Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game

by John Sexton

  Therein lies the larger meaning: Being a kid and a Dodgers fan in that golden era was to be part of something larger than one’s self. This is the essence of Saint Paul’s trinity of blessedness—faith, hope, and love. Of course, Cal Abrams should have been held at third base, and, of course, Ralph Branca should not have entered the game, let alone thrown Thomson the same fastball in almost the same location twice; but we never stopped praying for Cal, for Ralph, for Gil, and for the Dodgers. Faith, hope, and love. Wait’ll next year.

  In a way, repeating that mantra or praying for Gil Hodges might have illustrated the popular definition of insanity: repeating the same action over and over while expecting a different result. But somehow we knew that to be accursed—repeatedly to suffer inexplicable but apparently preordained pain or hardship—was a necessary prelude to being released from its clutches and receiving great (and all the more enjoyable) blessings.

  A deeply religious man, Hodges did not bemoan his slump or search for scapegoats or even give up hope and self-indulgently claim virtue in bearing humiliation gracefully. He grasped the inevitability of slumps even as he maintained his determination to improve and overcome. He, like all of Brooklyn, answered accursedness with faith and hope. And he, like Brooklyn, ultimately was blessed.

  What is today the most famous of all the curses in baseball evoked a very different response from those it afflicted. So slow was this curse to build that it was not even discovered by its victims until roughly seventy years after the event that (it is said) precipitated it. Such, however, is the odd nature of the Curse of the Bambino, the damning of the Boston Red Sox and owner Harry Frazee for the sale in early 1920 of Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees.

  Memories dim or are erased by time, but the story of Babe Ruth’s departure is much more interesting than its typically shorthand retelling, and it shows that curses are never simple things. And I should note that its telling here is colored by the fact that for a Yankees fan, the Sox are the enemy. One person’s saints are often another’s sinners; or put differently, there are differing histories of the Crusades, or of the arrival of Cortés in Mexico. Perspective matters.

  Baseball always has had bizarre, flamboyant, roguish owners, but at the end of the twentieth century’s second decade, the Red Sox had the misfortune to be owned by one of the most outlandish, Harry Frazee. Frazee was leveraged to the limits of his finances; and he was a producer of theatrical extravaganzas on what was becoming known simply as Broadway. After 1918, his Red Sox sat atop the baseball world, the winners of five of the first fifteen World Series and boasting the finest pitching staff in the major leagues, anchored by the still-young southpaw Babe Ruth, whose batting potential already was well-known. In 1919, Sox manager Ed Barrow began to wean Ruth from pitching. Ruth won nine games in 1919, but (playing in the outfield) he batted .322, drove in 114 runs, and broke the then-record for home runs with the astonishing total of twenty-nine (more than the total of ten of the fifteen other major league teams).

  Strapped for cash, Frazee began to dismantle the team that July, when he sent one of his star pitchers, Carl Mays, to the Yankees for two journeymen and forty thousand dollars. Mays was on his way to a two-hundred-plus-victory career and would be the ace of the Yankees’ first pennant-winning team in 1921, with twenty-seven wins. The Ruth outrage occurred on January 3, 1920. No Yankees came north as compensation, just $125,000 for Frazee plus a $300,000 loan secured by Fenway Park itself (meaning, oddly enough, the first ballpark the Yankees “owned” was that of their rival’s, fully three years before opening their own palace in the Bronx). And the disgraceful episodes continued at the end of that year, when an eight-player deal with the Yankees could not mask the transfer of another expensive Red Sox pitcher, Waite Hoyt. Hoyt went on to the Hall of Fame and was the ace of New York’s fabled 1927 juggernaut. Nor were the Red Sox quite finished even then; in 1923, their last star pitcher, Herb Pennock, went to the Yankees and eventually the Hall of Fame for three more nobodies and fifty thousand more dollars. Legend has it Frazee needed all that money to finance a lavish production called No, No, Nanette. The legend is not literally true, but what is true is that money was the root of all this evil.

  Obscured in this madness was the fact that Ed Barrow himself read Frazee’s handwriting on the wall and departed for the Yankees after 1920. In New York, Barrow developed the modern, crucial baseball position of general manager and for the next quarter century was the actual architect of the dynasty that won fourteen pennants and ten World Series during his tenure, eventually landing him a spot in the Hall of Fame.

  For the decade following Frazee’s fire sale, the Red Sox languished in or near the cellar until they were bought in 1933 by Thomas Austin Yawkey, the adopted son of a Michigan industrialist (actually his uncle, at one point the owner of the Detroit Tigers), who paid $1.5 million out of his $40 million inheritance to buy the team the instant he was legally able to start spending it. Yawkey was dedicated to baseball, sank millions into the team and Fenway Park, and slowly built a competitive collection of players, helped immeasurably by the discovery of a talented kid from San Diego named Ted Williams. The Sox won a pennant in 1946 but suffered a heartbreaking seventh-game loss to the Cardinals in the World Series; they came achingly close to Cleveland and the Yankees in the pennant races of the late forties; after a seventeen-year string of mediocrity, and worse, they secured the Impossible Dream pennant in 1967, only to lose another seven-game Series to the Cardinals; and then a rebuilt 1975 team lost a Game Seven to Cincinnati despite the legendary walk-off home run by Carlton Fisk that won Game Six.

  Yawkey died in 1976, but the saga continued—good teams that just missed championships. Despite mismanagement by Yawkey’s widow and estate (they lost the heart of their ’75 team—Fisk, Fred Lynn, and Rick Burleson—to the effects of the new free agency system), they won another pennant in 1986 before dropping a fourth seven-game World Series, this time to the Mets; and this time, the Curse manifest itself in the sixth game when, with the Sox ahead and one out from victory and the title, a ground ball hit by Mookie Wilson dribbled between first baseman Bill Buckner’s injured legs.

  Grady Little’s managerial goof seventeen years later and Aaron Boone’s homer completed a truly sorry run.

  It was after the 1986 debacle that serious talk of the Curse of the Bambino began appearing, gaining broad acceptance in lore and rhetoric following publication in 1990 of a popular book by a wonderful writer, Dan Shaughnessy of The Boston Globe. People in what is self-admiringly called Red Sox Nation grasped the notion of the Curse like a drowning person desperate for a life preserver. The Curse allowed the Nation to ignore more obvious explanations for defeat, usually bad management that assembled weak teams.

  And the tale of the Curse avoided the elephant in the Red Sox’s room: race. As World War II neared its end, when it was clear that so many people of color had given so much to their country, the team was pressured along with most others to break the color line. In the face of considerable agitation from African-American writers and activists, as well as a prominent local politician, the Red Sox went through the motions in 1945 and arranged a three-player April “tryout” for three established Negro League stars. One was Marvin Williams, a second baseman out of Philadelphia; another was outfielder Sam Jethroe, who would become the National League’s Rookie of the Year with the more enlightened Boston Braves in 1950; and the third was Jackie Robinson, six months before Dodger president Branch Rickey made history with him in Brooklyn. After the “tryout,” none heard a word from the Red Sox.

  Tom Yawkey’s insistence on a lily-white team was maintained through the fifties by two crony general managers, both Hall of Fame infielders—first Eddie Collins and then Joe Cronin. In the process, the Red Sox not only shamed themselves but also lost the talent wars handily. Few if any teams can pass on such talent and still succeed; certainly, the Sox could not. Yawkey eventually made it into the Hall of Fame himself, despite gaining infamy as the last owner to desegregate his b
aseball team, a full dozen years after Jackie Robinson debuted for the Dodgers.

  This curse was said to have been lifted after all those decades when the team rebounded from the crushing loss to the Yankees in the 2003 playoffs to beat them in 2004 in what most fans (and all Sox fans) would say was the most thrilling comeback ever, all as prelude to sweeping the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series. Lifelong fans who had for decades resigned themselves to defeat flooded Boston Common as well as downtown streets for a parade (the crowd estimate was in the millions). More than a few visited cemeteries to put flowers on the graves of deprived loved ones. And for good measure, the Sox won it all again three years later.

  But the joy was followed by a return to accursedness in 2011, when in the span of a month the Sox fell from first place to a season-ending loss in the final game (baseball statisticians pegged their chance of missing the playoffs at just four-tenths of 1 percent with twenty-four games to play). Their free agent acquisition, Adrian Gonzalez, attributed the collapse to providence: “I’m a firm believer that God has a plan and it wasn’t in His plan for us to move forward…. God didn’t have it in the cards for us.” But that was a minority view.

  Talk of the Curse’s return resumed in an orgy of criticism that resulted in the departure of the general manager, the dismissal of the manager, allegations of drinking and dissension among the players, and finger-pointing in almost every direction. For hopeful Brooklyn, the ecstasy of 1955 never dimmed. But for Boston, the defeat of 2011 had awakened the Curse with a force that made the joy of 2004 and 2007 fade.

  The virulent atmosphere continued into the following season; several players got into public quarrels with the new Red Sox manager, Bobby Valentine. The team traded one of its mainstays, Kevin Youkilis, to the Chicago White Sox, and then as the severely disappointing season neared its end they unloaded three of their most expensive players (Gonzalez, Josh Beckett, and Carl Crawford) as part of a multiplayer deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers.

  This nearly century-long story is a saga of triumph, outrage, ineptitude, struggle, rebuilding, lousy luck, and racism. But (in this Yankees fan’s view of it) the real tragedy of the Curse, as it turns out, was not the Curse itself but Red Sox Nation’s reaction to it. The real curse for Red Sox Nation was not failure to win the World Series but rather an incapacity to choose hope over despair—the embrace of a collective narrative of indomitable accursedness over the hopeful possibilities of waiting till next year. So thoroughly had the Nation adopted their despair that, during the dramatic 2011 slide, The New York Times reported a meeting of the Benevolent and Loyal Order of Honorable Ancient Red Sox Die Hard Sufferers (BLOHARDS for short) under the headline, AS SOX KEEP SINKING, TRUE FANS SUFFER WITH A SMILE.

  There are exceptions to the general mood. In a beautiful eulogy of A. Bartlett Giamatti, the late baseball commissioner and noted Red Sox fan, Rabbi Robert Dobrusin showed a side of Red Sox Nation that signals there is hope of salvation for all humankind (in other words, even for Sox fans). The rabbi, writing in 1991, proclaimed:

  To be a Red Sox fan means to search for a way to understand how Fenway Park, with its green grass, close seats, hand-operated scoreboard, and all its history, cannot be allowed, just once, to fly a World Series championship banner. The championship would make Fenway Park perfect. Since 1918, however, that dream has gone unfulfilled.

  If all Red Sox fans suffer, an additional element of suffering comes from the perspective of the Jewish calendar. The Red Sox have a wonderful sense of timing. The greatest comeback in the team’s history, in the fifth game of the 1986 American League Championship Series, happened during Kol Nidre. That same year, on Simchat Torah night, the Sox came within one strike of winning their first championship in sixty-eight years before collapsing. Our faith was tested by stretching to the limit the commandment to be happy on our festivals.

  It is the fate of Red Sox fans to be philosophical about the team.

  In a letter to me, the good rabbi wrote, “Since 2004, my theology has changed quite a bit.” I trust that for him at least the championship achieved that year brought the kind of permanently fulfilling blessedness that the 1955 championship brought for us in Brooklyn. Sadly, it did not for most of Red Sox Nation.

  Hope and despair are two common though polar opposite responses to accursedness. A third possible response is acceptance—none of the high optimism of hope (let alone faith), yet none of the deep whine of despair. No team fills this bill like the Chicago Cubs.

  The curse that afflicts the Cubs, like Boston’s curse, has a history. The Cubs, like the Red Sox, were a dominant team in the early twentieth century—three consecutive pennants starting in 1906, including back-to-back World Series titles. And then, from 1908 to this day, nothing. No curse attended the World Series drought that ensued through World War II. The Cubs were a good, well-managed team, winners of three more pennants between 1909 and 1938. Some see a basis for this curse on the franchise in their last World Series appearance (1945). For those who accept this Genesis account, the curse persists despite the efforts of the man (Billy Sianis) who first leveled it, as well as his descendents, to remove it.

  A Greek-American, Sianis had since the end of Prohibition run the famed Billy Goat Tavern (née the Lincoln Tavern) near the old Chicago Stadium, site of historic political conventions and hockey games. It was renamed after Sianis rescued an actual goat that had been severely injured falling from the back of a truck right in front of the place. Having nursed the animal back to health, Sianis named his watering hole after it, and the delightful if grubby Billy Goat became a regular stop for thirsty writers, politicians, and gangsters.

  A flagrant promoter, Sianis showed up for Game Four of the 1945 World Series (the Cubs were leading, two games to one) against Detroit with two box-seat tickets and his goat, even parading the animal on the field before the game. Early in the game, however, the animal’s odor proved so noxious that the front office demanded it be removed; when Sianis balked, he and the goat were unceremoniously paraded out of the ballpark. On the spot, all historical sources agree, Sianis leveled his curse: never another World Series for the Cubs. After they lost that October, he actually sent a sneering telegram to William Wrigley’s surviving son and successor, P. K., wondering Who smells now?

  Through the years, no organization has tried more earnestly to lift a curse than the Cubs. P. K. Wrigley publicly apologized to Sianis. A year before Billy died in 1970, he had himself removed the curse during the first serious postwar pennant drive by the team (however, superstitious fans believe the Curse of the Billy Goat may have been reinforced that year when a black cat cozied up to team captain Ron Santo while he was standing in the on-deck circle at New York’s Shea Stadium near the end of the season). And Sianis’s survivors have led several exorcisms over the years to no effect.

  The truth is that even under P. K. Wrigley, the Cubs never achieved more than mediocrity for twenty-two years after the war ended. At one point, the team was so leaderless that they attempted on-field management by committee (the rotating group of eight was called the College of Coaches), with predictably disastrous results. But in the stands, the atmosphere rarely turned bitter. In fact, a ball game at Wrigley Field is as lovely a way to spend a day as exists in America; Wrigley really is a friendly confine.

  The atmosphere has always been different in Chicago than in Boston. The one exception was the scorn heaped on poor Steve Bartman—the local businessman who with five outs separating the Cubs from the World Series in 2003 (just two days before the Red Sox succumbed to Aaron Boone’s home run) prevented Cub outfielder Moises Alou from catching a foul ball, igniting a Florida Marlins rally that won them Game Six. Things got so bad for Bartman that Florida’s governor at the time, Jeb Bush, actually offered him asylum.

  Over the years, Cubs fans have accepted their fate with a measure of good cheer. For example, in the seventies, a group of transplanted Midwesterners (especially writers like George Will and the late David Broder) established in Wash
ington, DC, the Emil Verban Society, named after a journeyman infielder who worked hard but compiled forgettable stats for the Cubs in the late forties. At an occasional lunch, they entertained themselves with trivia and stories, even importing an elderly Verban himself to meet President Ronald Reagan, also a society member. This jocular acceptance of unabated disappointment would have been unthinkable in hopeful Brooklyn or despairing Boston.

  In truth, the Cubs’ faithful fit nicely between the poles of Brooklyn and Boston, neither hopeful nor despairing; instead, they delight in their status as baseball’s lovable losers. Tippy, for example, is a Cubs fan, though he has no connection to Chicago and has never been there. His reason: The Cubs frequently have led the National League in attendance, often in years when they have finished in last place. In his mind, they have earned his allegiance the hard way, even though his facts again are wrong.

  But one suspects that the possibility of some magical day once captured in another place and time by those three simple words, Wait’ll next year, lies somewhere in the heart of every Cubs fan—and that, if and when that day comes, its magic (like the magic that seized Brooklyn in 1955) will never die.

  Adversity is baseball’s handmaiden; coping with it is the game’s great challenge—and its great lesson. As the writer Gay Talese put it in a New Yorker profile of Yankee manager Joe Girardi, “Like religion, the game of baseball is founded on aspirations rarely met. It generates far more failure than fulfillment.” A player can lead one of the leagues in batting even though he gets a hit only once in three tries. The game’s benchmark of great pitching, Cy Young, lost 316 times—more than anybody else who has ever thrown a baseball. Its most accomplished manager, Connie Mack, actually lost more than he won, doing so an astonishing 3,948 times. Errors are so much a part of the game that their total is on every scoreboard every day. The statisticians recorded the five-hundred-thousandth error in major league history (by shortstop Jose Reyes of the Miami Marlins) in 2012. For a team to finish in the middle of its pack, to win roughly as often as it loses, is usually to have a decent season no matter how high the ambitions of its players and the hopes of its fans in the defeat-free beauty of spring.