The '34 Red Sox: Birth of a curse

Tom Yawkey bought Boston $2.25 million worth of hope.
That's when the trouble started

by Jim Kaplan

Lefty Grove

OH, THAT THIS could be the story of another sports success in the Hub: a saga of Red and Russ, Yaz and the Thumper, Bobby Orr and the Bruins, Doug Flutie and the Hail Mary pass. Alas. The 1934 baseball season was another kind of Boston sports story, one with which we hard-bitten Calvinist New Englanders are only too familiar. It was the year the Curse of the Bambino kicked in for good.

The title of a book by Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy, "The Curse of the Bambino" refers not only to the trail of tailenders that succeeded Babe Ruth's departure for the Yankees after the 1919 season. The Sox have been plagued by something far worse than mere failure: the sensation of reaching for the brass ring, only to see it snatched away, again and again. Nineteen thirty-four was the first of the cursed seasons, with spirits raised and dropped like two wrestlers slamming each other to the mat.

Of course, it didn't feel that way in March. It never does.

Boston, high noon, March 2, 1934

In the 1930s, spring training didn't begin the day the team broke camp in Florida or Arizona: it started the moment the official Red Sox traveling party, complete with boosters, officials, and equipment, pulled out of South Station en route to Sarasota, Florida. This year the team's ritual sendoff looked for all the world like the beginning of a politician's whistle-stop tour, or maybe the next leg of a papal visit. On board the train were "royal rooter" George Murphy, other local swells, an assistant trainer, a minor-league player, and nine newsmen -- the largest press contingent the Boston Herald's Burt Whitman could remember. Two extra sleeping cars, the McDougal and the McCausland, had been added. More than 100 well-wishers crowded the platform. "No less an authority than travelling secretary Phil Troy claimed that this was the first time in his two decades of connection with Boston ball clubs that a departing squad has been given an honest-to-goodness cheer as it pulled out of South Station for Dixie," Whitman wrote. His story trumpeted: HOSE GIVEN ROYAL SEND-OFF; TRAVEL LIKE PRIMA DONNAS.

Why so much enthusiasm over the lowly Red Sox? Depression Boston was a moribund place, and the Sox' 31-year-old owner, Tom Yawkey, looked like an EMT. In only 13 months at the helm, he had acquired the best pitcher in baseball, transformed a ballpark into a pleasure palace, and turned an American League also-ran into a team the oddsmakers were already projecting to be a contender. The sight of all that hope pulling out of South Station was not only inspiring, but Depression-lifting.

The Hub was ready for a winning team. Boston was the trading and transportation center of the region, but factories and mills were dying in places like Haverhill, Malden, and Lowell, and the goods just weren't getting to the city. Newspapers emphasized murder stories. Old money sat in banks, and there was no new investment to speak of. Not even the New Deal could bail the city out: Mayor James Michael Curley, who finished his third term as mayor in 1933, rejected federal relief unless it went to his personal contractors, with major kickbacks to Curley himself. Though Boston was eligible for 22,800 jobs under the Public Works Administration (PWA), the city accepted only 12,500. In 1934, Curley turned over the city's misery to Frederick W. Mansfield and directed his merry mischief into a successful run for governor.

No wonder Bostonians looked for relief on the sports pages. They weren't finding it among their pro teams, however. Then as now, clubs that spent were clubs that won, and the Red Sox and the National League Braves had spent the 1920s and early '30s trying to stay out of bankruptcy court -- and out of last place. In 1934 the hockey Bruins failed to qualify for the playoffs, and the football Redskins were two years from an unfortunate date with destiny. In 1936 they would, uniquely for their sport, play a "home" playoff game on the road. After losing to the Green Bay Packers in New York's Polo Grounds, the Redskins moved immediately to Washington, DC.

For sporting satisfaction, citizens walked from work to twilight semipro baseball games (which sometimes outdrew the majors), headed to the race track, or attended boxing and wrestling matches where Irishmen like Steve (Crusher) Casey were huge favorites and the opponents were described in terms like "dusky-colored grappler." Some of these events degenerated into public brawls.

THE ARRIVAL of Tom Yawkey promised to change all that. Yawkey, who inherited a fortune of more than seven million Depression dollars when he turned 30, bought the Red Sox in 1933. With a 1932 record of 43-111, they were a dismal last-place team. Yawkey signed catcher Rick Ferrell and infielder Bill Werber and, lo, the '33 Red Sox rose to seventh place in the eight-team American League, with a record of 63-86. Home attendance jumped from 182,150 to 268,715.

For the coming season, Yawkey replaced manager Marty McManus with Detroit's Bucky Harris, a pennant-winning skipper of the 1924 and 1925 Senators. Eddie Collins, late of the Philadelphia A's, arrived to wheel and deal as general manager. And Yawkey spent $1.25 million on union labor -- a good political move -- to transform Fenway Park from a wooden fire hazard into a cement-and-steel masterpiece, complete with the most famous landmark in baseball: the left-field wall known as the Green Monster. Perhaps Yawkey's most exciting move happened soon after the '33 season. When Connie Mack dismantled his long-time champion A's in a fire sale, Yawkey picked up three stalwarts in pitcher Rube Walberg, second baseman Max Bishop, and the best pitcher in baseball: Robert Moses (Lefty) Grove.

All told, Yawkey had spent at least $2.25 million on the team, but the focus of everyone's attention was Grove. Good religious fans that they are, Bostonians have always looked for saviors, be they named Foxx, Williams, Clemens, or Martinez. In Lefty Grove, they had landed a savior indeed: a player now considered by many baseball historians the greatest pitcher of all time.

A miner's son from the western Maryland hamlet of Lonaconing, the 34-year-old Grove had led the A's to three pennants in 1929-'31 and had won an unmatched 172 games over his past seven seasons. At 6-2¹/2 and 175 pounds, he was unusually long and lean for a player of his time. His bumpkin's head always looked too small for his large, sloping shoulders; he had a wide, big-lipped mouth, small teeth, prominent gums, creased cheeks, squinty eyes, and prematurely graying hair that rose almost as high off his scalp as that of Seinfeld's Kramer.

But his self-taught, absolutely flawless pitching delivery was a thing of beauty. Grove's money pitch, the fastball, was less lightning than legend. "He could throw a lamb chop past a wolf," the columnist Westbrook Pegler wrote. Said one batter, "Sometimes when the sun was out, really bright, he would throw that baseball in there and it looked like a flash of white sewing thread coming at you." Others were so dumbfounded they could only mumble, "You can't hit what you can't see."

The pitching equivalent of Ty Cobb, Grove had a temper to match his speed. When a young teammate's misjudgment cost him a chance to win a record 17th straight game in 1931, Grove dismantled the clubhouse almost literally board by board.

If Boston politics was James Michael Curley's show, the '34 Red Sox were first and foremost a drama of Robert Moses Grove. Call it "Waiting for Lefty."

Sarasota, March 1934

Baseball is a sport best understood incrementally, as facts and feelings accrue over a seven-month spring and summer season. To understand how the extraordinary year unraveled for Lefty Grove and the Red Sox, follow the deadline writing of beat reporters.

The Boston press in 1934 was not quite the den of headhunters and hit men it became when poor, unpolished Ted Williams came to town. Indeed, many of the scribes were outright "homers" who occasionally wrote in the first person about rooting the Old Town Team along. The Red Sox train had picked up players and officials in Providence, Bridgeport, New York, and Washington. Arriving in camp on March 4, the great throng was thrilled when Grove, who had preceded the train to Florida, entered the Sarasota Terrace Hotel with fellow pitcher Walberg at 3 p.m. The weather was blustery outside, with rain about to fall, and practice had been called off. The big story was inside.

"It seemed that everything around the hotel stood still for several minutes, while Grove was given royal greeting," Whitman reported in the Herald.

"Goodness gracious, Herbie," Grove teased 40-year-old Herb Pennock, his old Yankee nemesis, now a fellow Bosox. "You'll have to do a lot of running to get that stomach down." Everyone laughed: Pennock was as thin as a blade of grass.

"The ice was broken and everybody met everybody else," Whitman's dispatch continued. "Merely because you may have read that Grove is a taciturn, even grumpy fellow, who doesn't mix well, we hasten to add that he mixed beautifully with these Red Sox."

Grove announced that he wouldn't be practicing on Sundays because "six days are enough for me, and always have been." Lefty and Lefty alone was given his own room at the road hotels. He expected carte blanche, and Tom Yawkey, several years his junior, was in his thrall. The manager, general manager, and coaches could only follow.

The media fell in step too. Wrote Whitman after the March 5 opening practice: "He went into the bunting game like a trained acrobat, apparently without any stiff joints in his makeup."

On March 10, Grove finally threw batting practice. Teammates struggled to get the fat part of their bats on the ball. "It almost seemed that his glamorous reputation had them buffaloed," Whitman wrote.

Grove wasn't pushing himself too hard, restricting the bulk of his workout to playing a throwing-and-hitting game called "pepper" and doing some sprints. Back at the hotel, he lounged on a veranda, smoking big cigars, signing autographs, posing for pictures, playing practical jokes. The Boston Evening Transcript's LeRoy Atkinson described him in detail:

Grove is still a big country boy. Around the hotel he is a menace to life and limb. Usually picking on travelling secretary Phil Troy, who stands only shoulder high to Robert Moses, the big Lonaconing, Md. southpaw will swing the protesting Phil around as though the two were performing an adagio dance.

"I'm all black and blue around here," complains Phil, rubbing his gunwales. "I guess I'll have to take out an insurance policy as big as we have on Grove if the big fellow doesn't lay off me."

Another favorite trick of Mr. Grove's is to come up behind a newspaperman and take the skin around both ribs and then pull. The flesh seems to come out a foot and then snap back against the bones like the crack of an elastic. The feeling cannot be described, and the Grove back-slap: ow!

"I want all the work you can give me," Grove told Bucky Harris on March 13, "until the week before the opening game of the season, and then I don't want to work out at all until the first game of the season."

THAT SPIRIT was short-lived. During 30 minutes of batting practice on March 14, Grove threw at half speed, then virtually no speed, riling the batters. Immediately after the workout, Grove headed to trainer Doc Watson, who rubbed salve on him, massaged him, and put the offending arm under electric lights.

Two days later, the trouble was diagnosed as a sore spot near the top of the left shoulder, somewhere behind the biceps muscle and various ligaments. Watson had to dig deep to knead the sore area. Grove screamed.

The Sox hadn't played a single exhibition game, but already the same newsmen who had ballyhooed the season under headlines like RED SOX RECORD WARRANTS RISING PENNANT CHORUS threw the fans a curve and began predicting a fourth-place finish -- at best. The weather, in the 30s and 40s, didn't help the team get ready. Grove grimly ran sprints outside Payne Park and spent half an hour daily under the violet-ray lamp.

For all the gloom of the sportswriters, Sox fans were undiminished in their enthusiasm. Steeled by rough winters, New Englanders were used to late springs actual and metaphoric. Lefty Grove was merely the first local hero ready to stage a baseball version of the Perils of Pauline. The adventures of Ted Williams, Wade Boggs, and Roger Clemens were still to come.

On April 4, Grove threw his first full-scale tantrum of the year. After warming up for 15 minutes before a game against the Dodgers -- a game in which he wasn't scheduled to pitch -- Grove caught a return throw from coach Tom Daly and suddenly threw down his glove. As the ball rolled past his feet, Grove walked past silent teammates and stationed himself beside the dugout.

Subsequently Grove headed to the bench, ripped a teammate's sweatshirt from a peg, and threw it down. Then he flung his glove off the wall and walked outside the dugout. "To hell with it!" screamed Grove. "I can't do the club any good! I might as well hang up the spikes!" Eventually, Grove took his black windbreaker into the clubhouse, where he spent three innings before returning to the field, only to sit conspicuously apart from his teammates on the grass.

General manager Eddie Collins expressed no alarm over the reported outburst, and Grove himself recovered quickly. "Say, it looks as if after this when I want to get a little peeved, I'll have to go lock myself in my room," he joked to the Herald's Gerry Moore.

His first outing came on April 7, when Grove pitched four innings in Birmingham, Alabama, against the minor-league Barons. After warming up for 15 minutes on the sidelines, Grove walked to the mound, threw his customary three pitches, and announced he was ready. He was not. With a man on second and two outs, he surrendered a run-scoring single to a minor-league legend named Buzz Arlett. Grove was so discouraged by the third inning that he yelled to the umpire, "Where does the ball have to be?" Whereupon he tossed a bean-bag lob to the hitter, who doubled in the third run of the inning.

In the end, Grove gave up eight hits and four runs in four innings. "The spirit was willing, but the flesh was not," an unidentified Herald correspondent began a story. " . . . Lefty didn't even have the ghost of his fastball."

"I couldn't get anything on the ball," Grove, the picture of dejection, told the writer back in the hotel lobby.

"There is still a knot in his arm," said Doc Watson. "And the chances are, he won't be able to pitch until it's eliminated." Back home, fans held their breaths.

AS SPRING training unfolded, "Waiting for Lefty" got curiouser and curiouser. Perhaps the problem wasn't in his arm, or even in his mind. After the Birmingham blasting, Grove underwent a dental exam that revealed three abscessed teeth and inflamed tonsils. On April 8, E.L Sorrell, Yawkey's Birmingham-based dentist brother-in-law, extracted two molars. After the second tooth broke and had to be cut out, Lefty decided to have the third one removed in Philadelphia.

The inflamed tonsils he kept secret: Lefty thought he could take his chances with them as they were.

Doctors in attendance agreed that the teeth had affected Grove's pitching. If they didn't somehow bother the arm, they certainly worsened his general physical condition. "One of the doctors at Birmingham said that he `wished he had as much chance to go to Heaven as Lefty Grove's arm had to come back, following the elimination of poison from the general system,' " Melville E. Webb Jr. wrote in the Boston Daily Globe.

"I'm going to be ready -- let the teeth fall where they may," Grove told reporters in Atlanta. On April 10, in Philadelphia, another dentist took out the third abscessed tooth.

"Sore arm, sure I've got a sore arm," a notably cheerier Grove said. "But why all the uproar? Everything is coming along fine, and it won't be more than a week or so before I'll be in good shape.

"And he pulled a big one right out of my mouth right here -- look." He showed the reporters. Fans' hopes must have soared like a thermometer on the first sunny day of spring.

On April 11, Grove announced in Philadelphia that he wouldn't pitch for 10 to 14 days -- the time, he said, it would take for the poison to leave his system. His wife, Ethel, arrived from Lonaconing with the Grove car, and a few days later, they headed nonstop to Boston. "I'll be out tomorrow, and I'm feeling right in the pink again," said Grove upon his arrival.

"The dentist . . . told me not to stir up the animals too quickly."

Fenway Park, opening day, April 17

Grove was still sitting out, but by the end of spring training the Sox' bats were booming, and fans were talking pennant. Boston's April 16 opener in Washington was rained out, so their first game of the new season was in Fenway Park.

Entering Fenway for the home opener was like driving down a country road in Ireland. Everything was sparkling and green. There were new green signs over the enlarged grandstands, bright green paint on the cement walls, and green bull's-eye lights to mark balls (red for strikes and outs) on baseball's most famous landmark, the new sheet-metal-and-steel Green Monster, with its 37-foot fence. Stretching from the left-field corner almost to dead center, the great wall was also wide enough to hold updated scores from both leagues, as well as advertisements (later removed) for whiskey, razor blades, and soap. To expand the park's capacity to 37,500, fully 15,708 new seats had been installed, including box seats clear down to the field and bleachers "for forgotten men and small boys," as Whitman of the Herald wrote. The seating areas melded into each other in a unified pattern. It was an ultramodern stadium for its time, the sixth-largest in baseball. And it wasn't just useful; it was beautiful.

Fenway Park was a major story in Depression Boston. There were no tall ships being built, and no tall buildings, either. Thanks to a height restriction, the 30-story US Custom House tower was the only skyscraper in town. Rebuilt Fenway was a product of heroic round-the-clock effort. It had survived a five-hour, four-alarm off-season blaze that had burned down the center-field bleachers and turned reconstruction into re-reconstruction. Finished on time in spite of it all, this gleaming gem -- the city's largest private construction project of the decade -- was to Bostonians what Yankee Stadium, Central Park, and the Brooklyn Bridge were to New Yorkers. In Boston newspapers, opening day was so important it shared the top of page one with the hottest murder trial of the year.

Before the game, Grove threw painlessly on the sidelines for 10 minutes. A pitcher named Dusty Rhodes started the game for the Sox. Before 30,336 paying fans, the mayor, and the governor, the Red Sox rallied from a 5-0 deficit to tie the score. In the 11th inning, erratic pitching and an untimely error cost them a run and the game, which they lost, 6-5. But fans left Fenway babbling about the exciting team they'd seen. The fluke ending couldn't possibly be a harbinger of days (and seasons, and decades) to come.

"We want Grove!" the fans chanted every time he warmed up in the Washington series. Lefty wasn't scheduled to pitch until May, but he did throw five innings against Holy Cross in an April 27 exhibition game. He fanned the first two hitters and then let up a little, allowing only one run and four hits in five innings. "I felt all right all day," he said afterward.

With the Red Sox in fourth place at 7-7, Grove made his first appearance on May 5, in relief, against the St. Louis Browns. He began warming up in the second inning when starter Johnny Welch was struggling. Harris asked if Grove was ready for the third, and he said no. Rube Walberg worked the inning, and Grove was sent into the game in the fourth, with the Red Sox leading, 9-3. He walked from the bullpen, a lanky wraith in his white No. 10 uniform, while 19,000 Fenway fans cheered.

The cheering didn't last. A walk was followed by a triple, a single, a double, and a walk on four pitches. Finally Grove pointed to catcher Ferrell, signaling him to hold the ball. Without a look to the dugout, Grove walked off the field, carefully skirting the first-base line. He had surrendered three hits, two walks, and five earned runs without retiring a batter.

"The great southpaw was wholly without his famous `smoke' ball, so named because of its amazing speed," wrote the Herald's Whitman. "He merely was a thrower in there, and his control was not good."

Grove agreed. There was no pain, he said -- but no stuff, either.

SOON THE stuff looked to be on its way back. Nine days later, Grove reported for relief in a game against the White Sox. With the bases loaded, he walked a batter to force in one run, allowed another to score on a fielder's choice, then ended the inning by inducing a ground ball. A slow start, but in the following six innings Grove yielded only three hits and one unearned run, retiring 12 straight batters at one point. "The pronounced silver lining to the defeat was that Bob Lefty Grove staged a real come-back, impressive to a marked degree and indicative that soon he will be able to take his starting turn in the box for Manager Bucky Harris," Whitman wrote.

"Certainly feels all right," said Grove.

Boarding an all-night train to St. Louis at 4:30 p.m., both Grove and Harris struggled to contain their joy. "Just give me a couple of days of rest and I'll be ready to start," Grove "war-whooped," according to the Herald's Gerry Moore. "I was right yesterday and don't think that anyone is more pleased than I. Watch us go now."

"He'll be starting in St. Louis," said Harris, "and he'll win."

He sure did. Grove six-hit the Browns and even homered in a 4-1 victory on May 19. He still didn't have the old speed on his fastball, leading a St. Louis scribe to write, "The old Grove passeth." But when he beat the Indians, 7-5, in Cleveland four days later, the new Grove seemed to be passing muster.

The Sox, though still a few games south of .500, were brimming with optimism. On a late-May road trip, they picked up shortstop Lyn Lary, who had driven in 107 runs for the 1931 Yankees, and Rick Ferrell's brother Wes, a Grovian-sized (6-2, 195) right-hander with a 102-62 record for the Indians. Ferrell delighted everyone by pitching 5²/3 innings of two-hit relief to win a game on June 5. The show was on the road.

But this wasn't just drama; it was becoming melodrama. Grove proceeded to lose four straight, twice giving up eight earned runs and once seven, and the Red Sox failed to gain on the leaders. Was it his arm, his delivery, his confidence? Maybe it was something else: Grove had ended the 1933 season with severely ripped fingertips. Now the whole hand was at risk. While he was being raked for eight runs in 5²/3 innings during a May 28 loss at Detroit, he struck out a batter with no one on base, and catcher Rick Ferrell whipped the ball to Bill Werber at third. "Before throwing the ball to Lary at short, I noticed blood on it," says Werber, now 90. "Instead of letting the ball go around the infield, I took it to Lefty on the mound to inquire where the blood had come from. When I looked at the inside of the middle finger of his left hand, there was no skin there. He was pitching from raw meat.

" `Mose,' I said, `you can't pitch like that.'

" `Get the hell outta here!' he said. `Gimme the damn ball. Get your ass back to third base.' "

GROVE SAT out from June 17 to July 3, but the other Sox pitchers blossomed. The team climbed over .500. "Little wonder that the Red Sox look their strongest of the season," Harold Kaese wrote in the Evening Transcript. In a close race, they were 36-33, just 7¹/2 games behind the first-place Yankees.

On July 3, Grove returned to action in New York but threw only two innings of ineffective relief. After the game, while the team traveled to Philadelphia, he headed back to Boston with a surprise: he was still suffering from infected tonsils, which he had kept secret since April.

Grove finally had surgery performed on July 5. Suddenly Boston baseball seemed to hinge on the throat of a lanky southpaw from Maryland. "The very bad condition of his tonsils is encouraging," wrote Kaese, "for it means that they would be sufficient to rob Grove of his strength." In other words, removed tonsils could equal a strong arm.

"The addition of a Grove in his old-time form," he wrote, "may be the spur that will lift the Red Sox to leadership of the American League for the first time since 1918."

"A sore arm, or loss of confidence, will probably never be corrected entirely," Kaese concluded. "The question of Grove now depends on the question of the success of the operation removing his tonsils. It is baseball's biggest question of the year."

The recuperation stretched to five weeks. By the time Grove returned on August 8, the Red Sox were still three games over .500, 13 games behind the league-leading Tigers. The season had nearly 50 games to go, however, and excitement ran high. Lefty Grove, win or lose, was worth the price of admission. On August 8, he relieved Ferrell and pitched 6²/3 stellar innings to beat Philadelphia, 11-9.

Attendance was soaring. The park set a new record on August 12 -- this time not because of Lefty, but because of the Bambino. Babe Ruth, hoping to manage in 1935, was playing his last game in Fenway Park; the great man, 40, bid a wet-eyed farewell to an adoring Fenway crowd of 46,766. At least 10,000 more had been turned away. People sat in the aisles or watched from nearby rooftops. The field was roped off. Ruth was always a double treat, and it seemed fitting that he should part in a doubleheader. Playing left field, he went 2 for 6 without homers or RBIs. "The climax, and we never saw such a demonstration in any ball game before, came when the big fellow trudged off the field in the sixth inning of the second game," Whitman wrote in the Herald. "Spontaneously and as one man, the huge crowd, all the way around the field, stood up and applauded. There was little shouting. It was hand clapping, steadily swelling in volume until the big fellow was lost to sight as he entered the Red Sox dugout -- the one he first entered as a major leaguer 20 years ago -- and passed out of sight to the intimacies of the Yankee club house under the grandstand."

Fenway Park, August 19

But even that turnout was exceeded at Grove's next game, when the Sox faced first-place Detroit. On August 19, with the Sox 14 games out of first and just barely hanging on, he faced the Tigers' General Alvin Crowder, who had tied him for the league lead with 24 wins in 1933. A new park record of 46,995 watched them pitch the first game of a doubleheader. Some attendees had come to see a first-place team; others, to watch two fine pitchers. Others still arrived to cheer Detroit's player-manager, Mickey Cochrane, a Bridgewater native and Boston University graduate, or to honor a Tigers coach, Gloucester's own Cy Perkins. In Boston, all sports is local.

Grove didn't pitch badly, the writers said. He allowed some "soft" runs on four errors, two passed balls, and two other miscues that eluded the official scorer. But the Sox didn't hit as well as Detroit. "Pitching duels, after all, require some contributions by the other eight players on the ball club," Kaese tersely told the fans.

Detroit won, 8-6. It was clear that the season's drama was over. Sixteen games back, in fourth place, the Sox were out of pennant hopes. Grove wouldn't win 20 games -- indeed, he had only six victories so far, and he would lose four of his last six decisions to finish at 8-8. The Red Sox ended the season in fourth place.

For some fans and sportswriters, Grove became the convenient scapegoat. So what if Ferrell was the only pitcher in the rotation with a winning record? Who cared if Rube Walberg and Max Bishop, the other ex-A's, were over the hill? Did it matter that Yawkey hadn't developed a farm system, as critical to pennants then as now? With 16 more wins by Grove to equal his 1933 total, the critics said, the Sox would have won 92, two behind the second-place Yankees and nine games in back of Detroit. In other words, but for Lefty, Boston would have been in the race till September.

Here was a city that didn't blame James Michael Curley, who should have provided jobs, for this Depression year's misery, but did blame Lefty Grove, who couldn't possibly carry the entire Red Sox team on his back.

"Boston runs to brains as well as to beans and brown bread," William Cowper Brann had written years earlier in his Texas newspaper The Iconoclast. "But she is cursed with an army of cranks whom nothing short of a straightjacket or a swamp elm club will ever control."

In any other city, the 1934 season might have been counted a success. The Sox finished at 76-76 -- not a pennant, to be sure, but the first time they'd finished in the American League's top half since 1918. And they more than doubled their 1933 attendance to a franchise-high 610,640 fans. Bill Werber had established himself as the best third baseman in the league. Heading for a .321 season, with a league-leading 40 stolen bases, he was a threat to hit and run on every at bat. But in Boston -- where the press and win-starved fans had unrealistically banked on their seventh-place team's suddenly becoming a contender -- the season looked like a curse. In retrospect, the "curse" of the 1934 season was less a matter of poor performance than of overblown expectations created by beat writers and gamblers. But the fans didn't all see it that way; Fenway crowds spent the last month of the season booing manager Bucky Harris.

Some fans, though, counted the wins and saw the bright side. "Neighborhood teams wanted to be called the Red Sox again," says Musty Vitale, a 15-year-old pitcher at the time. "Grove may have been struggling, but they knew he was class."

In the years that followed, Grove entered his Luis Tiant phase and became a control pitcher par excellence. The Sox would sign Hall of Famers Joe Cronin and Jimmie Foxx, and Yawkey would send scouts westward to acquire Dom DiMaggio, Bobby Doerr, and Ted Williams. By the mid to late '30s, they had the lineup they needed to contend for the pennant -- but then, as now, the Sox were continually upstaged by the Yankees. Poor Tom Yawkey. "He tried to do it quickly by buying a pennant," said Sam Scimone, who sold peanuts in both Boston ballparks while watching discontent spread through the city. "And it didn't turn out."

Over the years, the curse just got worse. The formula for lifting it -- a little bit of Lefty, a little bit of Ted, a little bit of Yaz -- has yet to be found. But some year, maybe, the hope of spring will not wilt with summer's end, and everything will be sparkling and green. n

Jim Kaplan is author of A Thin White Thread: The Life and Times of Lefty Grove (1900-1975), to be published next year by the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR).