Curse? What Curse?

[dxmachina]

There's an interesting article by Glenn Stout here that takes look at the so-called Red Sox curse, and debunks a lot of the "facts" behind it. Essentially, Frazee sold Ruth not because he needed the dough, but because Ruth was becoming a headache. Stout postulates that the reason the original story got warped to how it is perceived today is because of the anti-semitism of the AL President, Ban Johnson, and the other AL owners of the time, who all seemed to think that Frazee was Jewish. The bizarre thing is that Frazee wasn't, but that didn't seem to matter. Even Henry Ford got into the act of going after Frazee. I don't know how much of that I buy, but it's clear that Ban Johnson disliked Frazee, whatever the reason. Johnson's close friend, Fred Lieb, wrote a history of the Red Sox that excoriated Frazee. That book is the source that Dan Shaughnessy drew upon when he wrote The Curse of the Bambino.

The reality of the curse is that the team was badly mismanaged over the years, and that's what really hurt them. Tom Yawkey owned the team for a very long time, and while he was a great owner for the players, because he massively overpaid them, he was far less so for the fans, because he ran the team like a country club. He just liked hanging out with the players. After he died, things got even worse, as the PTB pinched pennies and let their best players get away. Really, whatever curse there was ended the day the Yawkey estate finally sold the team.