino was a superstitious sports curse evolving from the failure of Major League Baseball team Boston Red Sox to win the World Series in the 86-year period from to. While some fans took the curse seriously, most used the expression in a tongue-in-cheek manner.
This misfortune began after the Red Sox sold star player Babe Ruth for $125,000 to the New York Yankees after the 1919 season. Before that point, the Red Sox had been one of the most successful professional baseball franchises, winning the first World Series and amassing five of the first fifteen World Series titles. After the sale, they went without a title for nearly a century, as the previously lackluster Yankees became one of the most successful professional sports franchises in North America. The curse became a focal point of the Yankees–Red Sox rivalry over the years.
Talk of the curse as an ongoing phenomenon ended in 2004, when the Red Sox came back from a 0–3 deficit to beat the Yankees in the best-of-seven American League Championship Series, and then swept the St. Louis Cardinals to win the World Series.
The curse had been such a part of Boston culture that when a "reverse curve" road sign on Longfellow Bridge over the city's busy Storrow Drive was graffitied to read "Reverse The Curse," officials left it in place until the Red Sox won the 2004 World Series. After the World Series that year, the road sign was edited to read "Reversed Curse" in celebration.

Lore

Although it had long been noted that the selling of Ruth had been the beginning of a decline in the Red Sox' fortunes, the term "curse of the Bambino" was not in common use until the publication of the book The Curse of the Bambino by Dan Shaughnessy in 1990. It became a key part of Red Sox lore in the media thereafter, and Shaughnessy's book became required reading in some high school English classes in New England.
Although the title drought dated back to, 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 said to be 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 also later sold or traded to the Yankees.
Neither the lore, nor the debunking of it, entirely tells the story. As Leigh Montville wrote in The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth, the production No, No, Nanette had originated as a non-musical stage play called My Lady Friends, which opened on Broadway in December 1919. That play had, indeed, been financed as a direct result of the Ruth deal. Various researchers, including Montville and Shaughnessy, have pointed out 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.
Yankee fans taunted the Red Sox with chants of "1918!" one weekend in September 1990. The demeaning chant echoed at Yankee Stadium each time the Red Sox were there. Yankee fans also taunted the Red Sox with signs saying "1918!", "CURSE OF THE BAMBINO", pictures of Babe Ruth, and wearing "1918!" T-shirts each time they were at the Stadium.

Reportedly cursed results

Before Ruth left Boston, the Red Sox had won five of the first fifteen World Series, with Ruth pitching for the and championship teams. The Yankees had not played in any World Series up to that time. In the 84 years after the sale, the Yankees played in 39 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.
Even losses that occurred many years before the first mention of the supposed curse, in 1986, have been attributed to it. Some of these instances are listed below:
Red Sox fans attempted various methods over the years to exorcise their famous curse. These included placing a Boston cap atop Mount Everest and burning a Yankees cap at its base camp and finding a piano owned by Ruth that he had supposedly pushed into a pond near his Sudbury, Massachusetts farm, Home Plate Farm.
In Ken Burns' 1994 documentary Baseball, former Red Sox pitcher Bill Lee suggested that the Red Sox should exhume the body of Babe Ruth, transport it back to Fenway and publicly apologize for trading Ruth to the Yankees.
Some declared the curse broken during a game on August 31, 2004, when a foul ball hit by Manny Ramírez flew into Section 9, Box 95, Row AA and struck a boy's face, knocking two of his teeth out. 16-year-old Lee Gavin, a Boston fan whose favorite player was Ramirez, lived on 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 musician Jimmy Buffett and his warm-up team at a Fenway concert in September 2004. Just after being traded to the Red Sox, Curt Schilling appeared in an advertisement for the Ford F-150 pickup truck hitchhiking with a sign indicating he was going to Boston. When picked up, he said that he had "an 86-year-old curse" to break.

End of the curse

In 2004, the Red Sox once again met the Yankees in the American League Championship Series. The Red Sox lost the first three games, including losing Game 3 at Fenway by the lopsided score of 19–8.
The Red Sox trailed 4–3 in the bottom of the ninth 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 against Yankee closer Mariano Rivera by third baseman Bill Mueller, and won on a two-run home run in the 12th inning by David Ortiz. The Red Sox won the next three games to become the first MLB team to win a seven-game postseason series after losing the first three games.
The Red Sox then faced the St. Louis Cardinals, the team to whom they had lost in and, and led throughout the series, winning in a four-game sweep. Cardinals shortstop Édgar Rentería, who wore the same number as Ruth, made the final out of the series, a ground ball back to the pitcher.

Antisemitism

Glenn Stout argues that the idea of a curse was indirectly influenced by antisemitism, although that aspect was not part of its modern usage; he even says "This does not mean that... anyone who writes or speaks of the Curse today—as a journalist or a fan—is either anti-Semitic or even remotely aware of the anti-Semitic roots of the Curse." Because Frazee was from New York and involved in theatre, it was assumed he was Jewish. Though Frazee was well respected in Boston, Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent ran a series of articles purporting to expose how Jews were "destroying America," and among these were articles lambasting Frazee, saying that with his purchase of the Red Sox "another club was placed under the smothering influences of the 'chosen race'." These articles turned the tide of both baseball owners and public opinion against Frazee, and Fred Lieb's vilification of Frazee in his history of the Red Sox portrayed him implicitly as a Jew. Stout argues that this hatred indirectly created the atmosphere where the "curse" could be accepted.

In popular culture

Non-fiction works