Thursday, October 28, 2004
Short of the victory that finally sends the Cubs to the World Series, I witnessed the most important baseball game of my life yesterday when the Boston Red Sox defeated the St. Louis Cardinals 3-0, sweeping the series and ending 86 years of disappointment for their fans.
This game was important to me because it provided vital proof of something I’ve dared to believe for some time now, which is: there are no such things as curses. Curses are, as Peter Gammons said, "medieval mumbo-jumbo," but, for Cubs and Red Sox fans, there was no proof of this before last night.
Despite being a baseball fan in general, and a Cubs fan specifically, I consider myself a rational person, and I needed someone to finally show me that curses were made-up, stupid excuses for weird occurrences like 86-year championship droughts. To my (near-) complete satisfaction and delight, the last two weeks have provided exactly the proof I needed.
How do you explain the Curse of the Bambino now? What did the Red Sox do to finally end their long affair with suffering? Nothing was special about this season for Boston, with the notable exception that they finally had ownership that cared about winning. Having recently taken over from the old-money Yawkey family, they installed a bright young GM and told him to spend liberally but responsibly to create a winning team. After nearly nine decades of frustration, this magic formula yielded that most desired of results in a single season. Amazing.
If there is a Curse that afflicts professional sports teams, it is the curse of bad ownership. As a Chicagoan, I live in a city blighted by arguably the worst sports ownership of all time. Incompetency is omnipresent, with the Tribune Co, McCaskeys, Wirtzes, and Reinsdorf providing nearly unmatched legacies of failure and apathy. When will we reverse our curse? When our teams are finally controlled by people who care about victories.
We can, of course, leave it to a Yankee fan to miss this point entirely. Say what you will about George Steinbrenner, but the fact will remain that the man is almost maniacally focused on winning championships, and so is the ideal sports owner. Yankee fans like Larry Mahnken, spoiled by an embarassment of championships, are free to make the following statements without even a whiff of irony:
[The Red Sox’ victory is certainly] a vindication for the front office of Theo Epstein, which has been criticized for doing it differently, but now they've done something that nobody had been able to do since World War One. Of course, Boston's hardly had the best management, but that's beside the point.
Actually Larry, that’s the entire point: organizations win more when they care about winning. The Red Sox have shown us the way, have thrown this truth into sharp relief, for all to see. I can only hope that my team follows suit. I’ve got the rest of my life to wait.
This game was important to me because it provided vital proof of something I’ve dared to believe for some time now, which is: there are no such things as curses. Curses are, as Peter Gammons said, "medieval mumbo-jumbo," but, for Cubs and Red Sox fans, there was no proof of this before last night.
Despite being a baseball fan in general, and a Cubs fan specifically, I consider myself a rational person, and I needed someone to finally show me that curses were made-up, stupid excuses for weird occurrences like 86-year championship droughts. To my (near-) complete satisfaction and delight, the last two weeks have provided exactly the proof I needed.
How do you explain the Curse of the Bambino now? What did the Red Sox do to finally end their long affair with suffering? Nothing was special about this season for Boston, with the notable exception that they finally had ownership that cared about winning. Having recently taken over from the old-money Yawkey family, they installed a bright young GM and told him to spend liberally but responsibly to create a winning team. After nearly nine decades of frustration, this magic formula yielded that most desired of results in a single season. Amazing.
If there is a Curse that afflicts professional sports teams, it is the curse of bad ownership. As a Chicagoan, I live in a city blighted by arguably the worst sports ownership of all time. Incompetency is omnipresent, with the Tribune Co, McCaskeys, Wirtzes, and Reinsdorf providing nearly unmatched legacies of failure and apathy. When will we reverse our curse? When our teams are finally controlled by people who care about victories.
We can, of course, leave it to a Yankee fan to miss this point entirely. Say what you will about George Steinbrenner, but the fact will remain that the man is almost maniacally focused on winning championships, and so is the ideal sports owner. Yankee fans like Larry Mahnken, spoiled by an embarassment of championships, are free to make the following statements without even a whiff of irony:
[The Red Sox’ victory is certainly] a vindication for the front office of Theo Epstein, which has been criticized for doing it differently, but now they've done something that nobody had been able to do since World War One. Of course, Boston's hardly had the best management, but that's beside the point.
Actually Larry, that’s the entire point: organizations win more when they care about winning. The Red Sox have shown us the way, have thrown this truth into sharp relief, for all to see. I can only hope that my team follows suit. I’ve got the rest of my life to wait.
