The Curse of the Bambino
The Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees in January 1920 and did not win a World Series for the next 86 years. The drought produced so many near-misses, so many collapses in exactly the wrong moment, that it stopped looking like bad luck and started looking like something else.
On January 5, 1920, the Boston Red Sox announced that they had sold George Herman Ruth to the New York Yankees. The deal, struck in late December 1919, sent the best player in baseball to a franchise that had never won an American League pennant. The purchase price was $100,000, payable in installments, plus a $300,000 loan from Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert to Red Sox owner Harry Frazee, secured by a mortgage on Fenway Park. Ruth was 24 years old. He had won 89 games as a pitcher for Boston, set the single-season home run record with 29 in 1919, and anchored three World Series championship teams. Frazee was a theater producer, chronically strapped for cash, and Ruth was his most convertible asset.
The Red Sox had won five of the first fifteen World Series ever played, in 1903, 1912, 1915, 1916, and 1918. They were the most successful franchise in baseball's early decades. The Yankees, by contrast, had existed since 1903 without once reaching the Fall Classic. The sale reversed both trajectories so completely that it acquired a mythology. For decades, Red Sox fans and sportswriters processed the team's losses through the lens of that single transaction, treating it as an original sin from which no amount of talent or effort could deliver them.
The phrase "Curse of the Bambino" entered the public vocabulary in 1990, when Dan Shaughnessy, the Boston Globe columnist, published a book by that title. Shaughnessy did not invent the idea that the Ruth sale had cursed the franchise, but he gave it a name that stuck. The concept had been building for years, gathering force with each October failure, and the book crystallized it into a cultural shorthand that every baseball fan understood.
What Frazee Set in Motion
Ruth hit 54 home runs in his first year in New York, nearly doubling his own record. He hit 59 in 1921. He became the most famous athlete in America and the financial engine of a dynasty that would accumulate 26 World Series titles over the next eight decades. The Yankees built their stadium on the revenue Ruth generated. Yankee Stadium opened on April 18, 1923, and sportswriter Fred Lieb of the New York Evening Telegram dubbed it "The House That Ruth Built." The nickname was not exaggeration.
Frazee, meanwhile, kept selling. Pitcher Waite Hoyt, shortstop Everett Scott, catcher Wally Schang, pitcher Joe Bush, pitcher Sam Jones, and pitcher Herb Pennock all followed Ruth to New York between 1920 and 1923. The pipeline was so steady that the early Yankees championship rosters were essentially assembled from Boston's dismantled talent. The Red Sox finished last in the American League in 1922 and 1923, and they would finish last again in 1925, 1926, 1927, 1928, 1929, and 1930. Between 1922 and 1932, they occupied the cellar nine times. The franchise did not recover for more than a decade.
Frazee did eventually get his Broadway hit. "No, No, Nanette" opened on September 16, 1925, and ran for 321 performances. The show was a commercial triumph. The cost of producing it, in an indirect but unmistakable way, was Babe Ruth.
1946 and Slaughter's Mad Dash
The Red Sox returned to the World Series in 1946 for the first time since beating the Cubs in 1918. Ted Williams, back from three years as a Marine fighter pilot and playing the best season of his career, led a team that won 104 games during the regular season. They faced the St. Louis Cardinals and carried a 3-2 series lead into Game 7 at Sportsman's Park on October 15.
The score was tied 3-3 in the bottom of the eighth inning. Enos Slaughter led off with a single and was still standing on first base with two outs when Harry Walker stepped in. Cardinals manager Eddie Dyer called for a hit-and-run. Walker lined the pitch into left-center field for a double, and Slaughter, running on contact with two outs, never stopped. He ran through the stop sign at third base. Red Sox shortstop Johnny Pesky, receiving the relay throw from the outfield, held the ball for what witnesses described as an extra beat. Slaughter scored. The play became known as "Slaughter's Mad Dash," and Pesky absorbed the blame for the rest of his life, fairly or not. The Cardinals won 4-3.
Williams, who had been hit on the elbow by a pitch in an exhibition game before the Series, batted .200 in seven games, managing five singles in 25 at-bats. The greatest hitter of his generation had been diminished at the worst possible time.
The Impossible Dream
Twenty-one years passed before the Red Sox reached the postseason again. The 1967 team was tagged with the nickname "The Impossible Dream" after winning the pennant on the final day of a four-team race that was not settled until the last weekend of the season. They had finished ninth in the American League in 1966 with a 72-90 record. The turnaround was astonishing.
Carl Yastrzemski won the Triple Crown, batting .326 with 44 home runs and 121 RBIs. Jim Lonborg won 22 games, earned the Cy Young Award, and threw a one-hitter in Game 2 of the World Series against the Cardinals. But Lonborg was asked to pitch Game 5 on three days' rest and Game 7 on two. By the time he took the mound for the finale at Fenway Park on October 12, he had nothing left. Bob Gibson, pitching on full rest, threw a complete-game three-hitter and struck out ten. The Cardinals won 7-2.
The Red Sox had risen from ninth place to the pennant in a single season, and Boston had fallen in love with the team in a way it had not since Williams's prime. The World Series loss established the template that would repeat for the next 37 years. Get close. Lose in the most painful way available.
1975 and the Most Famous Home Run That Won Nothing
The 1975 World Series between the Red Sox and the Cincinnati Reds is frequently called the greatest World Series ever played. The Reds, the Big Red Machine of Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, and Tony Perez, were favored. The Red Sox had two exceptional rookies in Fred Lynn and Jim Rice, though Rice had broken his wrist in late September and missed the entire postseason.
Game 6 at Fenway Park was played on October 21 after three days of rain delays. The Red Sox trailed 6-3 in the bottom of the eighth inning when Bernie Carbo, a pinch hitter, launched a three-run home run into the center-field bleachers off Rawly Eastwick to tie the game. The Red Sox loaded the bases in the ninth with nobody out and failed to score. In the top of the eleventh, with the game still tied at six, Dwight Evans made a leaping catch at the right-field wall to rob Joe Morgan of what would have been a go-ahead home run, then fired to first base to double off Ken Griffey and end the inning.
Carlton Fisk led off the bottom of the twelfth against Pat Darcy. He hit a high fly ball down the left-field line, and the television camera, operated by a cameraman inside the scoreboard who had been startled by a rat and stayed zoomed in on Fisk rather than following the ball, captured one of the most replayed sequences in broadcasting history. Fisk waved his arms, willing the ball to stay fair. It hit the left-field foul pole. Red Sox 7, Reds 6. Fenway Park erupted. The time was past midnight.
And then the Red Sox lost Game 7 the next night, 4-3. Joe Morgan singled home the winning run off Jim Burton in the ninth inning. Fisk's home run, one of the most extraordinary moments in World Series history, had won nothing permanent. Boston tied the Series, not the championship, and the gulf between the euphoria of Game 6 and the flatness of Game 7 became a defining feature of the Curse narrative. The high was always a setup for a harder fall.
1978 and Bucky Dent
The 1978 Red Sox held a 14-game lead over the Yankees in the American League East on July 19. They played roughly .500 ball for the next two months while the Yankees, under manager Bob Lemon, mounted one of the great charges in franchise history. The Yankees swept a four-game series at Fenway in early September by a combined score of 42-9, a stretch that became known as the "Boston Massacre." The lead evaporated, and the two teams finished the regular season tied at 99-63, forcing a one-game playoff at Fenway Park on October 2.
Mike Torrez started for Boston against Ron Guidry. The Red Sox led 2-0 entering the seventh inning. Bucky Dent, the Yankees' light-hitting shortstop who had batted .243 during the regular season with four home runs, stepped to the plate with two runners on base. He fouled a ball off his foot and had to call for a new bat. On the next pitch, he lifted a fly ball toward the Green Monster that did not appear hit hard enough to clear it.
It cleared the net atop the wall by a few feet. Yankees 3, Red Sox 2. Reggie Jackson added a solo home run in the eighth. The final score was 5-4, with Goose Gossage pitching two and two-thirds innings of relief to close it out. The last batter was Yastrzemski, who popped up to third baseman Graig Nettles in foul territory.
In Boston, Bucky Dent became Bucky Bleeping Dent, his middle name permanently replaced by an obscenity. He was not the kind of hitter who was supposed to beat anyone in October. He beat them.
The blown 14-game lead and the Dent home run felt different from the 1975 and 1967 losses. Those defeats had come against great teams in competitive series. The 1978 collapse was a surrender, a team that had held the division in its grip and watched it slide away over the course of a summer. It was the loss that made the Curse feel active, as though something were pulling the franchise backward against its will.
1986 and Bill Buckner
No single play in Red Sox history before 2004 occupied more psychological space than what happened on October 25, 1986, at Shea Stadium. The Red Sox led the New York Mets three games to two in the World Series and carried a 5-3 lead with two outs and nobody on base in the bottom of the tenth inning of Game 6. They were one out from winning the championship.
Gary Carter singled off Calvin Schiraldi. Kevin Mitchell singled. Ray Knight singled to score Carter, cutting the lead to 5-4. Bob Stanley came in to face Mookie Wilson and threw a wild pitch that scored Mitchell and tied the game at five. Wilson then hit a slow roller toward first base, where Bill Buckner, playing on ankles so damaged he could barely walk, let the ball go through his legs. Knight scored from second. Mets 6, Red Sox 5.
Manager John McNamara had been replacing Buckner with Dave Stapleton for defensive purposes late in games throughout the postseason but left Buckner in for Game 6, reportedly so he could be on the field for the celebration. There was no celebration.
The Red Sox still had Game 7. They led 3-0 in that game before the Mets rallied to win 8-5. But almost nobody remembers Game 7. They remember Buckner, the ball skipping under his glove, and the camera lingering on his face as he walked off the field.
Buckner had played 22 seasons in the major leagues, collected 2,715 hits, and been one of the finest contact hitters of his generation. He had played through injuries that would have sidelined most players. None of it shielded him. He received death threats. He moved his family to Idaho. He returned to Boston years later and received standing ovations at Fenway Park, but the reconciliation never fully erased the wound. Bill Buckner died on May 27, 2019, at the age of 69. His obituary led with the ground ball.
2003 and the Decision That Defined a Firing
The 2003 American League Championship Series between the Red Sox and the Yankees went seven games and produced one of the most scrutinized managerial decisions in franchise history.
Pedro Martinez was brilliant through seven innings of Game 7 at Yankee Stadium on October 16. Jason Giambi hit two solo home runs off Martinez, one in the fifth inning and another in the seventh, cutting the Red Sox lead to 4-2. Boston scored a run in the top of the eighth to push the lead to 5-2.
Then the bottom of the eighth began, and Red Sox manager Grady Little chose to leave Martinez in the game. Derek Jeter doubled. Bernie Williams singled, scoring Jeter to make it 5-3. Hideki Matsui doubled. Jorge Posada hit a bloop double that scored two runners and tied the game at five. Little finally walked to the mound and removed Martinez, but the damage was done. Martinez had thrown 123 pitches. The bullpen, including Alan Embree, Mike Timlin, and Scott Williamson, had been available and rested.
Aaron Boone, a third baseman acquired at the trade deadline who had entered the game as a pinch runner, led off the bottom of the eleventh inning against Tim Wakefield. He hit a knuckleball into the left-field seats. Series over. The image of Boone rounding the bases became a companion piece to Bucky Dent's home run in the folklore of Red Sox suffering.
Little's contract option was not exercised on October 27, eleven days after the loss. The decision to leave Martinez in, when every available indicator suggested he was done, joined a catalog of institutional failures stretching back to Pesky's hesitation in 1946, McNamara's loyalty to Buckner in 1986, and all the smaller choices in between.
2004
The 2004 Red Sox were built to end the drought. General manager Theo Epstein, 30 years old, a Yale graduate raised in Brookline, Massachusetts, had assembled a roster constructed around offensive depth. Manny Ramirez, David Ortiz, Johnny Damon, Jason Varitek, Kevin Millar, and Trot Nixon filled a lineup with power and on-base ability from top to bottom. Curt Schilling, acquired from the Arizona Diamondbacks, anchored the pitching staff alongside Martinez and Derek Lowe.
The team called itself "the Idiots." Players wore their hair long, grew beards, and projected a deliberate looseness that stood in contrast to the tight-jawed intensity of previous Red Sox teams during October. The attitude was a conscious choice. They were not going to carry the weight.
They met the Yankees in the ALCS for the second straight year. The Yankees won the first three games, 10-7, 3-1, and 19-8. No team in Major League Baseball history had ever come back from a 3-0 deficit in a best-of-seven postseason series. The Red Sox were three outs from being swept in Game 4.
Kevin Millar walked against Mariano Rivera to lead off the bottom of the ninth inning at Fenway Park, with the Red Sox trailing 4-3. Dave Roberts entered as a pinch runner. Everyone in the stadium, everyone watching on television, and Rivera himself knew Roberts was going to steal second base. He went anyway. On Rivera's first pitch to the next batter, Roberts took off. The throw from Jorge Posada was close. Roberts was safe.
Bill Mueller singled to center field, and Roberts scored to tie the game. In the bottom of the twelfth inning, Manny Ramirez singled against Paul Quantrill, and Ortiz hit a two-run home run to right field to win it, 6-4. The game ended at 1:22 a.m. and lasted five hours and two minutes.
Game 5 went fourteen innings. Ortiz singled home the winning run against Esteban Loaiza, fighting off the pitch and dropping it into center field. The Red Sox had been within three outs of elimination and had now won two consecutive extra-inning games.
Schilling started Game 6 at Yankee Stadium with a torn tendon sheath in his right ankle, sutured into place by team doctor Bill Morgan in a procedure that had never been attempted during a game situation. Blood soaked through his white sock during the broadcast, visible on every close-up. He pitched seven innings and allowed one earned run, a solo home run by Bernie Williams. The Red Sox won 4-2.
Game 7 was the reckoning. Damon hit a grand slam off Javier Vazquez in the second inning, then added a two-run homer later. Lowe, on two days' rest, pitched six innings of one-hit ball, needing just 69 pitches. The final score was 10-3. The Red Sox had done what no baseball team had done before, coming back from 3-0 to win the pennant. They did it against the Yankees. They did it at Yankee Stadium. The symmetry was staggering.
The World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals was an afterthought. The Red Sox swept in four games, outscoring the Cardinals 24-12. Ramirez hit .412 and was named Series MVP. Ortiz drove in four runs. On October 27, 2004, Keith Foulke fielded a ground ball hit by Edgar Renteria and tossed it to Doug Mientkiewicz at first base. The ball settled into his glove, and 86 years ended.
What the Drought Built
The Curse of the Bambino was never a real curse. It was a narrative frame placed around a long sequence of close losses, bad decisions, and extraordinary coincidences. The Red Sox were not a bad franchise during the 86-year gap. They reached the World Series four times and came within one out of winning in 1986. They had Ted Williams, Carl Yastrzemski, Jim Rice, Roger Clemens, Pedro Martinez, and dozens of other players who rank among the best in the sport's history. They were competitive decade after decade and unable to finish.
The story worked because it gave structure to randomness. Random failure across seven decades does not satisfy the human appetite for meaning, but a curse does. It explained why Pesky held the ball, why the grounder went through Buckner's legs, why Little left Martinez in, and why Dent's fly ball carried over the wall. It transformed a collection of unrelated events into a single, continuous tragedy. And it made the reversal, when it came, feel not like a championship but like a deliverance.
Dave Roberts's stolen base in Game 4 of the 2004 ALCS was the pivot point. If Posada's throw had arrived an inch closer to the bag, if Roberts's hand had gotten there a fraction later, the series would have ended in a sweep and the drought would have continued. Instead, it became the most famous stolen base in baseball history, the first beat of the greatest comeback the sport has seen, and the moment the Curse's hold broke.
The Red Sox have won four World Series since the drought ended, in 2004, 2007, 2013, and 2018. The franchise that spent 86 years defined by one transaction has spent the years since defined by its escape from that story. The Curse is over. What it did to the people who lived through it is not.