By Jackson Roberts

Copyright newsweek

Boston Red Sox fans are understandably nervous about Thursday night’s series finale against the New York Yankees, which will decide whether their team’s season ends or continues. But perhaps a reminder is welcome that times certainly have been worse before.

ESPN’s brand-new docu-series, “Believers: Boston Red Sox” dives into a subject that would have been far worse for any Red Sox fan to live through than Jarren Duran dropping a catchable line drive off the bat of Aaron Judge: “The Curse of the Bambino.”

The curse gripped the Red Sox for 86 years, beginning shortly after their World Series championship in 1918 when they sold pitcher/outfielder Babe Ruth to the Yankees, and culminating in 2004. Even with the knowledge that it happened 107 years ago, it’s hard for many to fathom why Boston would not only trade, but simply give up on a player who would go on to become a titan of the sport.

circa 1945: American baseball player Babe Ruth (1895 – 1948), outfielder for the New York Yankees, autographs a baseball for two young fans. (Photo by American Stock/Getty Images)

For one, as explained by curator Richard Johnson of The Sports Museum in the docu-series, Ruth was tired of playing the role the Red Sox wanted him to play, and because he no longer had a good relationship with many of the higher-ups in Boston, the team wasn’t willing to accommodate his requests.

“He was tired of pitching,” Johnson says at one point. “He really didn’t want to be a pitcher. He felt and he knew that his future would be as an outfielder, as a slugger.

“Ruth long had a very temperamental relationship with the Red Sox, and Harry Frazee, who was the owner,” Boston novelist Dennis Lehane adds. “At the end of 1918, having won the World Series for the Red Sox, and feeling generally underappreciated, Harry Frazee wanted to get him out of town.”

Red Sox fans nowadays are aware (in some cases, painfully) that disputes with the team can spiral quickly. Third baseman (then designated hitter) Rafael Devers was traded this season, two years into a $313.5 million contract, in large part because he was unwilling to play the role the team asked.

So, sure, there was strife, but Ruth was already on a Hall of Fame path as a slugger and a pitcher. Couldn’t the Red Sox have figured out a way to salvage the relationship?

Perhaps not, and that was attributable to some of his off-field pursuits, as sports journalist Devin Gordon explains in one episode.

“He was becoming a problem for the team,” Gordon tells the filmmakers. “He was carousing, drinking, falling asleep in brothels. So even though they were on the top of the mountain, and the best team in all of baseball, it was starting to fall apart. But 1919, that was when the deal to sell him to the Yankees for $125,000 was put into motion, and that’s when the curse began.”

Ultimately, the Red Sox would look like fools for the next century, as Ruth went on to hit 659 home runs in a Yankees uniform, still a club record. And more importantly, he’d win five World Series titles in the Bronx, while the Red Sox would win zero until he’d already been dead for 56 years.

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