When the Boston Red Sox beat the St. Louis Cardinals 3-0 on Oct. 27, 2004, giving them the World Series, the entire city of Boston felt like a weight had been lifted.
It had been 86 years since the team's last Series win, in 1918, and no matter the confluence of circumstances that combine to make a team a winner or loser, many over the years blamed the drought on the Curse of the Bambino.
Throughout the 1910s, the Boston Red Sox were a superior ball club, winning four World Series, while the New York Yankees had yet to make the championship, much less win one.
Decades after the fact, the theory developed that the sale of Babe Ruth — by far the best player in baseball at the time — from the Red Sox to the Yankees, supposedly to finance the production of a Broadway musical called “No, No, Nanette,” was such a disaster that it left the Sox cursed to lose for almost a century.
