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October 1, 2004/Tishri 6 5765, Vol. 57, No. 5
Is Red Sox 'curse' rooted in anti-Semitism
PETER EPHROSS
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
NEW YORK - Most casual baseball fans know about the "Curse of the Bambino."
Now a sportswriter has written that the curse - which links the Boston Red Sox's failure to win a World Series since 1918 to the sale of slugger Babe Ruth the following year to the New York Yankees - has anti-Semitic origins.
The article comes as the history of Jews in baseball is getting unprecedented pub-licity, including a recent two-day conference at baseball's Hall of Fame celebrating Jewish players. The story also comes as Shawn Green, a player with the Los Angeles Dodgers, made his decision to sit out one of his team's two games during Yom Kippur.
As writer Glenn Stout tells it, the story revolves around the anti-Semitic attitudes of pre-World War II America - and some previously unchall-enged historical inaccuracies.
In the September 2004 issue of Boston Baseball magazine, Stout writes that the roots of the animus against Harry Frazee, then the Red Sox owner, lie in his battles with the president of the American League, Ban Johnson.
Knowing that Frazee was from New York and was a theatrical producer, Johnson assumed he was Jewish. But he was wrong - Frazee was Protestant, Stout writes.
Further, Stout writes, the "facts" behind the curse are not true: the sale of Ruth was not necessary to finance the Broadway show "No, No, Nanette," and many thought the sale was a good move.
But the Frazee-was-Jewish story gained further traction when Frazee was blasted in automobile magnate Henry Ford's anti-Semitic newspaper, The Dearborn Independent.
Frazee's tenure as owner of the Red Sox amounted to "the smothering influences of the 'chosen race,'" the Indepen-dent railed in 1921.
The problem, the Indepen-dent decided, was that Frazee was an unprincipled business-man, not a baseball purist.
"Baseball was about as much a sport to Frazee as selling tickets to a merry-go-round would be," an article in the paper said, according to Stout, adding that "baseball was to be 'promoted' as Jewish mana-gers promote Coney Island."
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