by Seth Mnookin
For Dick Williams and the Red Sox players, losing the World Series was a disappointment, but 1967 was the year the Red Sox helped create magic in Boston. The country was being torn apart by the Vietnam War and the burgeoning youth movement, and the boyish, happy-go-lucky Red Sox, who hadn’t been expected to do much of anything before the season began, seemed to embody both the younger generation’s sense of possibility as well as an older generation’s nostalgia for a simpler, more innocent era. After the Impossible Dream season, the Sox won a fan base that would forge an almost religious connection with the team, awarding them a loyalty whose intensity and durability would prove astonishing.
The Sox wasted no time testing that loyalty. The next seven seasons were a return to the Red Sox’s modus operandi of inefficiency and lost opportunity. Almost every year, the Sox fell short of expectations. Paradoxically, it was during these fallow years that the lure of the Red Sox began to reach a national audience, largely due to the emergence of a young sportswriter who approached the game with a fan’s passion and fervor. Peter Gammons was a Massachusetts native who joined the Globe’s sports staff soon after graduating from the University of North Carolina in 1969. By the mid-1970s, his Sunday “Baseball Notes” columns were known for featuring the most important baseball reporting in the country. Unlike so many Boston writers, Gammons didn’t seem primarily interested in finding ways to tear down the local team. He was critical, to be sure, but his criticism was usually couched in his obvious love of both the game and the Red Sox. Gammons’s wonderfully evocative stories and detailed analyses helped form and then cement the notion of the Red Sox as the quintessentially American team. The New Yorker’s Roger Angell, one of the best-known baseball writers of all time, has said that Gammons is “as important to New England baseball as a Yastrzemski or a [Carlton] Fisk.”
During Gammons’s first years on the beat, the team was slowly remaking itself. In 1972, Fisk, a Vermont native, excelled as the team’s catcher, winning the league’s Rookie of the Year award. In 1975, the Sox again won the pennant, and were matched up against Cincinnati’s “Big Red Machine” in the World Series. The Reds, like the Cardinals in 1967, were perhaps baseball’s most dominant team, and they won the National League West by an astounding 20 games. The Red Sox, meanwhile, were underdogs once again, and most people were surprised they had managed to beat the defending champion Oakland A’s in the American League playoffs. In the Series, the Red Sox’s Cuban maestro, Luis Tiant, won Game 1 with a 6–0 shutout, and he won again in Game 4. As the Series moved back to Boston for its final two games, Cincinnati was leading, three games to two. Game 6 was delayed for three days, as biblical rains drenched the Northeast.
The game, which was finally played on October 21, is still remembered as one of the best ever postseason baseball contests. With Tiant again on the mound and center fielder Fred Lynn hitting an early three-run home run, things looked good for Boston. By the eighth, the Reds had fought back and led, 6–3. In the bottom half of that inning, Boston’s Bernie Carbo hit a pinch-hit, three-run homer, and after the Red Sox left the bases loaded in the ninth, the game went into extra innings. The next two innings featured missed calls and defensive gems, but no scoring. Even the players seemed to realize they were part of something special; as Cincinnati’s Pete Rose stepped into the batter’s box in the 10th inning, he looked back at Fisk as the Red Sox catcher settled into his crouch. “This is some kind of game, isn’t it?” Rose asked rhetorically.
Two innings later, Fisk made Rose’s words seem prescient. In the bottom of the 12th inning, with the score still tied 6–6, Fisk launched a shot toward Fenway’s left field wall. The ball clearly had enough distance to be a game-winning home run; the only question was whether it would go foul, and as Fisk began to move down the line toward first base, he jumped up and down, waving his arms as if he could will the ball to stay fair. As the ball arced out of the park, it glanced off of the foul pole.* The Red Sox had won.
After such a heart-stopping contest, it almost seemed fated that the Red Sox would lose the deciding Game 7 as they, of course, did. The 1975 World Series is often referred to as one of baseball’s best. As Gammons wrote, “The Sixth Game was an abridgment of the entire splendid series in which Boston led in all seven games and lost the lead in five of them, in which five games were decided by one run, two were decided in extra innings, and two others in the ninth inning.” Playing in a historic match was little consolation for the Red Sox, or for the people of Boston.
On July 9, 1976, Tom Yawkey died of leukemia. At the time of his death, Yawkey was estimated to be worth $57 million, most of which he left to his wife. Julia, his adopted daughter from his first marriage, got just $10,000. Yawkey and the Red Sox organization he had bought 43 years earlier would be forever linked; in time, Yawkey came to be seen as the kind of rich benefactor baseball purists yearned for when they harkened back to the sport’s supposedly gentler past.† In typical Boston fashion, this myth became an accepted reality, and soon obscured Yawkey’s surly alcohol-fueled rants, his unwillingness to break down baseball’s color barrier, his occasional indifference to the Red Sox, and even his threats to move the team out of town. Tom Yawkey, the person most responsible for the Red Sox’s decades of futility, became Tom Yawkey, the gentlemanly, sporting owner more interested in winning than turning a profit. It’s a portrait that remains largely intact to this day.
*On August 18, Conigliaro was hit in the face with a pitch. His cheekbone was shattered, and his left eye and eye socket were severely damaged. Robbed of the 20-15 vision with which he had been blessed, Conigliaro was forced to sit out the remainder of the season and the entire 1968 season.
†Dick Williams, for one, wasn’t so thrilled about Yawkey’s renewed interest in the Red Sox. In his autobiography, Williams wrote, “You’d have thought he was one of the damn players. He was in the clubhouse, around the batting cage, on the field until the last possible minute, chatting and kibitzing and being about as fake as an owner can be…. Where had he been when we got our asses kicked earlier in the season?”
*The famous television footage of Fisk trying to will the ball fair was said to be the result of a cameraman’s being frightened by a rat and therefore failing to track the ball as it came off Fisk’s bat. Before that moment, cameramen were trained to follow the path of the ball; after that, they kept their lenses trained on the players themselves. In 1998, TV Guide ranked that moment as the single greatest in the history of televised sports.
†In 1980, Yawkey became the first owner to be inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame. His plaque at Cooperstown lauds him as “one of sport’s finest benefactors.”
Chapter 4
The Gerbil, the
Spaceman, the Rocket,
and the Curse
IN MAY 1978, Tom Yawkey’s estate sold the Red Sox for $20.5 million to a partnership consisting of Jean Yawkey; Haywood Sullivan, a Sox executive who was often likened to an adopted son for the childless Yawkeys; and Buddy LeRoux, a former Red Sox trainer. At the time, it was thought to be the largest amount ever paid for a baseball team. Sullivan, LeRoux, and Yawkey would be the team’s three general partners; nine limited partners also bought in, at $500,000 a share.
Although this was the first change in the team’s ownership since the 1930s, 1978 wouldn’t be remembered for the sale of the team. Just as the Impossible Dream season of 1967 had established the Red Sox as the darlings of New England, the events of 1978 helped solidify the Sox’s reputation as an organization that inevitably broke its fans’ hearts. With Sullivan running the show and Don Zimmer managing the team, the Red Sox surged early in the year. The Red Sox’s outfield—Jim Rice, Fred Lynn, and Dwight Evans—seemed destined to go down as one of baseball’s best. Fisk was still manning the plate, and Yaz, at 38, was still a feared hitter. Even the pitching staff, which included Dennis Eckersley, Mike Torrez, Luis Tiant, and Bill “Spaceman” Lee, was strong. By July 20, the Red Sox led their closest pursuers, the Milwaukee Brewers, by nin
e games, while the Yankees were a staggering 14 games back. A division title seemed all but assured.
Once again, poor management hurt the Red Sox’s chances. Zimmer, who didn’t have a contract beyond the season, kept playing injured starters such as third baseman Butch Hobson* rather than take a chance with the team’s reserves. By September, Boston’s lead over New York was down to six-and-a-half games. It had dwindled to four when the Yankees came to Fenway early in the month for a four-game set. Those four days are still referred to as the Boston Massacre. The Yankees swept the Sox, outscoring the home team by a combined 42–9, including 15–3 and 13–2 spankings in the first two games. In the last game of the series, Zimmer refused to start Bill Lee because the flamboyant pitcher had referred to the manager as a “gerbil,” instead sending Bobby Sprowl to the mound for his second major league appearance. Sprowl didn’t make it through the first inning, and pitched only once more for Boston in his career.
If that had been the end of it, if the Sox had folded and the Yankees had run away with the division, the memories of ’78 would be difficult but not gut-wrenching. Boston battled back, however, winning its final eight games, and at the end of the season the two teams had identical 99-63 records. The Red Sox, just as they had done 30 years earlier against the Cleveland Indians, would play a sudden-death playoff game to decide the division.
The game was at Fenway. By the seventh inning, Red Sox fans were, for the first time in weeks, allowing themselves to think they might actually pull it off: Mike Torrez seemed to be cruising, and the Sox led, 2–0. There were two men on and two men out when Bucky Dent, the Yankees shortstop, came to the plate. In his two years with New York, Dent had not hit above .250, and he had only four home runs on the season. Torrez got him to loft a lazy ball into left field, an easy pop fly. At least it would have been at any other park in baseball; in Boston, it was a Green Monster–aided home run. The Yankees had the lead, 3–2. “We talk about loving Fenway Park so much,” Yastrzemski would say later. “That’s probably the one time I hated Fenway Park.” Still, Boston crawled back, and in the bottom of the ninth, Yaz was at the plate with two outs, a runner on third, and New York leading 5–4. He popped out, and the Yankees went on to win the American League pennant and their second consecutive World Series.
In the wake of 1978’s heartache, Haywood Sullivan quickly proved he was a worthy heir to almost every Red Sox general manager who’d come before him. He let Luis Tiant sign with the Yankees and traded Bill Lee to Montreal. In 1980, he sent out Fred Lynn’s and Carlton Fisk’s contracts two days later than was mandated, with the result that Lynn forced a trade to the California Angels and Fisk became a free agent and signed with the White Sox. By the early 1980s, bumper stickers reading “Haywood and Buddy Are Killing the Sox” began to appear on cars around Fenway.
By the mid-1980s, almost in spite of the team’s management and ownership, the Red Sox were exciting again. “Rocket” Roger Clemens, who came up as a rookie in 1984, dominated baseball in 1986, going 24-4, with a 2.48 earned run average* and 238 strikeouts. On April 29, with Fenway Park about one-third full, he set a new major league record, striking out 20 batters in a game against the Seattle Mariners. Clemens won the American League’s Most Valuable Player award that year, and he helped lead the Red Sox to the postseason, where they beat the California Angels in the American League playoffs.
In the World Series, the Sox faced the New York Mets, whose 1986 squad was arguably the decade’s best team. Veterans like catcher Gary Carter and first baseman Keith Hernandez anchored the team, and 24-year-old right fielder Darryl Strawberry and 21-year-old pitching phenom Dwight Gooden provided excitement. The Red Sox won the first two games in New York, beating Gooden in Game 2, giving Boston five more chances to win two games, and the championship. After the Mets clawed back to win Games 3 and 4 in Boston, the Red Sox, behind lefty hurler Bruce Hurst, again beat Gooden in Game 5. They now had two chances to clinch the Series, and Clemens took the mound to start Game 6.
Clemens left after seven innings with a 3–2 lead. Calvin Schiraldi was brought in to finish the job, but he let the Mets back in it. After nine innings, the game was tied, 3–3. In the 10th, outfielder Dave Henderson hit a home run, and a Wade Boggs double followed by a Marty Barrett single scored another run. Going in to the bottom of the 10th, the Red Sox were winning, 5–3.
Schiraldi, in his third inning of work, retired the first two Mets batters, and as champagne was wheeled into Shea Stadium’s visiting clubhouse, the park’s scoreboard congratulated Bruce Hurst for winning the World Series MVP award. A pair of singles put men on first and second, but the Sox still appeared to be safe. Schiraldi brought the next batter, Ray Knight, to an 0-2 count. The Red Sox were one strike away. Knight tapped at Schiraldi’s third offering, and his single drove in a Mets run and left runners on first and third. All was not yet lost. Boston still led, 5–4, and the Red Sox still needed only one more out.
Finally, Sox manager John McNamara brought in Bob Stanley, the Sox veteran, to face Mookie Wilson. Stanley must have cherished the moment. In April, after getting heckled at Fenway, he said, “Those fans who are booing me now will be cheering for me when I record the final out in the World Series.” Now he’d get a chance to prove himself right. With the count 2-1, Wilson fouled off three straight pitches. Catcher Rich Gedman wasn’t able to handle Stanley’s seventh pitch, and another Mets run scored, tying the game at five and moving the Mets’ Ray Knight to second base. Three pitches (and two more foul balls) later, Wilson finally hit the ball fair. It was a slow roller toward first base.
For each of the Red Sox’s World Series victories that year, McNamara had, late in the game, replaced Bill Buckner, his regular first baseman, with Dave Stapleton, who was a nimbler, better, defensive player. The whole world knew about Buckner’s painfully arthritic knees, and the Mets, obeying one of the chivalric, unspoken rules that still dictates how the game is played, didn’t bunt on Buckner once the entire series. But McNamara wanted Buckner to be on the field when the Sox finally won it all. And so it was Buckner, not Stapleton, who was manning first base as Wilson’s grounder rolled up the line. Buckner shuffled over and bent down to pick up the ball. He was too late. The ball went through his legs, and the Mets won the game.
In his recap of the game in The New York Times, columnist George Vecsey referred tangentially to “the Curse of Babe Ruth,” incurred when Red Sox owner Harry Frazee “[sold] the slugging pitcher to the Yankees early in 1920.” (The sale actually occurred in December 1919.) With Game 7 still to come, not much attention was paid to Vecsey’s column at the time, but after the Red Sox lost that game, and the Series, Vecsey returned to the theme in a column titled “Babe Ruth Curse Strikes Again.” In that piece, Vecsey picked up on a theme that had been floating around the press for years, but had rarely, if ever, made its way into print. “[T]he Boston Red Sox have been playing under a cloud ever since their owner, Harry Frazee, sold off Babe Ruth early in 1920, and that cloud settled over them in this Series. All the leads they had, all the chances, went down the drain, just as they had in 1946 and 1949 and 1967 and 1975 and 1978.” Finally, Vecsey repeated what the Times’s Fox Butterfield had written a week earlier, when Butterfield echoed the urban legend that Frazee had sold Ruth so he could finance No, No, Nanette. Ever since Frazee sold Ruth “to the lowly New York Yankees to finance one of his Broadway shows,” Vecsey wrote, “it has never been the same.”
Vecsey helped introduce the idea of Ruth’s curse, and the power and prestige of the Times helped cement the notion that Frazee’s sale of the team’s star was tied to his theatrical aspirations. But it wouldn’t be until 1990, when Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy appropriated “Curse of the Bambino” for the title of his book on the history of the Red Sox, that the phrase—and the sentiment—really entered the popular lexicon and mythology.
Shaughnessy was raised in Groton, Massachusetts, about 40 miles outside Boston. Six years younger than fellow Grotonite Peter Gammons, Shaughn
essy went to Baltimore to cover the Orioles for The Sun after graduating from Holy Cross. After a stint with the now-defunct Washington Star, Shaughnessy was hired by the Globe in 1981. In 1982, he replaced the formidable Bob Ryan as the paper’s Celtics beat reporter, and he covered the Larry Bird–led championship team of 1984 before moving over to cover the Red Sox in time for their first pennant-winning season since 1975.
Shaughnessy’s book focused almost exclusively—some might say masochistically—on the Red Sox’s misery, as he repeated many of the inaccuracies that had hardened into perceived fact. Failing to acknowledge that some contemporary articles and editorial cartoons had argued it was better for the team that Ruth had been sold, Shaughnessy wrote how the sale of the slugger was almost universally seen as a horrible move at the time it occurred. He quoted the Times obituary that said that Frazee’s estate “did not exceed $50,000” when he died, but left out what followed in the Times’s account—that “it may be much larger after Mr. Frazee’s interests in Boston and Chicago are appraised.” (Frazee owned or controlled theaters in both cities.) Shaughnessy also reprinted the most incendiary quote in Frederick Lieb’s widely discredited 1947 history of the Red Sox: After Frazee had died and could no longer defend himself, Lieb claimed that the former Sox owner had told him that “the Ruth deal was the only way I could retain the Red Sox.” (There is no evidence that this was ever the case, or that Frazee ever said those words.) In order to support his strained hypothesis that all of the team’s misfortunes could be traced to an event that had occurred six decades earlier, Shaughnessy ignored the many problems of Tom Yawkey’s ownership of the team, even going so far as to whitewash Yawkey’s troubled history with black ballplayers.
His book, Shaughnessy wrote, was the story of “baseball’s original sin” and the “subsequent seventy years of sorrow for New England’s baseball fans.” In fact, The Curse of the Bambino served as an unintentional primer on the ways in which the Boston press was able to inflict itself on players and fans alike. Forever after, every Red Sox fumble, misstep, or mistake would be attributed to a curse that had been popularized, if not largely invented, by a cantankerous sports columnist.