Curses

From Boston to Chicago to Japan, baseball teams can't shake bad luck

Probably this story should begin: Once upon a time ... because by now most of us know this modern fable as well as we know Grimm's fairy tales.

So ... once upon a time there was a baseball owner who sold his big star, and this bewitched his team so it never would win a championship again. Of course, the team was the Boston Red Sox and the owner was Harry Frazee, and since he sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees on Dec. 6, 1919, the Sox have never won the World Series. Now, Boston's run of bad luck is called "The Curse Of The Bambino."

Gracious.

Whereas superstitions have always been rife in sport, suddenly curses are in, too. At least in baseball. It is not just the spell The Bambino cast upon the denizens of Fenway. In Chicago, the curse of Murphy The Goat has been revived. A saloon owner named Billy Goat Sianis, who presided over his Billy Goat Tavern, tried to bring his furry pal Murphy into Wrigley Field for the fourth game of the 1945 World Series, Cubs vs. Tigers. P.K. Wrigley denied Murphy a seat, declaring "The goat stinks." Whereupon, Billy Goat -- the human being, not the beast -- declared: "Cubs, they ain't gonna win again."

And, of course, they haven't. Whereas both Billy Goat Sianis and Murphy have passed on to their reward, efforts to exorcise their demons have since been attempted -- notably on Opening Day in 1984, when Billy Goat's nephew was allowed to bring a goat named Socrates into Wrigley. Alas, to no avail. The Cubs have still not triumphed since 1908. Of course, maybe that goat isn't the problem. After all, the Cubs were 37 years along in defeat before Murphy cast his spell. Rather, it may be that Fred Merkle yet haunts Chicago.

It was 95 years ago this week, Sept. 23rd, 1908, when the callow Merkle, a teenaged rookie playing for the Giants, failed to proceed all the way to second base on a potential game-winning hit against the Cubs. Chicago's Johnny Evers called for the ball, stepped on second, and thus did the Cubs come to win the pennant and Merkle forever cast as the baseball dummy of all time. The Cubs did go on to win the World Series the next month, but for what they did to poor Fred Merkle they may still be paying.

Meanwhile, in Japan, the Hanshin Tigers of Osaka are sort of the Nipponese version of the Cubbies and Bosox -- Osaka plays second-fiddle to Toyko, just as Chicago and Boston do to New York. Not unlike the Cubs and Red Sox in America, Hanshin was the top franchise when the Japanese League started, but the Tigers were surpassed by the Yomiuri Giants of Tokyo, and have only once won the Japanese World Series. On that occasion, in 1985, giddy fans started throwing themselves into the Dotonbori, a horribly polluted river that flows through Osaka. Somebody got the idea that fans who looked like the Tigers players should jump in as surrogates for their heroes.

The star of the '85 Tigers was a bearded white American named Randy Bass, but there was no one in the crowd who matched that description. But, ah ha, one of the fans remembered that there was a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet nearby. The happy mob streamed over, tore loose the statue of the bearded Colonel Harlan Sanders, and threw it into the Dotonbori -- the graven image of Randy Bass. The Tigers have not won a championshipsince. It has become known as The Curse of the Colonel, and efforts to recover the sunken statue and end the spell have failed -- even as the Tigers have finally won a pennant again and will now try to win the Japanese World Series.

There has even been speculation that if the Curse of the Colonel can be lifted and the Tigers are finally victorious again, the whole local Osaka economy will be enjoy a boost. It could mean an additional $73 billion yen to the economy, 8,000 new jobs! Not even a Red Sox or Cubs win is expected to generate that much.

What I want to believe is that all the baseball curses are somehow connected. And if just one of the bewitched teams could ever win again, the other two would also be freed from the awful spell and in Boston, Chicago and Osaka, everyone will live happily ever after.

Sports Illustrated senior contributing writer Frank Deford is a regular contributor to SI.com and appears each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. He is a longtime correspondent for HBO's Real Sports and is one of the writers featured in the new Sports Illustrated book Fifty Years of Great Writing, available wherever books are sold, through amazon.com or by calling 800-423-9444.