Baseball Curses

In honor of the start of baseball season, here's something I wrote last fall...


Of all the sports topics that get me fired up, nothing boils my blood like the media coverage of baseball curses. While I was cleaning out my room over the summer, I came across a dusty old Sports Illustrated from 2005.

The cover: A split-photo of Tom Brady and Peyton Manning in anticipation of their upcoming matchup.
The tiny print sub-headline: [By the way the] White Sox won the World Series [for the first time since 1917].

Seriously? To be honest, I’m glad I didn’t see this issue in 2005, because I probably would have had a stroke on the spot.

The White Sox end the 2nd longest drought in pro sports history, and they get booted off the cover of SI for a regular season football game that hasn’t even been played yet? It’s not like Tom and Peyton haven’t had 946,000 other SI covers, you know with all the Super Bowls and Sportsmen of the Year and what not.

I don’t even like the White Sox. But here’s what gets me mad. When the Red Sox won it all just a year earlier, the media frenzy was so fantastical that you would’ve thought Jesus himself had returned to Earth. Those “idiots” got SI covers for about a month, appearances on every talk show known to man, multiple books, a blockbuster movie, and a plethora of old guys announcing that their lives were complete. Babe Ruth could finally stop rolling over in his grave!!

Setting World Series celebrations aside, it’s the curses themselves that make me angry. First, we have Boston, a team that traded Babe Ruth sometime in the 20s and never won another World Series. Lost in all of this frenzy are the White Sox, a team with an even longer drought and a much more believable curse.

The White Sox dominated the 1910s. Then they threw the World Series in 1919 and didn’t even APPEAR in another World Series for 87 years. ARE YOU SERIOUS? I can’t think of a better reason for a curse than a bunch of guys throwing a championship to get back at their stingy owner who wasn’t paying them enough to put food on the table. Talk about screwing up a good thing!

What’s crazy about this set of Sox is the fact that they didn’t even have the longest streak in their CITY! The entire city of Chicago had a longer drought with two teams than the Red Sox did with their one. Now that both Sox have won it all, the Cubs stand alone with a solid 40 year lead on the 2nd place Indians (1948).

The Red Sox got all the pub because they were whiny. The Cubs are just bad. The Indians aren’t dramatic enough to even make it onto the national map. If any team deserved a huge parade for breaking their curse, it was the Chicago White Sox, and they didn’t even make the cover of SI.

[And don’t get me started on the media frenzy that accompanied the Phillies breaking their staggering 20-year drought last year.]