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.

References

Albanese, Catherine L. America: Religions and Religion. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1999.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities:Reflections of the Originand Spread of Nationalism.  London/New York: Verso, 1991.

Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.

______, ed. Execution Sermons. New York: AMS Press, 1994.

Bhabha, Homi, ed. Nation and Narration. London; New York; Routledge, 1990.

Chidester, David.  “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.

Eitzen, D. Stanley and George H. Sage, eds.  Sociology of North American Sport, 3rd edn.  Dubuque, IA:  Wm. C. Brown Publishers, 1978.

Evans, Christopher H. and William R. Herzog, eds. The Faith of Fifty Million: Baseball,Religion, and American Culture. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002.

Falassi, Alessandro, ed. Time Out of Time: Essays on the Festival. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987.

Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972.

Guttman, Allen.  From Ritual to Record:  The Nature of Modern Sports.  New York: Columbia University Press, 1978.

Hall, David. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Hall, Donald. Fathers Playing Catch with Their Sons:Essays on Sport,Mostly Baseball. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981.

Kirsch, George B. Baseball in Blue & Gray: the National Pastime During the Civil War.Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

McGimpsey, David. Imagining Baseball: America’s Pastime and Popular Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.

Melville, Tom. Early Baseball and the Rise of the National League.Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2001.

Miller, Perry. The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, [1983], c. 1954.

Overman, Steven. The Influence of the Protestant Ethic on Sport and Recreation. Aldershot Hants./Brookfield, VT: Avebury, 1997.

Price, Joseph L., ed.  From Season to Season:  Sports as American Religion. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2001.

Rielly, Edward. Baseball and American Culture: Across the Diamond. New York: Haworth Press, 2003.

Shaugnessy, Dan. Fenway: A Biography in Words and Pictures. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Press, 1999.

______. At Fenway: Dispatches from the Red Sox Nation. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1997.

______. The Curse of the Bambino. New York: Dutton, 1990.

Spink, Alfred. The National Game. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003.

Tygiel, Jules. Past Time: Baseball as History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

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.