Joe Torre talks about the Sox-Yankees rivalry and how last year’s win changed the tenor of the rivalry, and then invokes the c-word:
“I’m curious to see, every year the pressure seemed to mount because that 1918 was further back in time,” Torre said Friday before the Yankees played Pittsburgh. “Now that’s not an issue anymore, I’m curious because The Curse is not the motivating factor.” (Link)
Now, as an old-timer in the game, Torre must surely have known that no one talked about a curse - and certainly not a Curse with a capital C - surrounding the Sox until about 1986, as Glenn Stout’s research has shown. So was he talking about only recent history, or is human memory fallible like that, with the proliferation of ‘Curse’ talk in the stream of conversational chatter making him think there’s always been talk of a curse?
Yankees continued their losing streak against the Pirates, incidentally. When was the last time they won a game? Oh yeah, sometime in October.