GEORGE: WILL JETER BE CURSED IF HE TRADES STANTON?
One day soon, unless fate intervenes, the monster headline will drop that Giancarlo Stanton has been traded by the Miami Marlins for money reasons alone.
Though it won’t come as a surprise, there is no warding off the shock of dumping so spectacular a slugger at the peak of his powers.
Derek Jeter should know better. He is a major player in the history and the mythology of the New York Yankees. Even if he doesn’t believe in it, he has heard a million times about the Curse of the Bambino, a baseball fable that lived on for what seemed like forever.
Not saying that Stanton
is Babe Ruth or ever will be, but stick with me for a minute.
The Boston Red Sox were doing just fine, a fistful of World Series titles and everything, until they sold Ruth to the Yankees following the 1919 season.
It’s not like there was anything wrong with the Babe at the time. He was 24 and coming off a season in which he led the American League in home runs (29) and RBIs (113). Players like that are too good to be true.
Money got in the way, however. Red Sox owner Harry Frazee needed some to finance a string of Broadway theatrical productions he wanted to stage and the Babe, fairly theatrical himself, was getting a little hard to handle with this party lifestyle. So Frazee moved the budding superstar for $100,000 in cash from the Yankees plus a sizable loan from the team.
Over the next 86 years the Red Sox won zero world championships and the Yankees won 26. Curse or coincidence? You be the judge.
All I know is that trading Stanton for any reason feels like throwing away the gift of a lifetime. It figures there should be punishment for that. Short
term there will be, of course, in the form of fan backlash against the new owners. Long-term? Well, the Marlins haven’t exactly been killing it lately, but it can always get worse.
The Red Sox suffered 14 consecutive losing seasons after selling the Babe, and included in that skid were nine last-place finishes.
Jeter doesn’t expect something so dire to result from trading Stanton for a raft of prospects that may someday remake the Marlins in the way the world champion Houston Astros have been remade. Maybe that will happen, too.
Just don’t say that I didn’t warn you about Giancarlo Stanton and what could become the bane of the franchise’s existence for decades to come.
Call it the Hex of the Hulk.