Holy Sox

By Bill Saporito Sean Gregory/Busch Stadium; Jane Bachman Wulf/Fenway Park

The chant would come every time they played in New York City. "Nine-teen eight-teen." Win or lose against the Yankees, they would hear it rise from the bleachers and spread to the box seats. Those are far from the unkindest words that could be directed your way in the South Bronx, but to members of Red Sox Nation, as fans of Boston's baseball team are known, they burned with particular intensity, scarlet letters on their sporting souls, because the words reminded them that the Red Sox hadn't tasted a World Series championship since Babe Ruth was the team's star player. For generations of New Englanders, it had been axiomatic: When the leaves fall, so do the Red Sox. Yet for 86 years, fans were bonded by this epic failure. It nurtured in them an almost messianic belief that somedaythis year, surely their time would come. Wherever Sox fans lived, they carried their quest with them, a treasured keepsake of home.

The Celtics have won 16 NBA championships, the Bruins five Stanley Cups and the Patriots two Super Bowls. Those were appreciated, but New England's soul belonged to the denizens of Fenway Park. Citizens of Red Sox Nation even came to believe they had been cursed. Baseball may no longer be America's pastime, but it has always been Boston's passion play. And last week the good guys finally triumphed. The Red Sox won the World Series.

"This is for everyone who played for the Red Sox, who's rooted for the Red Sox, whose relatives rooted for the Red Soxit is so much bigger than the 25 guys in this clubhouse," enthused Boston's general manager Theo Epstein as his team sprayed champagne around the clubhouse after sweeping the St. Louis Cardinals in four games. Just 30 years young, Epstein is living every Boston fan's childhood fantasy, leading the team he has rooted forand suffered withto that long-elusive championship. "In New England," he said, eyes welling, "this is life."

If you want to bury a ghost, you have to dig a very deep hole. And the Sox had dug themselves a doozy: down three games to none against the pin-striped demons of New York, Boston trailed, 4-3, as the team headed into the bottom of the ninth inning of what could have been the final game of the American League Championship Series (ALCS), three outs from another despairing winter.

But the team that had comported every characteristic of human frailty would become the immortals of New England, the ones who reversed the curse. They rallied somehow to win that game and took the next seven--a record run of eight straight postseason victories. Did you hear that, Babe? Not since the visiting Redcoats lost to the hometown Colonials in 1776 has Boston celebrated like this. As victory drew near--the finale was a 3-0 game in which the Cards played as though the curse had struck them--thousands of fans gathered near Fenway, while across New England, from the Maine woods to the divided turf of Connecticut, there was teary joy. Even in Manhattan, deep within enemy territory, expats of the Red Sox Nation poured into the streets to celebrate as the locals, for once, quietly seethed. Some 3.2 million fans thronged Boston for the victory parade, so many that the parade route was extended into the Charles River by boat.

In their sublime run to the championship, the Sox put to rest one of baseball's most irresistible legends: that the great George Herman Ruth, a.k.a. Babe, Bambino and Sultan of Swat, had jinxed the team when the Sox sold him to the Yankees in 1920 for $100,000 so that Boston owner Harry Frazee could finance a Broadway show. With Ruth, the Beaneaters won three World Series, the last in 1918. After Ruth, they reaped eight decades of squat, with the occasional run at the title always ending in tragedy, including seventh-game World Series losses to St. Louis (1946 and 1967), Cincinnati (1975) and the New York Mets (1986), as well as the painful collapse in last year's league championship showdown with the Yankees.

For Boston fans, this is more than just an overdue triumph. The graveyards of New England are filled with men and women who gifted the curse to their children like a family heirloom. Maybe there were fights over money and you argued over music and politics, but everyone shared in the exquisite agony of rooting for the Sawx. By beating the Cards, the Sox provided their fans a redemption story to beat all other redemption stories. As Washington attorney Bob Kirk, a Boston native, stood watching the celebration on the field in St. Louis, Mo., he talked about his father, who died of cancer last December. "His last words to me were, 'Have they signed [pitcher Curt] Schilling?'" Kirk remembers. "I promised him that if he pulled through, I'd take him to see this. I wanted to be here for him. I feel a little angel over me."

Such deep sentiment has been a burden for Bosox players over the years. So to insulate themselves from that kind of pressure, this Red Sox squad cultivated an attitude better suited to its needs: staggering immaturity. They sported hairdos of unknown origin, beginning with Series MVP Manny Ramirez, whose locks spilled out of his hat like they were trying to abandon ship. The players treated every game as though it was, well, a game. They were the polar opposites of their rivals from New York (no facial hair, no fooling, no fun). They were the anti-Yankees.

The casual swagger was exemplified by players like center fielder Johnny Damon, the leadoff hitter whose long hair and beard evoke the style "modern caveman." His philosophy could generously be described as early developmental. "We are just the idiots," he mused during the postseason, referring to the moniker that the team had adopted. This in a city with 100 colleges. Damon was echoing his teammates' mantra: they were playing a kid's game, they were having fun, but they were also going to "grind you out." "We try to eliminate the thinking and let our natural abilities take over. So I think that's why the phrase about the idiots kind of took off," Damon explained. "But we don't think. If we use our brains, we're only hurting the team."

To utility man Dave Roberts, the idiots complemented neurotic, overeducated Red Sox Nation. "To be honest, since Red Sox fans are so intense and baseball's a long, 162-game season, it helped that this team was as loose as it was. If this team was as intense as its fans, it could have been too serious, too overbearing for everyone." Epstein found the right manager too in Terry Francona, a laid-back personality who sometimes sounds like a bewildered father of 25 teenagers.

Ultimately, of course, the Sox won the big prize not via voodoo but by assembling a pitching staff deep enough to win a seven-game series. Starters Schilling, Pedro Martinez and Derek Lowe didn't give up an earned run in the last three games, limiting the Cards' "MV3" all-star trio of Albert Pujols, Scott Rolen and Jim Edmonds, collectively .316 during the season, to .133 in the Series. And the Sox bullpen, which for decades had leaked late-inning leads like a faulty tire valve, finally stopped letting the air out. In Game 3 of the ALCS, the Bronx Bombers brutalized Boston pitching, winning 19-8, to go up three games to none. That's when the magic ride began. The next night, five Sox pitchers shut the Yanks out for the last six innings, giving Boston a chance to tie and then win the game on David Ortiz's walk-off home run in the 12th. A day later, six Sox emerged from the pen to hold the Yanks for the last eight innings. Ortiz again delivered, with a game-winning single in the 14th. Even Boston's long-scarred faithful dared to believe this could actually--no, really!--be the year.

The enduring story will be Schilling's. Boston's ace had to pitch off an ankle tendon sewn in place to keep it from wobbling out of its torn sheath. He pinned down the Yankees in the sixth game, a 4-2 win in the House That Ruth Built. As Schilling worked the Yankee lineup, blood leached from the wound, turning his sock red. Holy metaphor! Then Lowe, who won the clinching game in all three postseason rounds, threw nothing but worm balls as the Sox won 10-3 in the decider. With that kind of momentum, did the Cards stand a chance?

If the odds had finally shifted in Boston's favor, thanks had to go in part to John Henry, the team's principal owner. Henry, a lifelong St. Louis fan, grew up on an Arkansas farm listening to Cardinals radio broadcasts. He developed a gift for numbers, computing batting averages in his head and eventually making millions trading commodities. He and his partners bought the Sox in 2001 for an estimated $660 million. What Boston fans deemed a curse was, to him, a statistical anomaly at best. Or lousy management. One explanation for Boston's years of failure is that the team wasn't run very well. Tom Yawkey, the owner from 1933 until his death in 1976, was a lumber magnate who was willing to spend money but unwilling to let anyone other than a few trusted cronies run the club. His widow Jean directed the operation until her death in 1992, and then a trust led by John Harrington, hired by Yawkey as a Red Sox treasurer in 1973, took over. The Sox improved but still no silverware.

Henry, who had owned the Florida Marlins, is part of a new breed captivated by a strategy for evaluating players called sabermetrics. Its adherents dismiss traditional measures like batting average and RBIs, seeing stats like on-base percentages and pitch counts as better indicators of productivity. In this view, a guy who hits .250 and walks 50 times might create as many runs as one who hits .300 and strikes out a lot. He'd be a damn sight cheaper too. Sabermetrics produced signings such as that of third baseman Bill Mueller (with a $2 million-a-year salary), who would lead the American League in hitting after joining the club, and Ortiz ($1.25 million), who developed this year into an MVP candidate.

A year after taking over, Henry and his CEO, Larry Lucchino, handed the team's reins to Epstein, the then 28-year-old assistant general manager. A Yalie who had grown up a mile from Fenway, Epstein was a data freak who did a sabermetric analysis on everyone in spikes. By the time he was finished dealing, Epstein had replaced 16 of Boston's 25 players. Before the 2004 season, he tried to pull off a stunning coup by bringing superstar shortstop Alex Rodriguez to Beantown. The deal fell apart, and Rodriguez eventually landed in New York. But Epstein had other gems in sight. He splashed out $24 million for a much-needed closer, Keith Foulke, after landing the incomparable Schilling, a certified Yankee killer. The additions gave the Red Sox a lineup that was perfectly balanced on the field--and refreshingly off-center in the clubhouse.

In Ortiz, Epstein acquired a perfect clubhouse presence. Dissatisfied with his work ethic and production, the Minnesota Twins cut Papi, as Ortiz is known, after the 2002 season. Epstein saw value. "We spoke to a lot of people about David," says the GM. "Everyone said he was part of the heart and soul of that Minnesota team, that he was the kind of guy you'd love playing with."

Ortiz turned out to be a perfect foil for his flightier fellow Dominicans, Ramirez and Martinez. Ramirez plays left field, but that's more of an address than a position. On bad days, he fields fly balls like a Border collie, running left and right to herd the ball toward him. He can forget standard obligations: running to first base on a grounder, say. Last fall the Bosox offered him to any team that would eat the remainder of his $160 million contract--no takers. Lucky for Boston. Ramirez this year was calm and focused and hit a ton. "This team has a mentality that it will pick you up when things go wrong," he told TIME. "It made everything so much easier this year."

Martinez is another complex character. Although he has been one of the game's dominant pitchers, the Yankees seemed to have his number. After another loss to them in late September, he blurted out, "I just tip my hat and call the Yankees my daddy." Ever sensitive New York fans quickly added, "Who's your Dad-dy?" to the 1918 taunt. But by the thick of this year's playoffs, Pedro too had adapted the team's "Why not us?" attitude. He pitched a gem in the World Series.

The final pieces were assembled on July 31, the eve of the trading deadline, as the Sox shipped out shortstop Nomar Garciaparra. No-mah, as Boston fans know him, went to the Chicago Cubs in a complicated trade that brought the relatively unknown Orlando Cabrera from Montreal. Trading Garciaparra was risky. He was a baseball Brahmin, descended from the line of Boston icons that included Ted Williams and Carl Yastrzemski. But Garciaparra had been unsettled since the Sox tried to land Rodriguez. It was a gutsy, initially unpopular trade, but it worked out. Says Epstein: "One thing about our ownership--they're not afraid to look stupid."

But one of Garciaparra's last games in a Boston uniform was a season turning point. At home on July 24, the Bosox rallied from a 9-4 deficit to beat the Yankees 11-10 in the ninth on a Mueller homer off Yankee closer Mariano Rivera. The game was marked by a scuffle in which catcher Jason Varitek smacked Rodriguez after the two exchanged heated words. It was the kind of inspiration the team had been seeking. "We've been kind of waiting to have this feeling all year," said Epstein afterward. "Today wasn't really about stats, box scores, fundamentals. Today was really about emotions." The Sox were 52-44 until that point but finished the season on a tear, winning 70% of their last 66 games, to clinch the AL wildcard playoff spot.

There is a downside to the victory, of course. Now that the Sox have won, baseball is deprived of its best narrative. Ahab nails the whale, and Moby Dick is a novella. Red Sox Nation had long believed that otherworldly forces rose when baseball got to October. In this universe, dark spirits open the earth beneath Bill Buckner's feet, and an easy grounder--and the 1986 Series--disappears under his legs. In this universe, Yankee shortstop Bucky Dent, who during the 1978 season couldn't hit a ball into the Charles if he was knee deep in it, wallops a homer that costs the Sox the pennant. In this universe, a bewitched manager leaves his ace pitcher in too long, with catastrophic results. That's why Boston ran skipper Grady Little out of town for sticking with Martinez in last year's implosion in the Bronx. It's what you expect when home plate is a short broom ride from Salem, Mass., where their forebears hung suspected witches just to get their mojo right.

Can Red Sox fans cope with winning? Judging from the continuing delirium, absolutely. Although now they may have to live with another curse: higher expectations. Henry has surely calculated that the Sox can't win the Series every year, or even every other year. A reasonable goal is to be one of the eight teams that makes the playoffs. That means the team always has a 12.5% chance at the title. In other words, Boston ought to win once every eight seasons. For Red Sox fans, who waited 86 years to have their prayers answered, that must sound like tomorrow. --Reported by Sean Gregory/Busch Stadium and Jane Bachman Wulf/Fenway Park