Before gaining her greatest fame with the New York Yankees, Babe Ruth was a star with rival Boston Red Sox. As an elite pitcher and outfielder, Ruth helped Boston win three World Series titles in her first six seasons with the team. Then, after the 1919 season, Red Sox owner and Broadway producer Harry Frazee sold the man nicknamed the “Bambino” to the Yankees for $ 125,000 and a loan of $ 300,000 which he used to pay off. Fenway Park mortgage and stage the musical “No, no, Nannette.” “
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Babe Ruth played for the Boston Red Sox from 1914 to 1919.
Bettmann Archives / Getty Images
The Red Sox also received something else in return: misery.
The fortunes of the two franchises quickly changed after the transaction. The Yankees, who had never competed in a World Series before the arrival of Ruth, became a dynasty. Boston has become Mudville. New York has won 26 World Series titles in the eight decades since baseball’s biggest icon was sold to zero for the Red Sox.
The transformation of the teams was so brutal that superstitious Red Sox fans believed a vengeful Ruth had cast a spell on the club after she left. Much like the baby himself, the “Bambino’s curse” took on legendary proportions, until a teenager with an unlikely connection to Ruth apparently broke the hexagon in 2004.
Red Sox suffer title drought after Babe Ruth sale
For Boston baseball fans, the worst part of the “Curse of the Bambino” wasn’t just that the Red Sox didn’t win, it was that they lost in the most excruciating way possible. Not to mention the many regular season meltdowns, the Red Sox reached Game 7 of the World Series four times in the decades since Ruth left. Four times they have lost.
In 1946, Boston’s Johnny Pesky briefly pulled off a double clutch in a stint in the eighth inning of a tied game, allowing St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Enos Slaughter to score on the first goal with the point. winner. Twenty-one years later, Cardinals ace Bob Gibson won a full game and hit a home run to end Boston’s “Impossible Dream” season in a championship game.
In the 1975 World Series, the Red Sox won Game 6 with a spectacular home run from Carlton Fisk to the Green Monster foul post in left field. But the following night, Boston lost a 3-0 lead at Fenway Park and lost when the Cincinnati Reds scored in the ninth inning.
For many Boston fans, first baseman Bill Buckner’s mistake in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series was unforgivable.
Stan Grossfeld / The Boston Globe / Getty Images
Cruelest of all was the 1986 World Series when the Red Sox were one shot away from the title after taking a 5-3 lead over the New York Mets in the 10th inning of Game 6. For Boston fans , what followed was worthy of a Shakespearean. tragedy: three straight singles, a wild throw and a dribbler who cut through the legs of first baseman Bill Buckner to lose the game.
In Game 7, the Red Sox lost a three-point lead and the streak. Boston fans couldn’t help but wonder if they were suffering from Puritan penance for Frazee’s deadly sin.
Strange coincidence occurs at Red Sox game in 2004
The curse seemed alive and well as Lee Gavin, 16, arrived at Fenway Park in a limousine on the last day of August 2004 to celebrate a friend’s birthday. Although in full swing, the Red Sox remained 4 ½ games behind the hated Yankees, who had again crushed the Boston spirit a year earlier with an extra inning homerun in Game 7 of the series. of American League Championships.
Late in the fourth inning of that night’s game against the Anaheim Angels, a flying ball from Boston hitter Manny Ramirez’s bat was out of play. In Section 9, Gavin reached out to catch it. . He missed. The bullet slipped through his hands and hit his face, leaving his lip to bleed and both of his front teeth on the ground.
“I got in a limo and left in an ambulance,” Gavin recalls.
The high school junior and longtime Red Sox fan also left with the bloodied baseball, which the Red Sox then arranged for Ramirez to sign. The incident would have been just another day at the stadium, with one exception: The house Gavin has lived in all his life once belonged to Ruth himself.
Red Sox win World Series title in 2004
Even after her sale to the Yankees, Ruth continued to live in the Boston area. In 1922, he bought a 155-acre pastoral farm in the Boston suburb of Sudbury. Many believed that the baby was not made to be a farmer. They were right. He sold “Home Plate Farm” in 1926, and decades later, Gavin grew up on the five-room farm and played baseball on the Bambino’s old lawn.
After Gavin’s encounter with the foul bullet, his friend’s father mentioned the incident to a former colleague in the Boston Globe, who posted a story about the bizarre coincidence and wondered, “Has a teenager’s blood lifted the Bambino’s curse?”
The newspaper noted that another bizarre event happened on the same night as Gavin’s injury: The Yankees suffered the most unbalanced loss in team history in 101 years, a 22-0 loss. at home against the Cleveland Indians.
In the playoffs, the Yankees returned to their winning form and took a 3-0 lead over the Red Sox in the 2004 American League Championship Series. Yankees’ haunting chants of “19-18”, a reminder of the last time Boston won the title, had more bite after a 19-8 choke in Game 3 because no team in Major League Baseball history had rebounded from a 3 -0 playoff deficit. A World Series title for Boston seemed unlikely.
In Game 4 of the 2004 World Series, won by the Red Sox in four games, Boston fans were eager to end an 86-year starvation for the title.
Jed Jacobsohn / Getty Images
And then the story happened. Down by a run in the ninth inning of Game 4, a stolen base by Boston pinch runner Dave Roberts put him in position to score the tie on a Bill Mueller single against Yankees closest, Mariano. Rivera. Red Sox slugger David Ortiz won it on a scoreless homerun in the 12th inning.
The following night, Ortiz produced the winning run at the end of the 14th inning. The series returned to Yankee Stadium, “The House That Ruth Built”, where the Red Sox won Games 6 and 7 to complete the unlikely comeback.
With his teeth back in place, Gavin joined the fans at Fenway Park to cheer on the Red Sox during the series. “I’m not sure I said anything supernatural was at work, but there were several coincidences that happened in 2004 that lined up nicely to get you thinking,” Gavin says.
Another such coincidence occurred hours before Game 1 of the American League Championship Series when contractors began razing a house in Watertown, Massachusetts, where a fire in January 1929 had killed the Ruth’s ex-wife, Helen. As Red Sox fans harvested pieces of wood from the demolition scene as keepsakes, a banner placed on a nearby fence proclaimed, “Reverse the Curse.”
After defeating the Yankees, the Red Sox needed a lot less drama to sweep the St. Louis Cardinals into the World Series and win the team’s first title since the sale of Ruth. It really looked like Gavin had exorcised the curse by offering a blood sacrifice to a baseball god.
“Being the big Sox fan that I am, I was ready to accept this spell!” said Gavin, who was brought back to Fenway to meet with the team. “I was very excited to see the Sox win the World Series that year and to imagine having something to do to help accomplish the feat!”
In a final cosmic sign, the Red Sox celebrated their first championship in 86 years during a lunar eclipse in which a crimson moon floated across the sky, much like a bloodstained baseball.
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