Honoring the Babe
I wrote this article on Sunday, October 16, urgently trying to finish it before the Yankees inevitably won game 4 and their series against the Red Sox that night. Of course, the Red Sox proceeded to become the first team ever to come back from a 0-3 deficit, giving this article a shelf life of a whole 4 days. Brilliant.
Psychologists say that there is no Curse of the Bambino. The curse, they explain, is simply a "negative placebo." If the Red Sox stopped believing in it, it would no longer have an effect.
Unfortunately, psychologists don't know a thing about baseball.
To be fair, it isn't a bad theory, as these things go. It has a certain logic, and it appeals both to Red Sox fans and to rationalists, two groups that do not normally overlap. But, like any hypothesis, it must be subjected to empirical scrutiny.
The Red Sox have followed doctor's orders. Their new owner, John Henry, rode into town promising to build a dynasty. Pedro Martinez told reporters to "Wake up the damn Bambino and have me face him. Maybe I'll drill him in the ass." Curt Schilling even called the curse "silly," and compared the Yankees' victory-filled history to a pair of strippers: "When you use words like Mystique and Aura, those are dancers in a nightclub."
The Yankees, of course, proceeded to knock the Red Sox out of the playoffs two years in a row. It appears that even if the Red Sox don't believe in the curse any more, the Yankees still do.
Martinez, who was 5-2 against the Yankees when he offered to plunk the Babe, has since gone 6-18 against the Bronx Bombers. Schilling, who had been healthy throughout 2004, dislocated his ankle tendon just days before facing the Yankees in this year's playoffs. Try to explain it away, but placebos do not dislocate tendons. Eighty-six years on, the Bambino is still not appeased. What does he want from Boston?
Babe Ruth always needed to be loved. He famously promised to hit home runs for hospitalized children, and infamously spent his nights carousing with starlets. Elden Auker, who played against Ruth, remembers him as "a guy who'd sign autographs in the middle of the game if you'd ask him."
New York loved the Babe. Yankee Stadium is "The House that Ruth Built," and his name appears on both the giant bat outside the stadium and a monument behind center field. Ruth has rewarded New York with 26 World Series victories in 86 years.
Ruth's labors for Boston, on the other hand, went unrequited. Everyone knows that the Red Sox sold Ruth to the Yankees in 1920, but it is often forgotten that Boston also ended his career in 1935. The Braves, then Boston's National League club, lured Ruth to play for them with the implicit promise that he would become the team's manager when he retired. Instead, once Ruth could no longer fill the seats with his massive home runs, the team ignobly dropped him. Boston spurned the Babe not once, but twice.
The city never made amends. Rather than honoring the man who pitched them to its last three World Series victories, Boston calls him a curse. Is it any surprise that he has turned his back on it?
Still, there is hope for Boston. When his career ended, the Babe desperately wanted to become a manager. No team would have him, not even the Yankees.
Today, the Red Sox must make Babe Ruth their manager.
Some might call making a dead man your manager crazy. But after 86 years, 35 living managers, and no World Series victories, it would be crazy not to give Babe Ruth a try. Besides, the Babe would no doubt be hands-off, delegating most of the responsibility to his bench coach.
Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, the Red Sox have had it in their power to reverse the curse all along. The need only to acknowledge and reward the Babe for everything he did for Boston. As a psychologist might say, acceptance is the first step to recovery.