Word: buckners
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...Curse of the Bambino--the infamous mojo said to hover over Fenway Park ever since Babe Ruth was sold to the Yankees in 1919--or because of a pall of New England Puritan guilt, or decades of nerves frayed into vermicelli by the exploits of Bucky Dent or Bill Buckner. The Sox lost because two mighty players--Pedro Martinez, the best pitcher in baseball, and Nomar Garciaparra, the finest shortstop whose first name happens to be his father's name spelled backward, at least until there's a better shortstop named Bob--could not carry 23 relative mediocrities on their...
...matchups that would have made the best stories didn't eventuate. Mets-Red Sox would have been a replay of the Buckner series of '86; and Yankees-Mets, presumably, the mythic second coming of the famed Subway Series that marked the 1950s--mythic because, these days, people who ride subways don't often get tickets to Series games in New York City. After the corporate box-seat ticket holders and other big shooters are taken care of, it would only be accurate to call a Yankees-Mets engagement a Lincoln Town Car Series...
...came after Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. "Never place the burden of your life's happiness in the hands of others," he said, "especially the Red Sox." I was only eight years old and devastated by Boston's loss at the hands--or feet--of Bill Buckner. My dad, himself a diehard fan for now more than 50 years, was trying to put a brave face on things while also teaching me an important "life lesson...
...This record can be seen as one of remarkable consistency or futility ? your pick ? but it's certainly one that marks the Red Sox as a companionable second or third banana. They've been so often near, yet always as far as the distance between Bill Buckner's feet...
...Bill Buckner was a first baseman who let a ball slip through his legs in 1986, giving the New York Mets life and, ultimately, the championship. He's a player in this long psychodrama now, as are Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams ? some great baseball names. But this isn't about them. It's about Scott, my brother-in-law and father of my niece. Scott is not from Massachusetts and until recently wasn't even much of a baseball fan. His wife, Gail, my sister, is fiercely from Massachusetts, as are my brother, my father, my mother...