How the Boston Red Sox finally broke the ‘Curse of the Bambino’ to end an 86-year championship drought

By Emile Nuh, CNN

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For generations, the Boston Red Sox had become accustomed to heartbreak.

After winning the World Series in 1918, the famed franchise endured one of the most unprecedented droughts in American sports history.

Game 7 losses in 1946, 1967, 1975 and 1986 made it feel as though the Sox might never get over the hump again and lift an elusive sixth Commissioner’s Trophy.

By 2004, that barren spell had stretched to a staggering 86 years, reinforcing the idea that Boston was somehow cursed – a notion that had become part of baseball folklore.

And when the Sox fell behind 3-0 to the New York Yankees in the American League Championship Series (ALCS), it looked as though history was about to repeat itself.

But for a franchise that had spent decades in distress, enough was finally enough.

Curse of the Bambino

The roots of Boston’s misery stretched all the way back to 1919, when the Red Sox sold Babe Ruth – then a star pitcher and slugger who would become arguably the greatest player in baseball history – to the Yankees.

The Yankees then went on to become baseball’s most dominant franchise – winning 27 World Series titles – while the Red Sox would not taste success for the rest of the 20th century.

This gave birth to the “Curse of the Bambino,” the notion that Boston’s decision to part ways with Ruth “is the reason why the Red Sox go not only so long without winning a World Series, but losing them in such catastrophic, fateful, cursive ways,” says Devin Gordon, a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine.

After Bill Buckner’s infamous error in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series – with the Sox leading the New York Mets 3-2 in the series and 5-3 in the 10th inning with two outs – it felt as though this cursed team from New England was just destined to always fall short.

As CNN Contributor Bob Costas says in the series, “The story of the Red Sox is heartache… so close, yet so far,” and even 2003, Boston’s gut-wrenching loss to the Yankees in Game 7 of the ALCS showed the “Curse of the Bambino” had followed the Sox into the new millennium.

So when the two franchises met in the ALCS a year later, it seemed almost inevitable that the Red Sox would come up short again, because as Joe Posnanski – author of Why We Love Baseball – highlights, “hopelessness was probably at a high.”

And for good reason, as New York won the first three games to take a commanding 3-0 lead, and as NBC Sports broadcaster Kenny Albert recalls, “in Game 3 it’s not even close, the Yankees score 19 runs (and) they had just demolished the Red Sox.”

“I’m a columnist for the Boston Globe, and I destroy these guys in print,” says former Globe columnist Jackie MacMullan. “Their nickname was ‘the idiots,’ and I was like, ‘yeah, they’re idiots alright.’”

Game 4 looked certain to be the one where the Sox’ dreams would be crushed by the Yankees once again, as they entered the ninth inning 4-3 down and just three outs away from elimination.

One play changed everything

But then Boston sent Dave Roberts to first base as a pinch runner, and waiting for him on the mound was Mariano Rivera, arguably the greatest closer in baseball history.

Everyone in Yankee Stadium – including Rivera himself – knew Roberts was going to steal, and as Gordon highlights, “it’s very, very hard to steal a base of a pitcher whose one pitch is a 95 mph fastball… which is exactly what happened.”

Roberts somehow slid safely into second, and in retrospect, it represented the first crack in the Yankees’ seemingly impenetrable grip on the series.

As Posnanski highlights, “It’s not like Dave Roberts’ steal changed anything that was obvious, but looking back on it, you realised it changed everything.”

Bill Mueller then drove Roberts home with a game-tying single, before David Ortiz delivered the decisive blow with a walk-off home run in the 12th inning.

The Red Sox then won Game 5 in extra innings, went into Yankee Stadium and won Game 6, then returned home for Game 7 and completed the greatest comeback in MLB postseason history, and “it’s pandemonium in Boston like you’ve never seen,” says Gordon.

The Red Sox had come back from the depths of despair, then swept aside the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series to end their 86-year championship drought.

And as Posnanski highlights in the series, “it was so perfect because Red Sox fans had built all of this scar tissue around their hearts, and the greatest gift of all that Red Sox team gave them is that once they got to the World Series, they just won, and there was never any pressure that they wouldn’t.”

After all those years, the curse had finally been broken, and a franchise once defined by failure suddenly became one of baseball’s great modern success stories.

Boston lifted the Commissioner’s Trophy again in 2007, 2013 and 2018, with the Sox’s four World Series titles being the most of any MLB franchise this century.

It was one of the greatest turnarounds in American sports history, and it all started with one game – and stolen base – in 2004.

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