Reverse the Curse

A new Netflix docuseries looks at the 2004 Red Sox season, one unlike any other

October 25, 1986 is one of those dates where people of a certain age – particularly Mets and Red Sox fans – are able to say exactly where they were that evening when “a little roller up along first” at Shea Stadium wreaked havoc on Red Sox Nation. Bill Buckner watched a grounder go through the wickets, and improbably, the Mets staved off elimination in Game 6 of the World Series. 

For a Hamilton College freshman on a campus of roughly 1,600 students, I was smack in the middle of the pendulum shift of emotions during the crucial 10th inning of that game. My Red Sox-rooting roommate, Nate O’Steen (from New Hampshire), was in early celebration mode in our tiny triple (converted from a double) dorm room during the top of the inning, when Dave Henderson ripped a solo homer and Marty Barrett added an insurance run with an RBI single. 

“Red Sox, bay-beeeeee! We’re finally gonna win the World Series!” O’Steen said, an Old Milwaukee can affixed to his one palm, and a hazy grin stretched across his face. He gave me a sweaty hug and continued the revelry in the hallway with other Boston fans.

But by the time I got to the other side of campus to attend a frat party, the great announcer Vin Scully had already uttered his famous line about the little roller and Buckner’s flub. The Mets fans at the frat kegger were delirious, including my other roommate, Mets-rooting Brad Griffin from Connecticut. The raucousness continued into early Sunday morning, and then was reignited Monday when the Mets won it all. 

For Sox fans? The Curse of the Bambino continued. 

Fast forward to another October evening, 17 years later, when the same storied Red Sox team was on the doorstep of advancing to the World Series and – possibly? definitely? – breaking the Curse against the Florida Marlins (a club that had stretched the NLCS to seven games against the Cubs after that series’ own eventful Game 6, featuring Steve Bartman). Even better for Boston fans, the Red Sox World Series berth would come at the expense of the hated Yankees. 

I was at old Yankee Stadium that evening of Oct. 16th, my first full year at the Daily News, and the buzz was palpable among the Boston reporters in the Stadium bowels’ auxiliary press room when the Red Sox went ahead 5-2 in the top of the eighth inning of the deciding ALCS Game 7. Boston’s ace, Pedro Martinez, had stifled every Yankee not named Jason Giambi, but there were still a few eyebrows raised when Pedro trotted out to the mound in the bottom half of the 8th inning. 

Boston manager Grady Little paid the price with his job for sticking with Martinez, as the Yanks stormed back and tied the game. Before Aaron Boone stepped to the plate to start the bottom 11th, I had made my way back up to the main press box, which was SRO by then. I stood next to my colleague Julian Garcia, and we and the rest of the sold-out crowd watched Boone clock a Tim Wakefield first-pitch knuckleball into the left field stands. Bronx bedlam ensued, ensuring the Curse was alive for another year. 

The terrific new Netflix documentary series, “The Comeback: 2004 Boston Red Sox,” explores that crazy, Curse-breaking Sox season, as well as the origins of the Boston heartache, going all the way back to when the Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1920 and the ensuing decades of World Series drought and almosts – 1946, 1967, 1975 and of course, the aforementioned 1986 debacle – along with the requisite Bucky “Effing” Dent 1978 zinger.

After the dramatic 2003 ALCS – the cast of characters, Pedro buzzing Karim Garcia, Clemens buzzing Manny, the Pedro-Don Zimmer smackdown, an ALCS stretched to seven games, Mariano pitching multiple scoreless innings of relief, Grady Little’s fated decision, the Boone homer – it didn’t seem possible that the two clubs could outdo themselves the following year. 

Oh yes, yes they could. For the New York and Boston media covering the madness, it was every bit the demanding, cutthroat, competitive and exhilarating experience you would imagine, all in the pre-social media era, when tabloid back pages still ruled. 

There’s a snapshot in Part III of the Red Sox docuseries where Derek Jeter is being interviewed at his locker at Fenway Park, and yours truly is standing next to him in the cramped visiting clubhouse. That media scrum session took place in a July 2004 series which became famous for the Alex Rodriguez-Jason Varitek fight and subsequent bench-clearing brawl in the second game, and which the Sox improbably won in extra innings with Mariano Rivera on the mound.

During that July series, I spotted the late Larry Lucchino, then the team president, outside the Sox clubhouse, after his club had dropped the first game. I managed to interview him one-on-one while a nearby group of Boston and New York reporters waited anxiously, and Lucchino – who had famously called the Yankees the “Evil Empire” – delivered another jab at Boston’s rivals while paraphrasing Mark Twain: essentially, “the reports of (the Red Sox) death are greatly exaggerated.”

Turns out, Lucchino had a Nostradamus moment that played out for real a few months later. 

None of that Boston euphoria seemed possible when the ’04 year began. Two months after a December 2003 proposed trade that would have sent Alex Rodriguez to Boston in exchange for Manny Ramirez going to the Rangers fell through, A-Rod landed in the Bronx instead. Boone, the hero of the ’03 championship series, tore up his knee in a pickup basketball game in January. 

In between A-Rod’s lavish Stadium press conference, where Jeter looked like he was having root canal surgery while helping Rodriguez slip on his No. 13 pinstriped jersey, and Boston’s historic ALCS comeback after being down 0-3, there was plenty of fodder to fill a reporter’s notebook. 

Two memories in particular stick out from that postseason, the first of which came in the decisive ALCS Game 7. There was an auxiliary press box set up in right field of the old Stadium, but working from there had its challenges: trying to type with numb fingers and avoiding the detritus — beer, vomit, vitriol — of raucous Yankee fans. I tried to squeeze into the main press box at the start of the game, but only lasted one inning before being booted. As I walked the concourse back to right field, I arrived at the auxiliary box entrance at the exact moment Johnny Damon’s second-inning grand slam was soaring towards me. 

Three days later, before the Red Sox played Game 1 of the World Series against the Cardinals, I was at the Stadium for the annual stakeout of players cleaning out their lockers. The old Stadium was awesome for this task, because the players’ parking lot was out in the open, and provided virtually no escape hatch from the media (or fans for that matter). 

I was there with Newsday reporter Jim Baumbach and a New York Times reporter, Gloria Rodriguez. Hours ticked by. The temperature dropped. No players. Gloria left. I called into the Daily News desk with a semi plea to exit as well. I also had to get up Sunday morning and head to Foxborough to cover a Patriots-Jets game. Hang a little longer. Then a clubhouse attendant told Baumbach, “Maybe Jeter…” That assured I would be waiting for as long as possible until the Captain appeared.

Sure enough, Jeter eventually pulled up in a Mercedes coupe and told me and Baumbach he would talk to us after he cleaned out his locker. The payoff was a money back page (see above). 

Unlike Lucchino, however, Jeter’s prediction was decidedly un-Nostradamus.