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Did selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees really curse the Boston Red Sox?
If you told a baseball fan from 1917 that the Boston Red Sox would go for nearly 100 years without a championship win, they would laugh and laugh and laugh.
Pre-1918, the Red Sox were the team to beat. During that era, they were one of the most successful sporting franchises of all time. However, between the years 1918 and 2004, they did not win a single championship.
This would have seemed impossible to the baseball fans of 1917. But Red Sox fans know the all too painful truth – this drought was named The Curse of the Bambino. In today’s article, we are going to look at the curse, what caused it, and how it was broken.
What was the curse and what caused it?
The championship drought suffered by the Boston Red Sox between 1918 and 2004 was entitled The Curse of Bambino by a book with the same name published in 1990.
The curse was believed to be caused by the Boston Red Sox selling their star player Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. At the time, fans were upset that the managers of the Red Sox had chosen the money over the wishes of the fans and the loyalty that Ruth had shown the team.
The Red Sox did not win a single championship in the 86 years between 1918 and 2004. Babe Ruth was sold to the New York Yankees in 1920.
Throughout the 20th century, the Red Sox seemed to be cursed with bad luck – they lost the championship at the last moment multiple times (most of the time to the Yankees), and one year they tied for the title and lost due to a silly mistake in the first ever one-time playoff game.
This carried on until the year before the curse was broken when in 2003, the Red Sox lost the title to the Yankees again. The game went down to the very last run.
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Who Was Babe Ruth?
Babe “Bambino” Ruth is one of the most famous figures in American sporting history. He played for both the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. Ruth was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018. He was one of the 5 founding members of the Baseball Hall of Fame and was inducted into it in 1938.
Ruth was won of the first big sporting stars as his career perfectly overlapped with the emergence of the tabloid obsession with celebrities and sports stars. He was famous for his work on the pitch but he was just as famous for his bad behavior off it. He was a notorious womanizer and a big drinker.
After retiring from the MLB, Ruth tried to get a job as a coach of an MLB team, but no team would take him thanks to his bad behavior as a player. Ruth came back into the public eye when he became a spokesperson for the American World War 2 war effort.
Ruth passed away in 1949 and is still remembered fondly in the cities of New York and Boston. Ruth won 7 World Series titles while playing for the MLB.
How and when was the curse broken?
There were many attempts to break The Curse of The Bambino over the 86 year drought. But efforts doubled after the release of the 1990 book about the curse.
Fans tried leaving a Red Sox cap at the top of Mount Everest after burning a Yankees cap at the base of the mountain. They brought a witch into the stadium to try and break the curse. A player once even suggested exhuming Ruth’s body, bringing him to Boston, and having the mayor formally apologize for selling him to the Yankees.
The curse was finally broken in 2004 when the Red Sox won the World Series for the first time in 86 years.
Fans believe there are two incidents that could have broken the curse.
There was a comedy musical performance at the start of the final game that included musicians dressed up as a witch doctor and Babe Ruth. They performed a comedy curse removing routine.
The other suggested curse-breaking incident was when a 16-year-old fan who lived on Ruth’s old farm was hit in the face by a ball struck by his favorite player. Later that day the Yankee’s suffered their worst defeat of all time – they lost 0-22.