by Yocheved Friedman
Faulty Curses and Baseball Legends
My father didn’t have many urges to shuffle us together in the back of our brown Chevy and ship off to some God-forsaken zoo or museum a few states over where the traffic was heavy and the roads raw. But there was one time in August, six years ago—perhaps when the roads were tamer—when he lugged all nine of us up to Boston, Massachusetts. He’s a die-hard Red Sox fan, loyal all the way, and I guess he felt it was high time we all had a look at the old place at Fenway Park, home of the team that had once bared Babe Ruth’s number 3 before they traded him off to the Yankees. That’s very much its own story, one he told me years earlier when the Red Sox won their very first world Series since Babe’s curse, which had lasted eighty years. It was a long night that last game when the Red Sox won and my father stayed up to watch them take it home. Like I said, loyal all the way.
***The Short Tale of Babe Ruth’s Curse***
“Daddy, why do they keep showing a gravestone on the T.V if this is supposed to be a baseball game?”
“That’s Babe Ruth’s grave. He was the best baseball player in the country when baseball first started and he was on the Red Sox. But then they traded him to the Yankees and he cursed the team and said they’d never win another World Series without him.”
“Why’d they trade ‘em?”
“Because the manager of the Red Sox at that time didn’t really care about the team. He just wanted a lot of money, so they lost their best player and we’ve never won a World Series since.”
“So the curse came true?”
“Well, they think it’ll be lifted tonight since the Red Sox are a game away from winning the World Series.”
That was the night of the last game when he told me about Babe’s curse and how close they were to breaking it. I didn’t know there was even a beginning of baseball. I thought the curse was sad for the Red Sox because it meant they’d never win but it was sad for Babe too. I thought eighty years was a long, long time.
***
I think I can count the few times he’d ever been that happy. Scouring the insides of Fenway Park. That was his baby. He told me the story of the red seat out in the bleachers where a guy had fallen asleep once during the game. As far as the legend goes, Johnny Damon was up at bat and when he saw the sleeping guy out in the bleachers, he pledged to give him the greatest wake-up call in baseball history. Damon’s home run squared the guy right on the head. To be honest, I didn’t believe the story was actually true, but right there in the bleachers at Fenway Park stood one lonely red chair to mark the legend.
All I really wanted to know was whether they charged more to sit there.
They didn’t.
We went on the green monster which was really just a big wall out in left field. My father said it was put up because they discovered people snagging free games on rooftops right outside the stadium. We took a picture on the top deck with the stadium behind us and that’s the one- I believe the only one- that hangs in my father’s office in a green frame. It’s his favorite picture of us. Maybe, because in that green frame, he has it all. The Red Sox, which has been his since he was a little boy catching fly balls in the park near his house in Massachusetts. And his family, which came about much later when the Red Sox were already well into their eighty-year-long curse.
The sun was getting in everyone’s eyes and this memory smells like the sweaty palms of 10,000 fans in the bleachers on the night they broke the curse. And somewhere on that night, a single fan sat in a house full of sleeping children in New York to watch the final inning.
