Off the Field Antics

This has been a pretty interesting weekend for the old Yankees/Red Sox rivalry. They’re playing each other for the final time this season, with the Yankees poised to capture their seventh consecutive AL East crown. The Red Sox, then, are set also to finish second place behind the Yanks for the seventh consecutive season. Of course, should Schilling beat the Yanks today, the Red Sox chances improve, but not by much. A magic number of four is pretty daunting until there are only two games left in the season. That said, the games have been pretty interesting in that they’ve all seemed to have moments when they’ve just blown open—this is true on both sides of the series, except for the first game at the Bronx last week, which waited too long to get blown open. The Yankees jumped on Derek Lowe and blew the game open before the Red Sox knew what hit them, and Pedro similarly let the game get blown open. This weekend, Pedro was pulled before the Yanks really blew it open, and the Red Sox, well, we know what happened yesterday. The point is that the games have been tight as drums on the whole—no massive comebacks, etc.

But my interest here, this weekend, is not on the games themselves, but on two things that happened off the field: Pedro Martinez’s post-game collapse after losing two straight to the Yankees and Peter Vecsey’s public renunciation of the Curse of the Bambino, a curse he helped popularize.

Pedro told reporters after the game that he wished the Yankees would “fucking disappear and never come back,” and that he should start calling them his “daddy.” Mike Mussina has already sounded the call for enterprising New Yorkers to start making “daddy” t-shirts, and the Times is saying that the best way for Pedro to have the Yankees fucking disappear and never come back is, of course, to join them and never play against them again. Pedro’s comments are very interesting, of course, since here’s a man who is infamous for his arrogance and pride. He threatened to bean the Bambino in the ass to show how uninterested he is in his curse. Similarly, after one-hitting the Devil Rays, he proclaimed that there’s “no crying in baseball.”

Yet here he is, tail between his legs, wishing he could pitch against anyone else right now. After all, had Pedro won both of his last two starts, the Red Sox would be back at 2.5 games out of first, the closest they’ve been since before Iraq was an umitigated disaster of epic proportions. Shaughnessy covers the situation rather well (for him), so I won’t take up more space here describing it. But he does shortchange the idea of gamesmanship. Pedro is crafty, after all, and he may be laying a trap. There’s certain ways he expresses himself that suggest this—how it’s all his fault, for example, and not Francona’s (when, in fact, it is Francona’s—of course, a one-run lead in the eighth is not a sure thing, but Pedro at 101 pitches is certainly anything but. Similarly, he says that he pitches as well as he can and still the Yankees find a way to beat him—also true, but of limited meaning. The Yankees have the most wins in the AL. Of course they’ll find a way to beat good pitching. But the Red Sox have been the same way, as we saw when they faced the Oakland Aces earlier this month and shamed them all. But even with his “being beat,” he still had the lead going into his last inning. So he wasn’t beat. Maybe Pedro expected to have pitched a one-hitter against the Yanks, and he was upset with that. I don’t buy it. Pedro’s not the same pitcher he used to be, and keeping neck and neck with the Yanks is a pretty good place to be. Not every game is going to get blown open. So who knows how it’ll work out. With the series on the line, would I give Pedro the ball? Well, what are my options? A three-day rest Schilling? Arroyo? No. I’d give Pedro the ball.

In any case, Peter Vecsey’s own public admission over the weekend ends up being far more interesting than Pedro’s. Vecsey, writing about Game Six in 1986, is credited as being the first person in print to suggest that there’s some kind of connection between Babe Ruth’s being sold to the Yankees and the Red Sox’s subsequent failures. Shaughnessy then turned this specious claim into a money tree. Vecsey, and it’s unclear why he chose to go public now, wants no part of the claim anymore, as recent historical research has shown that there is a strong thread of anti-Semitism supporting the villification of Red Sox owner Harry Frazee’s selling Ruth. In order to make the connection clear, however, and in order to explain why it’s still loathsome (especially in consideration of the fact that Frazee was not, most likely, Jewish), we have to take baby steps through the whole situation.

First, there’s Vecsey’s version of the story from 1986: Frazee, a Broadway impressario, sold Ruth to the Yankees for cash so that he could fund a bomb, No-No Nannette. Vecsey claims that he wasn’t smart enough to come up with this on his own, and that informal talk of a curse had been floating around sports desks for years. This is a crucial point for later. Now, Glenn Stout’s research has shown that the motivation for the sale is 100% wrong. First, the show did not open until 1926. Second, Frazee made the deal not because of a desire for money, but because he was trapped in his dealings. Timothy Savage of the bosox email list collapses the story this way:

Stout basically concludes that Frazee was not hurting for money, but sold Ruth to the Yankees because he hated Ruth’s drinking, whoring, and prima donna-ness. The reason it was a straight cash deal was that Frazee, Comiskey, and the Yankees owner were all feuding with Ban Johnson, so they could basically only deal among themselves. After failing to agree on a Ruth for Shoeless Joe Jackson trade, he was basically stuck with the Yankees as the only team he could deal with, and they couldn’t come up with a group of players that would still leave the Yankees competitive. So they decided on cash.

You can argue that Frazee still made a giant mistake in getting rid of Ruth as a superstar, and that’s fine, but that’s not the social history that underlies the myth of the curse. It’s vitally important for the curse that Frazee sell Ruth out of his own personal greed. It’s crucial that Frazee be portrayed as caring more about his own pockets than about putting a competitive team on the field. Without that element of greed, Frazee cannot be vilified. That vilification is what Vecsey had heard rumbling in the sports desks all those years, so that he could make a claim like the one he did. And then that vilification led to Shaughnessey’s book.

If Frazee was already vilified before the curse had taken on a public meaning, whence did this vilification come? This is Vecsey’s point, then, and the one that should shame curse-continuers out of continuing the trope:

Because Frazee was a New Yorker and a showman, he was apparently fair game to be labeled as Jewish, when, as far as anybody knows, he was a Presbyterian of Scottish ancestry.

Anti-Semitism is no more and no less vicious when it is directed at somebody who is not Jewish. But that was the way a lot of Americans thought in those days, including famous ones like Henry Ford, the founder of the automobile dynasty.

Ford bankrolled a vile weekly newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, whose issue of Sept. 10, 1921, included a long and repulsive diatribe called Jewish Degradation of American Baseball. The article asked how the Red Sox had been “placed under the smothering influences of the ‘chosen race.’ ”

The Independent then quickly explained: “Frazee, like so many of his kind, was in the ‘show business,’ a manager of burlesque companies. Then he saw a chance in sport.”

Frazee wasn’t hated, Stout claims and Vecsey echoes, until Ford denounced him in the Independent as a greedy Jewish businessman. “Henry Ford’s bile has leached into the aquifer of cultural memory,” writes Vecsey. Hence, when we are taught to hate Frazee, it’s because of anti-Semitism. Later, that hate is redirected onto the sale of Ruth, but the willing misrepresentation of the history of the situation only keeps that hate’s connection to anti-Semitism. Frazee isn’t hated for getting rid of a great player since he was sick of his off the field antics. Frazee is hated for selling a great player to finance show business. That’s why it’s a curse, and not just a blunder. That’s why the Red Sox are under a cloud for life, since they, like greedy Jews, put money ahead of sport.

It’s disgusting when you see it this way, and I’m not alone among my friends to be sick of past participation in the vilification of Frazee for being impecunious or for caring about money more than sport. Similarly, I’m not alone to be sad about failing to see this rather obvious connection. When you see my sentence with the italics, it can be read almost no other way than as an anti-Semitic trope.

So what? That’s all water under the bridge. Frazee wasn’t Jewish, after all, so it can’t really be anti-Semitic to hate him, right? I think the simplest counter-example here would be to look at homophobic hatespeech. The skinny kid, the weakling, the one who doesn’t like sports—he’s the “faggot,” the “sissy.” Now if that skinny kid is actually straight, does that mean that the mockers aren’t being homophobic? Of course not. Similarly, the verb “jew” doesn’t demand that the subject be Jewish in order for it to be a mobilisation of anti-Semitism. In fact, it’s worse when the subject isn’t Jewish, since it encodes negative practice with a cultural identity to be avoided—it’s not so much “All Jews are x” as it is “don’t do x, like the Jews do, because you wouldn’t want to be like them.”

Neither of these examples match well with the Frazee example in specific, but Ford’s claim carries a generic anti-Semitic thrust: we are worried that greed is infecting sport. Ford may have had his facts wrong about the Red Sox’s coming under the influence, but his general fears were still encouraging a culture of hatred—a culture that may even still have traces today outside of the specifics of the Curse. Are we engaging in a replaying of Ford’s anti-Semitism when we deride the greedy owners for demanding a salary cap? The case could be made…

The second “So what?” is the one that suggests that, yeah, maybe in the past it was the result of anti-Semitism that we hated Frazee, but now it’s just because of his getting rid of Ruth. I’ve already attacked that above, but I’ll do it again in context here: We don’t hate Frazee for getting rid of Ruth. We hate him for selling Ruth to continue a career financing show business. If the crux of the Curse was “The Red Sox are doomed since their owner couldn’t look past the whoring and drinking of the greatest player of all time, and so he got rid of him,” then, yes, the Curse would not be anti-Semitic. But it isn’t. It may be, at some point, but it isn’t. As Vecsey concludes,

The Red Sox may indeed be haunted by some miasma dating from the sale of Babe Ruth, who turned out to be the epochal player in baseball history. It is time, however, to exorcise any image perpetuated by Henry Ford and his lot. Free Harry Frazee.

Now, I disagree with that, too. I don’t think there’s any such thing as a Curse, anti-Semitic or no. It’s not unreasonable for the Red Sox to have gone so long without a World Series—after all, the White Sox have managed a similar drought, and no one talks of curses regarding them. What gives the idea of a Curse weight, other than standard Red Sox Nation pessimism as a defense mechanism (something that I do, too), is the choking. But is the choking really that amazing?

The first person I sent Vecsey’s article to was Puma, whom I’ve raked over the coals in the past over his support of the idea of a Curse. In part, I sent it since I figured he wouldn’t want to engage in crypto-anti-Semitism, but it’s also just good, in general, to remind youselves as we head into October baseball, that the Curse, even if it did exist in a non-anti-Semitic way, can’t be shown to exist. The Curse has only had cultural currency in the past few decades, and this post from the bosox list (also linked to in my raking of Puma) shows that in that time, the Red Sox haven’t choked. In fact, they’ve been remarkably lucky. Both 1975 and 1986 would have involved defeating teams that were far, far better than the Sox were. Similarly, in intervening years, other forces have conspired to keep grubby Red Sox paws off the trophy. We, as Sox fans, should be damn glad we’ve come as close as we have. And I know I am.

Puma wrote back this morning and redeemed himself somewhat, in my opinion. He granted that it’s fun to write about and talk about (and, in fact, that’s true: no one in Boston generally cares about the Curse, except as publicity stunts; however, watching the YES broadcast of the game last night, I learned more about the Curse than I’d ever known before—Yankees fans and hacks like Michael Kay care much more about it than Red Sox fans do, so tell me know… who has the inferiority complex?), but he doesn’t believe in it. Well, ok. There’s no reason to believe in it. But he also provided this gem, that I’m quoting without his permission:

It’s not real. You’re totally right. Even in the Sports, Science, and Society course I took senior winter, we had a statistics professor, Steve Stiggler, tell us that it is perfectly reasonable for the Sox, Sox, and Cubs to have gone so long without winning, given factors like the number of teams in the league and the relative lack of change in rosters from year to year.

So there you have it. If even Puma is denouncing the Curse, it’s time to kick it to the street with all the other trash from an ugly history not worth repeating. As I’ve said before, relying on the Curse lets fans not talk about the important mistakes the Red Sox front office has made, from not hiring black players to thinking that they can squeeze some extra life out of no-field right-handed power hitters who can jack the ball over the Monster. An inability to put together a team that consistently performs well (and, lately, outperforms the extremely well-built competition) is why the Red Sox have not won since 1918, not because of an anti-Semitic myth cooked up by one of the most notorious anti-Semites in American history. So give it a rest, and encourage your friends to do the same.