Dr. Darryl V. Caterine
Department of Religious Studies,
Grinnell College
Abstract
Boston Red Sox fans once attributed their team's failure to win
a World Series to its sale in 1918 of Babe Ruth to the New
York Yankees. In the 2004 playoffs and World Series, the Red Sox
exorcised the "Curse of the Bambino" by emerging victorious
over their rivals. The Curse and its catharsis–which
mirror Puritan jeremiads and execution ceremonies, respectively–reveal
baseball as a rite of "sacred violence" maintaining social
order by regulating aggression. Accentuated rivalry
between the Red Sox and the Yankees demythologized the pastoral
idealizations of baseball that have figured prominently in
its history since the Civil War, finally rendering it a spectacle
of ordinary violence for New England fans.
[1]
On the night of October 17, 2004, against the backdrop of a total
lunar eclipse, an unkempt and boyish band of Major League ballplayers
from Boston, who dubbed themselves "the Idiots," delivered
New England from eighty-six years of ignominy and defeat. For
the first time since 1918, after a series of heartbreaking near-misses,
the Boston Red Sox won the World Series, in a four-game sweep against
the St. Louis Cardinals. In the neologism of J.R.R. Tolkien,
their victory was nothing less than a "eucatastrophe," an
unexpected and astonishing rebound from a seemingly hopeless situation.
Eight games earlier, in the penultimate playoffs, the Red Sox had
trailed the New York Yankees 0-3 games, teetering on the edge of
what seemed almost certainly to be yet another year of humiliation
and heart-break for their fans. But the beleaguered team began
to clamber back, one game at a time, and by the tie-breaking game
against New York, a series of bloody and violent events seemed auspiciously
to signal a decisive turn of fortune for the New England team.
[2]
First, there was Curt Schilling of the Red Sox, who had vowed to
redeem himself from a humiliating defeat in the first game against
the Yankees. The born-again, evangelical Christian pitcher
seemingly prayed himself out of bed to the mound at Yankee Stadium,
where he gave up just one run over seven innings despite a dislocated
tendon in his right ankle. From its fresh sutures blood seeped,
turning his athletic sock a bright crimson. Then, in the sixth
game against the Yankees, in the top of the ninth inning, helmeted
New York police rushed out onto the playing field after two contested
calls by umpires had New Yorkers jeering and throwing debris from
the stands for ten minutes, threatening mayhem. Finally and
tragically, during the near-riotous celebrations following the Sox'
final victory against the Yankees, Boston City Police unwittingly
killed 21-year-old college student Victoria Snelgrove after
firing pepper-spray capsules into the crowds gathered around Fenway
Park. The gravitas of real-time events seemed to parallel,
for many New England fans, the possible waning of the so-called "Curse
of the Bambino," a legendary dark spell preventing the Red
Sox from winning a World Series, which Boston had allegedly brought
upon itself after selling Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees in 1918. New
England stood on the threshold of the 100th World Series with a
strange admixture of bewilderment and anticipation.
[3]
Finally, when in St. Louis the rag-tag fellowship finally clenched
the World Series in a four-game shut-out, Boston made it plain for
the world to see that something more than just a game had been won. The
Curse of the Bambino would never again stigmatize Red Sox fans. In
a geocultural region long known for its Anglo-Calvinist reserve,
celebration, revelry, and sentimentality erupted immediately in
the streets of Boston and throughout New England. On the night
of October 27, church bells tolled, fireworks lit up the sky, honking
car horns filled the late-night streets with cacophony, victory
parties gathered spontaneously in pubs and private homes. Three
days later, the victory parade for the homecoming Red Sox drew to
the streets of Boston no less than three million fans, who stood
in a shower of cold rain amidst a blizzard of confetti and the blaring
of Handel's Hallelujah Chorus.
[4] In this essay I would like to revisit the legend of the
Curse of the Bambino for the insights it can provide scholars of
American religion on the allegedly religious dimension of baseball. The
Winter 1996 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, which
was devoted entirely to a discussion of religion and American popular
culture, featured a now-widely-cited essay by David Chidester arguing
for the inclusion of America’s favorite game in the academic
study of religion.1 Chidester
put forward a functionalist argument to advance the cause, echoing
similar cases made years earlier by such notable scholars of religion
as Catherine L. Albanese, Allen Guttmann, and Joseph L. Price.2 For
these scholars, baseball exhibits a distinctive set of myths, rituals,
and codes of behavior–the formal elements of “official” religions–that
function to unite a community of participants/believers and orient
them to an atemporal social and cosmic order.
[5] The 2004 World Series would certainly seem to vindicate the
religious dimension of baseball, at least for New England fans.
If the explicit comparisons between baseball and religion in Red
Sox Nation–New Englander's designation for their own geocultural
fan base–were not previously known to scholars, they are by
now already "old news." Consider, for example, the
stunned reaction of ESPN sportswriter and Red Sox Nation citizen
Bill Simmons, who spoke after the play-offs for his fellow fans
in words that were only slightly hyperbolic:
Honestly, I don't know what to do. I just watched my beloved
Red Sox win the American League pennant. That's only happened
twice in my lifetime. I watched them rally back from three
games in a playoff series. That's never happened before, not
in the history of baseball. I also just watched the Sox beat
the Yankees in a deciding playoff game. Not only has
that never happened before, it's a possible sign of the apocalypse.3
Other fans and players celebrating the playoffs and Series victories
similarly resorted to language reserved for great events in religious
history. Former Red Sox infielder Johnny Pesky confessed, "I
dreamt about this day. I said my prayers every night to the
big guy: 'Bring us a World Series.'"4 Tyler
Kepner of the New York Times wrote, "This was
for the believers. For Ted Williams and for Yaz (Carl Yastremski)
and all the others who spent a career beneath a boulder that kept
rolling down a hill. This was an exorcism of 86 years of anguish."5 And Boston
Globe reporter Raja Mishra proclaimed, "Euphoria, joy,
or madness–call it what you will. After 86 years, Red
Sox Nation got deliverance."6
[6]
Even as fans in Red Sox Nation clearly recognize and testify to
the numinous dimension of baseball, scholars might consider the
history and final catharsis of New England's "curse" to
discuss the intimate relationship between religion, rivalry and
violence. In his now-classic study Violence and the Sacred, René Girard
writes that the origin and raison d'être of religion
is found in violence: ritual pre-empts intra-societal or "impure" violence
born of rivalry by periodically evoking communal aggression and
re-directing it towards a scapegoat. Social unity is "miraculously" effected
by such rites of "pure violence," epitomized for Girard
in ancient ceremonies of human sacrifice, which legitimize scapegoating
as mandated by more-than-human powers.
[7]
From a Girardian perspective, it is violence and its mystification
that impart to baseball its numinous character. Like any other
sport, baseball draws its appeal in large part from the way it evokes
aggression from a local fan base and diffuses it towards the rival
team, which is symbolically sacrificed in the ignominy of defeat. But
baseball typically effects such a catharsis more bloodlessly than
other modern games. As a rite of sacred violence in American
culture, its aggressive ends are muted by pastoral idealizations
of its origins–and once upon a time in New England, by biblical
explanations of its meaning.7 In
keeping with Girard's analysis, this denial or "misunderstanding" of
baseball's essential rivalry is what allows it to diffuse impure
violence from a community without triggering further acts of retaliatory
or mimetic violence.
[8]
As I will argue in the following pages, the Curse of the Bambino
was a modern-day retelling of the Puritan jeremiad that kept alive
a tale of social disorder symbolized by the sale of Babe Ruth. The
ritually pure violence of baseball was violated by the impure aggression
of capitalist aggrandizement. In the two decades leading up
to the victorious World Series, New Englanders attempted to “reverse
the curse” by redirecting rivalry towards its proper end,
the New York Yankees who purchased Ruth, in increasingly vitriolic
displays of collective animosity. From a Girardian perspective,
the ultimate catharsis of the Curse in the 2004 playoffs and Series
was predictably violent, marked as it was by riot police, a tragic
and accidental death, and of course Curt Schilling's bloody sock. But
now that the Curse is gone, now that the rivalry of Red Sox Nation
has finally found its proper place in the ceremonial complex that
is baseball–the identity of Red Sox Nation has been demythologized
for all to see. As Ken Rosenthal of The Sporting News taunted: "Sox
fans, destined to lose, conditioned to lose, born to lose, must
face a startling new reality: THEIR LIVES HAVE NO MEANING!
. . . [R]ooting for the Sox will be different now."8 Religious
longsuffering has finally given way to worldly triumph, and the
Boston Red Sox have returned to their pre-1918 status as an ordinary,
all-American team.
[9] It is impossible to say exactly when the Curse of the Bambino
emerged as a twentieth-century retelling of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The
House of the Seven Gables, a tale of sin and damnation revisited
upon posterity. According to several New Englanders interviewed
for the present essay, the Curse has been a part of local folklore
ever since they can remember. According to some scholars,
however, the origins of the legend are to be found in a 1986 article
by New York Times journalist George Vecsey entitled "Babe
Ruth Curse Strikes Again." After recounting a series
of heartbreaking near-misses in the years since Ruth's sale, Vecsey
wrote, "All the ghosts and demons and curses of the past 68
years continued to haunt the Boston Red Sox last night," adding, "Yet
the owner sold him to the lowly New York Yankees to finance one
of his Broadway shows, and for 68 years it has never been the same."9
[10] It was not until the publication of Dan Shaughnessy's 1990
book The Curse of the Bambino, a history of the Red Sox seen
through the prism of the Curse, embellished with reflections by
various Red Sox players and fans, that knowledge of the legend became
well-circulated throughout the national subculture of baseball. Shaugnessy
records that when Red Sox owner Harry Frazee exchanged Babe Ruth
to the Yankees in 1918 for $100,000 and a $300,000 loan for a mortgage
on Fenway Park, he committed a sin. Frazee exchanged greatness
for filthy lucre–a violation of the Protestant ethical code
of honour in sports. A South Boston leader of the Knights
of Columbus seemed to speak for most of Boston when he wrote to
the owner: “It is the consensus of opinion in K[nights] of
C[olumbus] circles that Boston fans were dealt with very unfairly
in the sale of Brother Ruth, and it is felt that commercialism is
fast gaining control of baseball.”10 The
indictment of baseball's commercialization hearkened back to another
suspected scandal in the early twentieth century: the alleged conspiracy
between eight Chicago White Sox players and organized crime to rig
the outcome of the World Series. Official indictments had
been made by a grand jury in Cook County, Illinois, a year after
the favored Sox lost to the Cincinnati Reds in 1919. While
the courts were not able to prove the guilt of the players, newly-appointed
commissioner of the National Commission of Baseball, Judge Kenesaw
Mountain Landis, called the verdict flawed and banned the so-called “Black
Sox” from baseball for life. Again the sin–baseball’s
corruption by money.
[11] In the years following Ruth's sale to the Yankees, Boston's
record in the American League plummeted. Between 1922 and 1932,
the Red Sox managed to finish last nine times in the American League. In
1939, with the addition of outfielder Ted Williams, the Red Sox
began to rebound. In 1946, they once again found themselves
in the World Series, playing against the St. Louis Cardinals. Shaugnessy
conjectures that the Curse of the Bambino began to form in the aftermath
of that Series, in which Boston Boston lost in the seventh game. Shaugnessy
cites a 1947 Saturday Evening Post article, "What's
the Matter With the Red Sox?" in which Boston Globe sportswriter
Harold Kaese expressed a mixture of bewilderment and frustration
over the home team's apparent inability to re-emerge as national
champions. The 1946 near-miss was to be followed by three
other heartbreaking losses in the decades leading up to 2004, each
of which was memorialized in a particular play: Bucky Dent's
home run in the 1978 one-game playoff with the Yankees; Mookie Wilson's
ground ball running between Bill Buckner's legs in the sixth came
of the 1986 World Series against the New York Mets; and Aaron Boone's
eleventh-inning home run for the Yankees in the seventh game of
the 2003 playoffs, which inspired the 2004 documentary Still,
We Believe–The Boston Red Sox Movie. Even as Boston
staggered, tried, and failed throughout the decades following Ruth's
sale to regain its national champion status, New York emerged as
the paragon of American ball teams. Ruth’s skill not
only catapulted the Yankees to a string of victories throughout
the 1920s and early 1930s, but brought fame to New York. Yankee
Stadium, opened in 1923, was popularly christened "The House
that Ruth Built” (a term first coined by Fred Lieb, nationally
renowned baseball writer) after the sports giant hit the park’s
first home run. Between 1918 and 2003, New York emerged to
win thirty-nine American League play-offs and twenty-six World Series.
[12] Leaving aside for a moment the dating of the legend, the Curse
of the Bambino came to galvanize what historian of religion David
Chidester designates as a “community of believers” in
his 1996 article “The Church of Baseball, the Fetish of Coca-Cola,
and the Potlatch of Rock ‘n’ Roll.”11 As
a national sports journalist summarized at the beginning of the
2004 season:
The church and state are inseparable when it comes to the Red
Sox: sisters pray for them; clerics sermonize about them, segueing
from the trials of Job; politicians bet (and lose) lobster dinners
because of them. MIT professors teach the physics of Tim Wakefield’s
knuckler. New anchors talk tough about bringing down the Yankees–in
March. The Sox are the state’s common bond, its cross
to bitterly bear. Victory may be sweet, but epic collapse
is unifying.12
As the turn of the millennium came and went, and the World Series
continued to elude the Red Sox, playing and watching baseball in
New England came to entail the perennial narration of a myth, a
story that contextualized the game’s subculture in a more-than-human
cosmos. In Red Sox Nation, victories came to be celebrated
and losses mourned as evidence of the transcendent Curse’s
waxing and waning. Shaughnessy even went so far as to liken
Fenway Park, the Boston baseball stadium, to the pilgrimage centres
of world religions. “A Harvard professor once compared
it with the bullring of Knossos on the island of Crete,” he
noted in The Curse of the Bambino. “Fenway is only a
ballpark the way the Sistine Chapel is only a church. And
it was left-handed [Bill] Lee (Red Sox 1969-1978) who observed, ‘Fenway
Park is a shrine where people come for religious rites.’”13
[13]
During what might be called the Era of the Curse, baseball in Red
Sox Nation became the locus of what scholar Lisle Dalton has called “popular
theodicy”–a reflection upon why bad things happen to
good Americans. In an extended sociohistorical analysis of
codes of behaviour in sports, The Influence of the Protestant
Ethic on Sport and Recreation, Steven J. Overman has applied
Max Weber’s well-known thesis on the Protestant ethic and
the emergence of capitalism to an analysis of modern games. Overman
cites seven secularized Protestant values–rationalization,
the work ethic, goal-directedness, moral asceticism, individualism,
achieved status, and competitiveness–as forming what he calls
the “American sports ethos.” Victory in baseball
or any modern sport is achieved by harnessing and developing physical
prowess through the disciplinary rule of Protestantized asceticism,
and conversely, the celebration of victory pays homage to the values
of the Protestantized ethos. But during the Era of the Curse,
hard work, achieved status, and competitiveness did not achieve
the goals they were supposed to achieve in Red Sox Nation; the national
championship continued to elude them. In an inversion
of what Overman has called the Protestant ethos of baseball, New
England responded by supporting their perennial near-winners in
an embrace of loss as a sign of grace. In an otherwise comic
national game, baseball came to take on a discernibly tragic dimension
in Red Sox Nation, as many fans likened their support of the local
team to the experience of unrequited love.
[14] Red Sox fans came, in fact, to celebrate loss in the same way
the Puritans had once embraced misfortune as a sign of Jehovah’s
punishing love. The Puritan jeremiad–a sermonic genre
developed to explain social calamities as the result of unrepented
sins–drew upon Old Testament speculations on the relationship
between sin and curses. Misfortune, disease, and even death
itself were understood in the ancient context to be the logical
outcome of human unholiness, a straying from the mitzvot of
YHWH’s Law. Jeremiads in seventeenth-century New England
similarly attempted to give a transcendent meaning to collective
suffering endured through epidemics, agricultural losses, or war. As
historian Sacvan Bercovitch has noted, the logic of the jeremiad
sealed the claim of Puritan New Englanders to be Jehovah’s
chosen people.14 Even in
the worst of times, God could never be said to have abandoned New
England. Punishment
was a special kind of grace–wrath was a sign that a chastising
God was keeping close watch over his Puritan flock.
[15]
At least on the surface of things, this morbid mythology seemed
to have little to do with baseball as it was played and appreciated
by fans outside New England. But not all Red Sox fans gave
in to the spell of the Curse. Stephen King, for one–New
England's native son, outspoken Red Sox fan, and author of gothic
fiction–refused, not without a little irony, to take curses
seriously. Red Sox president Larry Lucchino, who told reporters
after the 2004 Series, "we don't believe in no stinking curses," also
remained a diehard skeptic.15 And
in the two decades leading up to the 2004 victory, countless
other Red Sox fans increasingly grew weary of their Suffering Servant
status, and began exploring ways to “reverse the curse.” In
February, 2002, a national sports journal published what is arguably
the most bizarre ritual ever to be recorded in the subculture of
Red Sox Nation–a rite designed to expunge the Curse of the
Bambino from New England. With the permission of the state
of Massachusetts, a diving expedition was organized in Sudbury to
retrieve a grand piano allegedly dumped into a pond by Babe Ruth,
when he left New England to play baseball for the Yankees.
On Saturday, a group went to the bottom of a suburban Boston
pond in search of Babe Ruth’s piano, which, the story goes,
was tossed into the water by the slugger in 1918.
The group hopes to refurbish the piano and play it again, just
as the Babe did in 1918, the last time the Red Sox won a World
Series. A
season later, Ruth was sold to the New York Yankees, who have
since on 26 championships.
“Once we bring this up, the Red Sox will win,” Sudbury
historian Lee Swanson said.
The search is sponsored by the Restoration Project, a rehabilitation
program for adults with mental illnesses and head injuries. It
received a search permit from the state–Willis Pond
is state property . . .
“We’re confident we can save it and play it again,” said
Kevin Kennedy, a local upholsterer who volunteers with the group. “Wouldn’t
that be something? The last person to play this piano was
Babe Ruth. Who knows–it could end up at Fenway
Park.”16
While the piano was never found, the story of the Sudbury divers
instantly became part of local baseball lore. Added to the
gloom of the Curse were the efforts to exorcise it. In April,
2004, The Boston Globe saw it fit to publish as local news
the efforts of a second-grade teacher in Natick, Massachusetts,
to extract from her students new ways to expiate Red Sox Nation
of its sin. Their solutions included trading Red Sox players
who believed in the Curse to other teams, pretending the Curse did
not exist, and feeding Baby Ruth candy bars to Red Sox players before
their games.17
[16] The most efficacious rites used in Boston to repel the curse,
however, were neither bizarre nor quaint. They were, in a
word, violent. In September 2004, National Public Radio
aired a profile on Red Sox Nation on its All Things Considered program
documenting a number of preternatural signs seen by many New Englanders
to herald an imminent lifting of the Curse. The most auspicious: Lee
Gavin, a spectator at Fenway Park, had his two front teeth knocked
out by a ball slammed into the stands by Manny Ramirez. NPR’s
Melissa Block explained, “But instead of sympathy, Lee’s
injury has sparked something of a celebration. This wasn’t
just any kid who got hit. He’s the kid who lives in
the same Sudbury farmhouse where Babe Ruth once lived, the same
Babe Ruth whose trade to the Yankees spawned the Curse of the Bambino
that many believe has kept the Sox from winning a World Series since
1918.” An unsuspecting scapegoat, Gavin took a hit for
the accursed team.
[17] The most widespread ritual for repelling bad luck in Red Sox
Nation came to be the garish chanting of “Yankees Suck” during
Red Sox games against New York. The chant could spontaneously
erupt at any athletic event, professional or amateur, in New England. Vendors
at Fenway Park began to peddle “Yankees Suck” T-Shirts
as one of their best-selling souvenirs. During my own visit
to the 2004 opening game against the Yankees, one fan bared for
a local film crew a “Yankees Suck” T-shirt, worn underneath
the more traditional Red Sox jersey like a set of Mormon undergarments
for warding off evil. Even the second-graders in Natick included
putting a curse on the Yankees as one of their possible remedies
for a beleaguered New England.
[18]
Hatred of the Yankees hung like a pall over New England baseball
fans. Sports historians traced the roots of the antagonism
back to a 1938 game at Yankee Stadium, in which the Sox pitcher
hit New York outfielder Jake Powell with a pitch. Powell charged
towards the pitching mound, but was blocked by Red Sox owner Joe
Cronin. The two men began brawling, and the fight lasted for
several minutes, moving from the pitching mound to underneath the
stands. Both Powell and Cronin were suspended from ten games. Since
that time, six other fights have broken out between the Red Sox
and the Yankees: four at Fenway Park, and two at Yankee Stadium,
the most recent erupting in Boston in July, 2004. In the years
leading up to the 2004 Series, animosity toward New York mounted
to something of a fever pitch in Boston. After losing a bid
to the Yankees for Cuban pitcher Jose Contreras in 2000, Larry Lucchino
referred to the New York team as the “empire,” in a
thinly veiled reference to the Evil Empire of either Star Wars or
the former Soviet Union. In the spring of 2004, after Alex
Rodriguez signed with New York instead of Boston, Red Sox centre
fielder Johnny Damon told reporters: “I was shocked. He
signed with the Devil.”18 The
Yankees, in contrast, remained relatively cool. Their owner
George Steinbrenner dismissed comments about the Evil Empire with
a flippant, “That’s how sick people think.”19 And
former Yankee Reggie Jackson disclosed to Shaughnessy that “when
you were with the Yankees, you just handled the Red Sox. You
knew you were going to beat them. They just didn’t play
well against New York. The papers would get on ’em and
the fans expected them to get beat. The Red Sox players didn’t
expect to play well.”20
[19]
Throughout all these displays of naked aggression, New Englanders
were, of course, violating the etiquette of national baseball. Consensus
among sports fans has it that baseball is, or should be, distinguished
from sports like football and hockey for its relative lack of violence. National
poet laureate Donald Hall has called baseball “the poet’s
game”–citing Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams,
and Robert Frost as three luminary American bards who, together
with scores of lesser known poets, have incorporated the sport variously
into their verse as pastoral idealizations of pre-industrial America
(“baseball, mom, and apple pie”). He writes that “baseball
is fathers and sons playing catch,” while football, for example,
is “brothers beating each other up in the back yard”–at
least in the popular imagination.21
[20]
But Hall himself dissents from the majority opinion. Rather
than idealizing the game as a pastoral myth, he suggests that baseball
is distinguished from other sports by its ability to disguise the
underlying aggression of the athletes:
In the country of baseball, the citizens talk about aggression. Athletes
talk about aggressiveness the way businessmen talk about profit
margins. Many middle-class Americans–workers and clerks,
teachers and small business folk–have problems dealing with
their own aggression. Aggression is human and necessary, built
into us by the power and craft of survival, but in our lives it
can be destructive. We need to disguise it (as love
or sexual drive, as gregariousness or good works) in order
to live with it. Or we turn it inward on ourselves.22
Most analyses of baseball juxtapose or contrast the endeavors of
athletes to those of businessmen. As we have seen, Boston
and Chicago both met their legendary doom in encounters with the
marketplace. Accordingly, Chidester qualifies his own assessment
of baseball-as-religion by noting the increasingly widespread perception
that the game has lost its mythic charm in the hands of corporate
planners. “Feeling betrayed by both greedy players and
arrogant owners, many devotees have become apostates of the religion
of baseball,” he notes. “In this context the phrase ‘church
of baseball’ shifts from metaphor to irony; it becomes a figure
of ironic displacement as collective memory is transformed from
commemoration of an enduring tradition to nostalgia for a lost world.23
[21]
Hall points to a different configuration between capitalism, baseball,
and religion than has yet been explored by scholars. Baseball,
he suggests, is analogous to capitalism in its redirection of aggression
to what appears to be a non-violent end: the bloodless
defeat of the rival team. But baseball and capitalism in fact conceal the
latent aggression that drives them both. If Marxist analysis
demythologizes the rationality of capitalism through its exposure
of crass class warfare, spontaneous eruptions of violence and spite
in Red Sox Nation similarly demythologize the pastoral idealization
of baseball. There it is put on equal footing with football
and hockey; its essential meaning as a game of rivalry–not
always bloodless–is exposed for all to see. In their attempts
to reverse the Curse through heightened displays of aggression,
Boston fans also revealed one of its sociological meanings that
is not first apparent in either the theological language of the
jeremiad or the mythic idealization of the "baseball pastoral."
[22]
Historian of religion Catherine Albanese has suggested that rivalry
in American sports is a ritual that re-enacts Christian myths of
cosmic warfare narrated in the Book of Revelation. “As
in the biblical story of the ultimate war,” she writes, “it
is clear in the game that there is a good team (our side) and a
bad one (their side). Coaches urge the members of their team
to pour out all their efforts into winning–as if this were
the last game on earth.”24 In
Boston, however, rivalry with New York would seem to be embedded
in the history of the Curse. Directed against their demonized
rival, collective aggression was evoked and directed safely away
from Red Sox Nation. But at one time, as Bostonians constantly
used to remind themselves, aggression went awry. For easy
money, an owner colluded with New York and turned against Red Sox
Nation. New Englanders were haunted by something even more
heinous than the greed of Harry Frazee. The Curse of the Bambino
memorialized the ultimate taboo of sports: rivalry that should have
been directed towards another team was once directed inwards to
the community. Worse still, the misdirected aggression caused
the other team to prosper.
[23]
The ritual logic of “reversing the Curse” was as simple
as it was vulgar. If the Curse of the Bambino perennially
commemorated the introjection of aggression into Red Sox Nation,
rituals designed to reverse the Curse sought a catharsis of aggression. Rivalry
with New York, which in 1918 was insufficiently powerful to ward
off Frazee’s sabotage, was heightened to levels rarely seen
in baseball. New York was literally demonized, and its
defeat in games relished with all the joy and relief that some survivors
of violent crimes find in the execution of a criminal. It may have
been Boston’s truly uncanny loss of the 1986 World Series
to the New York Mets that paved the way for eventual rites of purification–if
not the origin of the Curse itself, in the New York Times article
by George Vecsey. As already mentioned, it was in the sixth
game of that World Series that a ground ball hit by the Mets’ Mookie
Wilson rolled between the legs of Boston’s first baseman Bill
Buckner. Many fans have since speculated that this was the
error that cost Boston its national championship–an irrational
claim to which we shall return. Buckner and his family later
moved away from New England, out of fear for their lives. It
was time for a sacrifice.
[24]
Once again, there is a clear Puritan precedent for this ritual logic. As
a lamentation of social disintegration, the jeremiad was largely
designed to restore social order by provoking sinners towards their
own repentance. But in certain cases, New England was said
to be cursed by the misdeeds of recalcitrant heretics and
criminals, who were accordingly sent to the gallows in a public
ceremony infused with the ritual language of expunging a curse. Historian
David Hall included these executions as instances of popular Puritan
religiosity in his Days of Wonder, Worlds of Judgment:
In ancient regime France, peasants set the church bells
pealing when a hailstorm threatened crops, and turned to relics
of a local saint for aid in bringing good weather. The Book of Homilies
of the Church of England included prayers “For rain, if the
time require,” “For fair weather,” for good crops
and for the abatement of the plague. Facing the same dangers,
people in New England depended on the fast day and thanksgiving
to restore proper order. They staged another ritual, the ceremony
of confession, in courts of law and churches. Less often,
and with fewer gestures in Europe, they hanged people in a
public execution.25
Puritans reserved public executions for what they deemed the most
heinous of crimes. Hall lists these as “blasphemy, murder,
bestiality, homosexuality, adultery, false witness, treason.”26 As
is well known, public executions were held in New England for women
accused of witchcraft during the late seventeenth century. As
a public ritual moving Puritan societies “from danger to deliverance,” execution
was the ultimate resort for expunging incorrigible sinners and powerful
curses from New England.
[25]
The relationship between the sins of the condemned and their accursed
consequences for all of New England were worked out explicitly in
a class of Puritan sermons referred to as “execution sermons.” Passages
from two of these texts, addressed to the accused but delivered
to entire congregations, suffice to illustrate the religious dimension
of execution in New England. Here is Increase Mather writing
in 1674 “Wicked Man’s Portion”:
Consider that now you must dye [sic] before your Time,
especially one of you, a poor young creature that hath hardly
lived twenty years in this world, and must this day be turned
out of it. Yea
both of you dy [sic] before your Time. You might according
to the ordinary course of nature have lived many a year. You
must be cut off by a violent and dreadful death. For indeed
the anger of the Lord would fall upon this whole Country where your
sin hath been committed, if you should be suffered to live [italics
added].27
In his 1685 “A Sermon Occasioned by the Execution of a Man
Found Guilty of Murder,” Mather develops the ritual logic
of execution even further:
For Murder is such a sin as does pollute the very Land where
it is done; not only the person that has shed blood is polluted
thereby, but the whole Land lies under Pollution until such time
as Justice is done upon the Murderer … One Murder unpunished, may bring
guilt & a curse upon the whole Land, that all the Inhabitants
of the land shall suffer for it; so that Mercy to a Murderer
is Cruelty to a People.28
Like the religious logic of the jeremiad, the theology of execution
sermons was firmly rooted in the scriptures of the Old Testament. Deuteronomy
21:23, for example, declared that “anyone hung on a tree is
under God’s curse,” while Malachi 4:6 spoke of YHWH
cursing the land of Israel for the sins of the people.
[26] In his classic analysis of human sacrifice, Violence and
the Sacred, René Girard argues that rites of “sacred
violence,” of which the Puritan execution ceremony is a fait
typique, function to evoke, redirect, and expunge violence
from a community. Girard suggests that the greatest danger posed
by human aggression is found in what he calls its “mimetic” character. Violence
typically provokes a like reaction, perennially threatening societies
with interminable chain-reactions of retribution. In ancient
rites of human sacrifice, Girard sees a mechanism by which the
cycle of violence is periodically pre-empted. On the one
hand, the prolonged execution ceremony of a human sacrifice is
deliberately designed to awaken and gratify the violent appetites
of a community. On the other hand, the death of a sacrificial
victim does not perpetuate violence because his or her execution
is ritually performed and presented as an act of more-than-human
violence, mandated not by the violent impulses of the human
community, but by the decree of the gods or God.
[27] Girard notes that the efficacy of human sacrifice rests on
this collective “misunderstanding,” or cultural denial,
of the essentially human violence of the rite. This misunderstanding
is effected through two important ritual strategies. First,
the ritual of sacrifice is legitimized as a re-enactment of divine
acts in illo tempore, a repetition of a primordial, cosmic
sacrifice. Second, the sacrificial victim is simultaneously
demonized and divinized; even as the maladies and misfortunes of
the entire community are heaped upon him, his death alone will liberate
them from their sufferings. In the absence of such ritual
strategies–if the violence of the ceremony were to be perceived
as simply another act of ordinary, human violence–sacrifice
would only serve to perpetuate the mimetic violence in the community. In
Girard’s terms, it would constitute “impure” violence. Pure
or sacred violence then, is never performed or perceived as violence per
se, but enacted and resymbolized through the mythic and ritual
language of religion.
[28] From a Girardian perspective, the empirical “curse” threatening
Puritan New England was social disintegration threatened by a mimetic
chain-reaction of retaliation and counter-retaliation for murders
or accusations of heresy. By grounding the execution of criminals
in the transcendent Law of YHWH, demonizing the condemned as the
agent of a collective misfortune, and awaiting their execution as
the lifting of a curse, Puritans followed the precedent of ancient
Israelite society of countering the threat of impure violence with
a ceremony of sacred violence. Similarly, in Red Sox Nation
the Curse commemorated a breakdown of a social order in the subculture
of baseball, when an owner’s capitalist aggression turned
against the team. By grounding animosity towards the Yankees
in the metaphysics of “reversing the curse,” demonizing
New York as the epitome of corporate ball teams, and awaiting its
defeat as a sign of YHWH’s forgiveness, New Englanders performed
an analogous rite through which aggression was properly directed
and internal social cohesion restored.
[29] This Girardian analysis is strengthened by the historical research
of Glenn Stout–who just weeks before the 2004 playoffs published
an article entitled "A 'Curse' Born of Hate" for ESPN.com. On
the one hand, Stout acknowledges the possibility that a Curse legend
may have existed in some inchoate form prior to Vecsey's 1986 article,
and credits Shaugnessy's 1990 book as the most important text popularizing
and/or revitalizing the myth. On the other hand, he ultimately
traces the Curse of the Bambino to the early twentieth-century,
anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of Henry Ford. As Stout documents,
Ford hired journalist W. J. Cameron to write a series of essays
for his weekly newspaper, "The Dearborn Independent," exposing
the machinations of the so-called "International Jew" to
undermine the world's nations. In September 1921, Cameron
wrote two articles entitled "Jewish Gamblers Corrupt American
Baseball" and "The Jewish Degradation of Baseball",
in which Jews were blamed for the Black Sox scandal and for undermining
the integrity of the game more generally.
[30] In the second of these articles, Cameron mistakenly identified
Boston Red Sox owner Harold Frazee–who was Presbyterian and
a Mason–as Jewish, and went on to characterize his sale of
Babe Ruth as typifying the Jewish conspiracy to ruin baseball:
Frazee was attacked for promoting boxing matches featuring "Negro" fighters,
for encouraging sensuousness in the theater, for the demise of the
Red Sox and for his undermining of Ban Johnson. "Baseball," opined
Cameron for Ford, "was about as much of a sport to Frazee as
selling tickets to a merry-go-round would be. He wanted to put his
team across as if they were May Watson's girly girly burlesquers.
Baseball was to be 'promoted' as Jewish managers promote Coney Island." When
Frazee bought the Red Sox "another club was placed under
the smothering influences of the 'chose [sic] race.'" The
article concluded that baseball's essential problem was that Frazee
and other Jews were "scavengers [that] have come along
to reduce it [baseball] to garbage. But there is no doubt
anywhere, among either friends or critics of baseball, that
the root cause of the present condition is due to Jewish influence
. . . If baseball is to be saved, it must be taken out of
their hands."29
In Stout's analysis, Cameron's anti-Semitic smearing of Frazee,
who did nothing to refute the slander, permanently tarnished his
reputation in the upper echelons of baseball's management, and influenced
his unsavoury and historically inaccurate portrayal in Fred Lieb's
still-influential, 1947 history of the Boston Red Sox. "The
portrait painted by Lieb is disturbing and underscores the degree
to which the specious story of Frazee's Jewish heritage was believed
in the baseball community and persisted after his death," Stout
argues. "Lieb turns Frazee into a caricature with Jewish overtones,
a portrayal that was likely influenced by the misinformation about
Harry Frazee given credence in the Dearborn Independent."30 Further,
it was from Lieb's history that Dan Shaughnessy drew his own vitriolic
caricatures of Frazee in The Curse of the Bambino in 1990. On
the one hand, Stout is careful to point out that neither Shaugnessy
nor Vecsey knew about the anti-Semitic underpinnings of Frazee's
portrayals in baseball historiography. On the other hand,
he is justifiably disturbed by a popular legend "born of hate."
[31]
Regardless of when and how the Curse of the Bambino took shape
as a modern-day jeremiad, the general frustration surrounding Boston's
failure to win a Series crystallized as early as 1947 when Lieb's
history of the Red Sox was published, into tales of scapegoating: "Had
Frazee not sold Babe Ruth . . .," "Had infielder John
Pesky not held the ball so long in the 1946 World Series game .
. .," and–the most notorious memory of all for Red Sox
fans–"Had the ground ball not rolled in between Bill
Buckner's legs in the 1986 World Series . . ." During
the fourth game of the World Series in St. Louis' Busch Stadium,
fans hung a sign from the bleachers that read, "We Forgive
Bill Buckner." Interviewed for The Idaho Statesman, Bill
Buckner told reporter Nick Jezierny that he was less than relieved
to see the banner hanging or to hear about an informal campaign
for his absolution that began circulating after the playoffs. "I
feel like the guy who got put away for a crime he didn't commit," Buckner
explained. "And then the DNA evidence comes back 30 years later
and the guy gets out of jail. What do you say for the 30 years
he spent suffering? I don't feel like I've committed a crime."31 Buckner,
of course, did not commit a "crime"–even if the
loss of a World Series is figuratively construed as such. What
is true is that Buckner's error cost Boston the sixth game of the
1986 World Series, which if won would have given the Sox a 4-2 game
victory over the New York Mets. Instead, the error allowed
New York its opportunity to win, which brought the Series to a 3-3
game tie. It was in the seventh game of that series that Boston
lost decisively to the Mets, in an 8-5 defeat. Such logic,
however, is moot, if the game of baseball is understood fundamentally
as an evocation and catharsis of aggression: Bill Buckner
was a scapegoat.
[32]
In the 1860s and 1870s, as baseball was emerging as a national
sport, Anglo-Protestant national culture was taking shape in an
era of Reconstruction, urbanization, and mass immigration from Southern
and Eastern Europe. Rituals to allay latent class, cultural,
and regional aggressions in local contexts were as urgently needed
as myths of political consensus on a national level. It was
in this context that baseball took shape as the American game, as
the works of Steven Riess on urban sports and George B. Kirsch on
baseball and the Civil War have recently documented.32 While
Riess has argued that baseball became a ritual of Americanization
for second- and third-generation immigrants, Kirsch has suggested
that the game partly took shape as a self-conscious alternative
to war. “While the balls of the rebels are base, it
is with base-balls that the sons of the Keystone State [Pennsylvania]
advance upon New York,” Kirsch quotes from a war-time issue
of Harper’s Weekly: “Still there is a difference. It
is play that the latter come for; it is in deadly earnest that the
rebels ride.”33
[33]
There is more at stake than etiquette in retaining the myth
of baseball’s
purity. In order for a national sport to effectively diffuse
ordinary violence from local contexts, it must simultaneously evoke
aggression and deflect attention away from the aggressive end of
the game. On the one hand, in the quotation provided by Kirsch,
parallels between the base balls of Rebel muskets and the base-balls
of players point unabashedly to the warlike nature of the sport. On
the other hand, there must be a difference. Most obviously,
baseball players do not shoot each other dead, but more subtly,
the end of baseball is “play.” In striking contrast
to later national sports which celebrate rivalry and even brute
force, baseball is presented from its inception as a sui generis type
of sport, the rivalry that is not really rivalry. While it
is easy to imagine why a bloodier sport would not serve the ends
of national unification, it takes a Girardian approach to see baseball’s
mystification as signifying a rite of sacred violence par excellence.
[34] The misunderstanding of rivalry that emerged as part of baseball’s
foundational mythology virtually ensures perennial interpretations
of baseball as anything but a game. Pastoral idealizations
of baseball abound as much in scholarship as they do in popular
culture. The Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American
Culture, for example, has been meeting annually since 1989 to deliver
and discuss diverse papers on the historical, anthropological, or
literary dimensions of the sport. In 1990, a sampling of titles
included the following: “White Lines and Green Fields: A Meditation
on Baseball and the West,” “Aluminum Bats and the Purpose
of Baseball,” and “The Game of Baseball as a Metaphor
of Life.”34 Jules
Tygiel, in his own history of baseball, has understandably characterized
such scholarly mystifications as “treacly flights of romantic
fancy.”35 Various
interpretations of baseball that ignore the aggression, indeed the
violence, underlying any sports event should strike us as spurious–not
only because they ignore baseball’s ritual context but because
they miss something of the experience of attending or otherwise
participating in the ritual of games. Collective aggression
directed towards the opposing team, shared joy in victory and collective
malaise in defeat all contribute to the affective power of any sports
event.
[35]
Now that the Curse of the Bambino has been exorcised from New
England, and the Red Sox restored as an all-American team, fans
and scholars alike can see that metaphysical ruminations on curses
and ghosts were, as Girard would suggest, a "misunderstanding" of
baseball's violent ends. The act of "pure violence," which
in modern sports is indeed the non-lethal and symbolic defeat of
the opposing team, brings each side in close proximity to the numinous
power of its own collective violence and successfully staves off
internal disintegration. But from 1918 to 2004 in New England,
the fans' expectation of consummation was perennially thwarted,
giving rise to a fantastical notion of the Curse of the Bambino
and threatening to unleash violence within the community. Were it
not for the tragic death of Victoria Snelgrove, the college student
killed in the post-playoff celebration by Boston police, the perilous
passage from curse to catharsis would have been completed non-violently. There
were other near-misses: the summoning of New York police onto
the playing field of Yankee Stadium during the sixth game of the
playoffs, the spillages of aggression into brawls on the field seven
times throughout the Era of the Curse. A Girardian analysis
of Red Sox Nation that explores the dimension of violence in both
its Calvinist rhetoric and heightened rivalry with the Yankees leads
past the pastoral flights of fancy to see baseball as a ritual of
collective unity–a rite of sacred violence that emerged in
the context of postbellum American nationalism.
[36] Talk of sin and damnation may have been a legacy of New England’s
Puritan culture, but care taken to direct aggression towards the
rival team is the raison d’être of any sports
endeavor. When aggression spirals inwards towards the local
community, the sacred violence of sports degenerates into ordinary
violence. With the Curse of the Bambino, the symbol of national
unity became a symbol of civil war, the “Black Mass” of
baseball. Predicting the future of New England's baseball
culture now that the Curse has been "reversed," e-zine
sportswriter King Kaufman put the matter starkly in an article for
All-baseball.com: "Two big market, big money, somewhat obnoxious
fan bases [the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox] clashing
without romantic notions of ghosts or curses to clutter things up."36 Let
others keep their pastoral idealizations of the game, which illustrates
what Catherine Albanese has called the "millennial innocence" of
Anglo-Protestant culture more generally: the denial of violence
in the mythologization of American nationalism.37 The
cultural heirs of Mather and Hawthorne must now live with the disquieting
truth.
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Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. Madison: University
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______, ed. Execution Sermons. New York: AMS Press, 1994.
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Notes
1 David Chidester, “The
Church of Baseball, the Fetish of Coca-Cola, and the Potlatch of
Rock 'n' Roll,” Journal
of the American Academy of Religion 64,4 (Winter 1994), 743-66.
2 Catherine L. Albanese, America: Religions
and Religion (2nd edn.; Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing
Co., 1999), 313-41; Allen Guttmann, From Ritual to Record: The
Nature of Modern Sports (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1978); and Joseph L. Price, ed., From Season to Season: Sports
as American Religion (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press,
2001).
3 Bill Simmons, "The Nation's
Independence Day," ESPN.com, October 21, 2004,
retrieved January 15, 2005, <http://proxy.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/041021>.
4 "What They're Saying," CBC
Sports Online, October 28, 2004, retrieved January 15, 2005, <http://www.cbc.ca/sports/indepth/curse/quotes.html>.
5 "What They're Saying."
6 Raja Mishra, "For
Multitudes, Years of Torment End in Bliss," The Boston Globe (Victory
Edition), October 28, 2004, 1.
7 In From Ritual to Record, Guttmann
considers–and refutes–the thesis that modern sports
act as a catharsis for collective aggression. Significantly,
he bases this refutation in an analysis of football, which he deems
to be the most psychologically aggressive sport in American culture. In
his chapter "The Fascination of Football," Guttmann, citing
various psychological studies, points out that football games seem
to intensify, rather than abate, aggression. As this essay
argues, however, football cannot be considered a rite of "pure
violence" analogous to baseball–precisely because football
makes no attempt to "misunderstand" its own violence. Football,
like boxing, is simply a controlled spectacle of "impure violence," which
would be expected in a Girardian analysis to provoke mimetic aggression
in such forms as fights and riots. Guttmann also takes care
to distinguish a violent game like football from a merely aggressive
game like baseball. As this essay argues, such a distinction
is possible precisely to the extent that baseball retains its mystified
or misunderstood status as a pastoral legacy. In Boston, where
such pastoral idealizations were long ago demythologized, the game
has degenerated from an aggressive sport, in which no player or
spectator gets hurt, to a potentially violent one. While violence
is held in check by the rules of baseball, it perennially threatens
to erupt in spontaneous fights and riots among the players and fans
of Red Sox Nation.
8 "What They're
Saying," CBC Sports Online.
9 "Red Sox Questions," redsoxconnection.com,
retrieved January 15, 2005, <http://www.redsoxconnection.com/redsoxfaq.html>.
10 In Dan Shaugnessy, The
Curse of the Bambino (New York: Dutton, 1990), 12.
11 Chidester, "Church
of Baseball," 746.
12E.M. Swift, “The Pox
on the Sox: Who Needs Success? The Red Sox’ Biblical Misfortunes
are Unifying Force,” Sports Illustrated 100,16 (April
19, 2004), 35.
13 Shaughnessy, Bambino,
33.
14 Chapter Two, “Blessings
of Time and Eternity,” in Sacvan Bercovitch, The American
Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987),
31-61.
15 "What They're Saying," CBC
Sports Online.
16 “Reverse the
Curse: Sunken Piano Could Be Music to Red Sox Fans’ Ears,” CNNSI.com, February 24,
2002, retrieved October 4, 2004, <http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/baseball/news/2002/02/24/ruth_piano_ap>.
17 “The Boston Globe
Fun Pages,” The Boston Globe, April 11, 2004, insert.
18Gordon Edes, “Joined,
For Bitter or For Worse,” The Boston Globe, April 2,
2004, F2.
19 Edes, "Joined."
20 Shaugnessy, Bambino,
143.
21Donald Hall, Fathers Playing
Catch with Their Sons: Essays on Sport, Mostly Baseball (San
Francisco: North Point Press, 1985), 30.
22 Hall, Fathers, 98.
23 Chidester, "Church
of Baseball," 749.
24 Albanese, America,
322.
25David Hall, Worlds of
Wonder, Day of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New
England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 169.
26Ibid., 175.
27 Increase Mather, “The
Wicked Man’s Portion,” in Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., Execution
Sermons (New York: AMS Press, 1994).
28Increase Mather, “A
Sermon Occasioned by the Execution of a Man Found Guilty of Murder,” in
Bercovitch, Execution Sermons.
29 Glenn Stout, "A 'Curse'
Born of Hate," ESPN.com, October 3, 2004, retrieved January
3, 2005, <http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/playoffs2004/news/story?page=Curse041005>.
30 Stout, "Born of Hate."
31 Nick Jezierny, "Demons
Haunt Buckner the Scapegoat," The Idaho Statesman, October
31, 2004, 1.
32 See Chapter Two, “Sport
and the Urban Social Structure,” and Chapter Three, “Sport,
Race, and Ethnicity” in Steven A. Riess, City Games: The
Evolution of American Urban Society and the Rise of Sports (Urbana
and Chicago: University of Illinois Press), 53-126; and George
B. Kirsch, Baseball in Blue & Gray: The National Pastime
During the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2003).
33Jules Tygiel, Past Time:
Baseball as History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000),
57
34 Alvin L. Hall, ed., Cooperstown
Symposium on Baseball and the American Culture (Westport,
CT: Meckler Publishing, 1990).
35 Tygiel, Past Time,
4.
36 Alex Belth, "Mecca
in the Nation," all-baseball.com, November 1, 2004, retrieved
December 21, 2004,
<http://www.all-baseball.com/bronxbanter/archives/016212.html>.
37 Albanese, America,
317-20.
