The Year After Next Year
Boston Red Sox 2005
(as well as the Other Sox)
Copyright © 2005 Timothy Horrigan
Postscript (October 26, 2005): As it turned out the Sox did win the World Series in 2005: the Other Sox, the Chicago White Sox.
The Chisox have been an even more accursed team than their Bostonian rivals with the similar name. They hadn't won a World Series since 1917. When the White Sox lost the 1919 series, several players, including the great Shoeless Joe Jackson (the best ballplayer never to be enshrined in the Hall of Fame) were prosecuted for throwing the series. (Just to add an irrelevant digression, the 4th and final game of the 2005 Series was preceded by the introduction of a “Latino Legends” team. One of the honorees was the legnendary pitcher Fernando Valenzuela — arguably the third or fourth-greatest player not to make it to Cooperstown.)
Since then, the White Sox have always been very much the Second City's second team. The White Sox were the favorite team of the South Side and a few southern suburbs, while the Cubs were the favorite team of everywhere else in the Midwest. Until recently, the White Sox were such a low-profile team that the average fan didn't even know what the name of their ballpark was: Comiskey Park is commonly referred to as “Kaminski Park.” Their greatest player of the past several decades, Carlton Fisk, was picked up as the result of a clerical error by his previous team (the Red Sox) which made him a free agent.
The most famous game in the history of the old Comiskey Park was a game which never actually got played. On July 12, 1979, a local radio DJ named Steve Dahl hosted a “Disco Demolition” promotion during the intermission of a doubleheader against the Detroit Tigers. When the pile of discarded disco records was detonated in center field, the fans began rioting and the second game of the doubleheader had to be forfeited. Although there have been a few similar incidents where fans rioted during a game, this is the only time the fans prevented a game from even getting started.
Since 1919, the White Sox made only one trip to the Fall Classic: that was in 1959. The Sox lost the series fair and square without anything particularly horrendous happening to them— but there was a bizarrely amusing incident when they clinched the pennant. Mayor Richard J. Daley decided to add a festive touch by setting off the city's air raid sirens. Unfortunately the elation turned to panic, when fans assumed that World War III had broken out.
Until 2005, the White Sox had never won an American League playoff series. In the seasons between 1969 and 2004, they only made three trips to the playoffs. In 1983, they won their division by 20 games but still failed to win the pennant.
[October 26, 2005]
Note: I originally wrote this piece at the beginning of the 2005 season, which was the year after the Red Sox beat the “Curse of the Bambino” by winning the 2004 World Series. The Sox put together another great team for 2005. The biggest loss over the post season was Pedro Martinez, who decamped for the Mets— but the Sox picked up another veteran pitcher to replace him in the starting rotation, i.e., David Wells. Although it was a great season, it seemed a little anticlimatic somehow with no curse to overcome.
The 2005 season ended with a Division Series against the Chicago White Sox (another cursed team who in 2005 compiled the best record in the American League.)
The Pale Hose swept the Carmine Hose 3 games to zip. It was a rather frustrating series for Red Sox Nation. Game 1 was a 14-2 blowout. Starter Matt Clement gave up 8 runs in 3-plus innings.
Game 2 was much closer. Chicago won, 5-3: the pivotal play was a shocking error by the normally solid second baseman Tony Graffanino. He somehow managed to miss a slow roller which any beer-league softball player could've gotten to. He made Bill Buckner look like Ozzie Smith on this particular play. This error set up a game-winning homer by Graffanino's opposite number, White Sox 2B Tadahito Iguchi
The series went to Fenway Park for Game 3. This game was a classic, especially the 6th inning. Even though only 3 runs were scored, it took almost an hour to play, and what an hour it was. The White Sox picked up two runs in the top of the inning, with great difficulty. Going into the bottom of the 6th, the Red Sox were down 4-2. Manny Ramirez led off by hitting his second homer of the game, and then the Sox went on load up the bases with none out. The White Sox brought in the ageless veteran Orlando Hernandez. “El Duque” needed about 25 pitches to shut down the next three batters (ending with a dramatic strikeout of Johnny Damon.) The game ended as a 5-3 White Sox victory.
The last time the White Sox won a post-season series was in
1917, when they won the World
Series. Two years later, the Sox got mixed up in the “Black
Sox” scandal when several players allegedly took bribes to
throw the 1919
World Series.
Box Scores:
Game 1 (October 4, 2005 @ New Comiskey Park)
Game 2 (October 5, 2005 @ New Comiskey Park)
Game 3 (October 7, 2005 @ Fenway Park)
The Boston Red Sox won the 2004 World Series, which was their first world championship in 86 years. Probably this is just a statistical anamoly: there are (currently) 30 Major League Baseball teams with only one World Series title available to be won each year. Nevertheless, it was a long wait. (For me personally, the end was anticlimatic: I even skipped a few innings of the last game of the Series to watch a lunar eclipse, though I was back in time for the last out. And the euphoria lasted only twelve hours: the next day an HR person from a company called Measured Progress, Inc. called me to tell me that I was in fact not going to get a job I was counting on getting. But for most Sox fans, the euphoria lasted a little longer than that.)
Even if their 86 years of futility was just a statistical fluke, it is still true that the Sox ran into some bad luck along the way. In Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, Red Sox first baseman Bill Buckner let a seemingly easy ground ball bounce between his legs. In a 1978 playoff game, a weak-hitting Yankees infielder named Bucky Dent finished off the Sox with a pop-fly homer which just barely cleared the wall. In 2003, a even weaker-hitting infielder named Aaron Boone did the same. And those are just a few examples.
The Sox fans explained their team's futility with two cliches: “The Curse of the Bambino” and “The Yankees Suck!”
The Yankees allegedly suck because they have too much money. Certainly, they do have the biggest radio and TV contract in Major League Baseball and since the mid-1970s they have been owned by an eccentric billionaire. However, the Red Sox franchise is itself not exactly poverty-stricken.
The “Curse of the Bambino” is supposedly the result of a financial transaction from the very distant past. After the 1919 season, the Red Sox sold Babe Ruth's contract to the Yankees for what seemed at the time to be a large sum of money. He was a 25-year-old left-handed pitcher who was such a good hitter that he played in the outfield between starts.
The Yankees converted him to a full-time outfielder, and he blossomed into the greatest hitter who ever lived, and one of his many nicknames was “The Bambino.” The Yankees also blossomed into the greatest team in baseball. Aside from relatively brief periods of mediocrity in the 1960s and 1980s, they have been a dominant franchise ever since. Meanwhile, until 2004 AL Championship Series, the Sox could never quite get the best of the Yankees. This was blamed on the “Curse of the Bambino”: supposedly the Sox were being punished for selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees. Ironically, Ruth himself liked the city of Boston. He ended his career in 1935 with Boston's National League team, the Braves, and he even lived in Boston for a while after he retired.
In any case, the Curse has been lifted. But the Yankees will presumably continue to suck. Appropriately, the 2005 season kicked off with a series between the Yankees and the Red Sox, with former Yankee David Wells being the Red Sox starting pitcher. Wells and Ruth have a strange connection: Wells collects Ruth's memorabilia. In an amusing and legendary incident, Wells was once fined for wearing a cap from his collection on the mound. It was one of Ruth's Yankees caps from the 1920s or 1930s, which looked almost but not quite like a present-day Yankees cap. A few innings went by before the umpire realized that Wells was not wearing a regulation cap.
It would have been funny if Wells had worn one of Ruth's Red Sox caps on opening day 2005.
Some Red Sox links:
Official Red Sox web site: http://redsox.mlb.com
Boston.com's Red Sox page: http://www.boston.com/sports/baseball/redsox
Baseball-Reference.com Red Sox page: http://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/BOS
CBS Sportsline Red Sox Page: http://cbs.sportsline.com/mlb/teams/page/BOS
Web Directories about the Boston Red Sox:
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