Larry Howser

Elimination Game! Larry Howser

For years, the Boston Red Sox carried the burden of "The Curse of the Bambino" - beginning when Harry Frazee, the owner of the Boston Red Sox, sold the greatest player in baseball history, Babe Ruth, to the New York Yankees, after the 1919 season - supposedly to finance one of his Broadway musicals (although the musical he was supposed to have been financing was not produced for a number of years). To that point, the Red Sox had won five of the first 15 World Series, the most of any team. From that point onward until 2004, the Yankees won 39 American league pennants (to the Red Sox' four) and 26 World Series (to the Sox' zero). In 2018, the Boston Red Sox captured their fourth World Series title in 15 years, after "Reversing the Curse" in 2004, ending 86 years of frustration. All these facts are very well known to most Red Sox fans, especially the constant of the "Curse" until the team finally triumphed in 2004. During the championship run of 2013, and again in 2018, the Bosox never faced an elimination game. But, in tracing back through the last 50+ years of major league baseball, there is no franchise that equals the Red Sox record in post-season elimination games. This is what I am interested in looking at in this book. For many years, we listened to the story of the curse under which the Red Sox operated. As a Red Sox fan, it was enjoyable, and certainly relaxing, that in 2013 the team NEVER faced a game in which they HAD to win to continue their season - and, of course, they repeated the feat in 2018. The last time that had happened to the Boston nine, it was in the 1918 World Series. Throughout the years of Boston postseason baseball, the Boston Red Sox - win OR lose - have produced some of the most tension-filled, exciting postseason baseball anyone has seen.