October 20, 2004, 20 years ago: The Red Sox ruin the anniversary of Mickey Mantle's birth. Unlike the 2003-18 Red Sox, Mickey didn't need no steroids to win baseball games. The chemicals he ingested were, most definitely, not performance-enhancing.
Having dropped 3 straight to the Sox to force a Game 7 at Yankee Stadium, the Yankees had nothing left, at least not emotionally. The Red Sox led 6-0 after 2 innings. It was 8-1 after 4. The final was 10-3.
Having let Andy Pettitte and David Wells get away, the Yankees had no lefthanded starting pitchers to counter the Boston lefthanders: David Ortiz (who hit a home run in the 1st inning), Johnny Damon (who hit one in the 2nd and another in the 4th), Trot Nixon (limited to a single in 5 at-bats), and the switch-hitting Mark Bellhorn (who homered lefthanded in the 8th) and Bill Mueller (who hit 2 singles).
Instead, manager Joe Torre had a choice of Kevin Brown, a great pitcher not that long ago but now unreliable; and Javier Vázquez, who, as his later career would confirm, seemed to pitch well for everybody but the Yankees. Torre removed Brown after loading the bases in the 2nd, already down 2-0 because of the steroid-aided homer of Ortiz. He brought in Vázquez, who gave up the 1st of Damon's homers, a grand slam.
This was not the kind of loss that crushes you because you apparently had it won at the end, and blew it. We got beat early. From the 1st inning onward, we knew the Red Sox were going to win the game. We knew it, and their fans knew it. There was nothing that could be done. And we had to stick it out, all 9 innings, and hear those Red Sox fans give us the business in our house for, as it turned out, 3 hours and 31 minutes. Never mind what the clock said: This was the longest game in Yankee history.
To paraphrase the movie Goodfellas: It was revenge for Bucky Dent, and a lot of other things. And there was nothing that we could do about it. The Red Sox were beloved in the national media, and the Yankees weren't. And we had to sit still and take it. It was among the New Englanders. It was real chowderhead shit.
It was 12:01 AM, October 21, when Ruben Sierra grounded to 2nd for the final out. So not only had the Sox ended the Curse of the Bambino, they had ruined the birthdays of both Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford.
Finally, after losing the Pennant to the Yankees on the final day in 1949, blowing the Division title to the Yankees in 1977 and 1978, losing the ALCS to the Yankees in 1999, and the shock of 2003, the Red Sox and their fans had their revenge over the Yankees. They had slain the big Pinstriped Dragon.
But, as Dan Shaughnessy of The Boston Globe, who knows more about the Red Sox than anyone, pointed out, it wasn't over: "The Curse of the Bambino is not that the Red Sox can't beat the Yankees. The Curse of the Bambino is that the Red Sox can't win the World Series." They lost the 1946, 1967, 1975 and 1986 World Series; the 1948 AL Playoff game; fell a little short of the AL Eastern Division title in 1972, 1974, 1979 and 1991; and lost the ALCS in 1988 and 1990. And some of those losses were crushing. But none of those defeats had anything to do with the Yankees, although the 1986 World Series loss, the most crushing of them all, was to a New York team.
Shaughnessy's Globe teammate, columnist Bob Ryan, was asked if only the Pennant, even with a win over the Yankees, would have been enough. He was emphatic: "Let's get this out of the way, right now: Would it have been enough for the Red Sox to beat the Yankees, without winning the World Series? The answer is, 'No!'"
It would take 7 more days for the Sox to truly break the Curse, beating the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series. The Cards had beaten them in the Series in 1946 and '67. The Sox have since beaten them again, in 2013.
Lost in the excitement of the Red Sox' revenge over the Yankees, Jim Edmonds hit a home run in the bottom of the 12th inning, to give the Cardinals a 6-4 win over the Houston Astros at Busch Memorial Stadium, and send the NLCS to a decisive Game 7. The Cards won the next day. But the Red Sox swept them in the World Series, and finished the job.
On July 30, 2009, it was revealed that David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez, the 2 biggest reasons the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004 and again in 2007, had failed steroid tests. They hadn't earned a fucking thing. They'd cheated. Ortiz was still there when they won it all again in 2013. Those 3 titles are fake, and they goddamned well know it. 1918 * Forever.
The baseball media, of course, will never give the Yankees the same benefit of the doubt that they give the Red Sox. Well, to hell with them. The world knows the truth, whether they accept it or not. They would say the Yankees "cheated" to win their titles. Really? The evidence against the 1996-2003 Yankees is incredibly flimsy. The evidence against the 2003-2013 Red Sox is overwhelming. The evidence against the 2018 Red Sox, while separate, is also pretty strong.
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