The Original Curse Read Online Free

Curse of the Bambino,” which was finally broken in 2004. For the Cubs, the curse source is William Sianis, owner of the famous Billy Goat Tavern under Michigan Avenue. As the story goes, when ushers asked Sianis to remove his pet goat from Wrigley Field (Sianis had bought a ticket for it) during the 1945 World Series, the angered barman cursed the team. The Cubs lost that series and have not played in another since.
    But maybe those curses are entirely misplaced. What if the gods were not angry about Ruth or Sianis? What if the karmic problems of the Red Sox and Cubs started with their participation in a fixed World Series played at the end of a wartime season that probably never should have happened in the first place? Wouldn’t that be cause for a curse if ever there was one? Two dominant teams, a fixed World Series, and decades of doom. Makes as much sense as a couple of curses imposed on behalf of a sold player and a malodorous goat, right?
    Curses are, of course, silly. They’re irrational ways to answer this perfectly rational question: “Why doesn’t my team win?” In the cases of the Cubs and Red Sox, that question was asked so many times and over such a long period that a curse came to look like just as logical an answer as any other. Reasonable fans don’t take the notion of curses seriously, and there are ways to explain the years of failure that defined both the Cubs and the Red Sox. For example, the teams playin relatively small parks that should favor power hitters, and for years neither paid proper attention to pitching and defense.
    There are other explanations. Even after the sale of Ruth (which was accompanied by the sale of several other Red Sox stars to the Yankees), Boston didn’t have the resources or the executive know-how to keep up with the dominant Yankees. Beyond that, the franchise’s resistance to accepting African-American players put it at a competitive disadvantage. The Cubs, meanwhile, have a history of indifferent ownership, with lucrative national television and radio networks that have bolstered the franchise’s bottom line. On-the-field performance was almost irrelevant to profits, and the team had little incentive to spend big money on top free agents. These are far more credible explanations for failure than voodoo and curses.
    Still, most of us take curses for what they are: fun, offbeat ways to imagine that baseball is at the center of the universe and that, somewhere, higher powers dictate the success and failure we see on the field. And we like to think that higher power has a solid sense of right and wrong, as well as a long memory—100 years, even. If we can, with a wink and a smile, agree that baseball gods are meting out curses, the throwing of baseball’s annual grand finale would have to get their attention.
    As for 1918, there is nothing that can definitively prove a fix, and we should be mindful that evidence of a fix in that World Series is circumstantial. It’s rumors and vague suspicions. It’s dead men talking, like Cicotte, with no opportunity to press them for details. It’s a skeptical reading of box scores and play-by-plays. It’s questionable connections and questionable characters, within the teams themselves and lurking on the periphery.
    Cicotte’s deposition is not the only instance in which the possibility of a crooked 1918 World Series was raised. Henry “Kid” Becker, an associate of some of the St. Louis gamblers who were involved in the fixing of the 1919 World Series, had planned to fix the ’18 series but came up short on cash and was murdered seven months later. 11 In his 1965 book,
The Hustler’s Handbook
, baseball executive Bill Veeck transcribed parts of the lost writings of Harry Grabiner, longtime secretary to White Sox owner Charles Comiskey. Grabiner and Comiskey were wise to the Black Sox and hired a private investigator to look into the ’19 series. Grabiner’s diary chronicled the investigator’s findings all over