Great piece by Glenn Stout on how the blather on the “curse” first started, from George Vecsey’s description of a haunting to Dan Shaughnessy’s later exploitation. I like the point he makes about the fanatical Sox following really only coming together in 1967:
Apart from a few brief seasons after World War II from 1918 until 1967 nobody gave a damn about the Red Sox
So no one would’ve thought anything of the Sox’s general mediocrity in that time period. On Vecsey’s piece in 1986, Stout notes:
Until that moment, no one ascribed Boston’s failure to win a World Series since 1918 to anything resembling a curse connected to Babe Ruth and Harry Frazee. After each previous painful loss no one evoked the names of Ruth and Frazee.
But Vecsey seems to have inadvertently stumbled onto a phrasing that people latched onto; perhaps more reprehensibly, Shaughnessy went on to make money out of the supposed curse. Stout makes a point-by-point rebuttal of the supposed facts of the Curse, showing it to be little more than Shaughnessy’s hooey. He also shows the villainisation of Frazee in large part to be the result of a prevailing anti-Semitic (Frazee wasn’t Jewish but was seen as so) sentiment at the time, fuelled by Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent, and the hatchet-job portrait of Frazee as described by Fred Lieb. (Does that mean by villainising Frazee you’re inadvertently giving in to the anti-Semitic roots of the Curse? More reason to stop talking about it…)
Getting to the heart of it:
Bad management, bad luck, financial largesse, cronyism and even institutional racism were all imaginatively subsumed under the catch-all phrase “Curse of the Bambino”
The institutional racism - the Sox being the last AL team to integrate - was probably responsible for far more of the drought than any mythical mumbo-jumbo. Instead of Jackie Robinson, the Sox have Pumpsie Green.