Curse of Bambino began 100 years of bad blood
London will get to see baseball’s biggest rivalry up close when Yankees and Red Sox visit, writes
Kids started selling T-shirts outside Fenway Park with two simple words: Yankees Suck
One of sport’s oldest and most storied rivalries received a 98mph fastball to the shoulder blade last month when Boston Red Sox pitcher Joe Kelly deliberately targeted the New York Yankees’ Tyler Austin.
This sparked a full-scale brawl. Not that I condone violence, but baseball brawls are simply the best. More spontaneous than in rugby, more violent than in football, and containing far less protective padding than in American football or ice hockey.
The appeal is magnified by the supposed non-contact element within baseball. Imagine, instead of lightly brushing Ali Carter’s shoulder at this month’s World Snooker Championship – somehow deemed a “barge” – Ronnie O’sullivan instead slowly dropped his cue and proceeded to beat the holy hell out of his second-round opponent.
Yet what makes baseball brawls so special is the arrival of the cavalry in the shape of the 50-odd members on both benches. Often by the time they have sprinted 100 yards, the initial dust-up has petered out. Not on this occasion, as haymakers continued to be thrown and landed, resulting in a raft of ejections and later suspensions.
Yet this is only the latest salvo in a rivalry that dates back more than 2,000 games and 100 years. Next year it will be coming to these shores after Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred announced this week that they would face each other in two games at the London Stadium on June 29-30.
Really, the feud centres around a single incident in 1919, when Red Sox owner Harry Frazee traded Babe Ruth to the Yankees, supposedly to finance a Broadway musical. So was born the “Curse of Bambino” as Ruth inspired a decadeand-a-half of dominance at Yankees. From 1920 through to 2003, the Yankees won 26 World Series championships. The Red Sox? None.
The rivalry probably reached its zenith during the late 1990s when the Yankees were enjoying another period of dominance, including a first post-season meeting in the American League Championship Series in 1999. As documented in a fascinating article on blog site Grantland, later turned into an ESPN podcast, this hatred spawned an entire cottage industry in Boston.
A group of punk-rock kids started hawking T-shirts for $10 outside Fenway Park with two simple words: Yankees Suck. They ended up selling more T-shirts than they could print, leading to a Breaking Bad style downfall complete with Uzi-wielding robbers in a drugs deal gone wrong.
“Hating the Yankees is part of our heritage,” Julia Lowrie Henderson explains in the piece. “It has brought generations of Bostonians together. But Ray (Lemoine) did something none of the rest of us did. He took that hatred and made a ton of money off of it.”
A lot of the heat came out of the rivalry around 9/11, but what ultimately led to a thaw in relations was when the Red Sox became the first and only team to come from 3-0 down to beat the Yankees in the 2004 Championship series. Using that momentum, the Red Sox beat the St Louis Cardinals 4-0 to finally claim a World Series after 84 years and break the Curse of the Bambino.
Suddenly, the Red Sox were no longer the underdogs in the Yankees’ shadow. The inferiority complex faded. In the past 14 years, both teams’ fortunes have ebbed and flowed concurrently. Until now.
The teams, now locked in a three-game mini-series, possess the best records in the league. All it needed was a spark to reawaken old animosities – and Kelly duly provided it.