If we gather all these curses (Titanic, Bambino, SI) and STILL win, will folks shut up about them already? And will we get extra points for degree of difficulty (like overcoming all our injuries)?

September 14th

September 14th

The Yankees got roughed up again last night, roughed up bad, this time by lowly Kansas City. The final score of that game was 17–8, and this morning the New York sportswriters will once more be eating their gizzards out about the pinstripes’ lack of pitching—lovely. The Red Sox, meanwhile, only split with cellar-dwelling Seattle, which is a long way from wonderful, but the road trip is over, four more games are off the schedule, and we’re coming back to Fenway Park almost exactly where we were in the standings when we left: three games behind the Yankees in the East, four and a half ahead of the Angels in the wild card. Furthermore, we’re looking at three with the hapless Devil Rays, and the Sox have been strong against them this year. So, at least until we meet the Yankees on the seventeenth, all’s okay with the world, right?

Wrong. There’s a problem. A big one. Father Curt is on the cover of Sports Illustrated this week, that’s the problem. He’s standing on the mound at Fenway with his arms spread and every letter on the front of his uniform clearly visible.

How could they?

With all the other stuff we have to worry about, how damn could they? Because while there’s no evidence of the Curse of the Bambino other than the failure of the Red Sox to win the World Series since 1918 (and they are not alone in that), there’s plenty of evidence that the Sports Illustrated Curse actually exists.[53]

Two games after his cover appearance on SI, Kurt Warner suffered an injury that sidelined him for five games (although in Warner’s case I’m at least willing to admit the possibility that Campbell’s Soup may have been a contributing factor). One day after Anna Kournikova appeared on the SI cover, she was bounced from the French Open, her earliest exit from a Grand Slam event in three years. In his first Monday Night Football game after his cover shot, Howard Cosell went from hero to zero by referring to a Redskins wide receiver as “that little monkey.” After Dale Murphy of the Atlanta Braves appeared on the cover, the Braves dropped fourteen of their next fifteen games. Other sufferers of the SI Jinx have included Tom Watson, Kirk Gibson, George Brett, Pedro Martinez’s brother, Ramon…and ex–Red Sox franchise player Nomar Garciaparra. After Nomar, stripped to the waist and looking most righteously buff, appeared on the cover, he went down with a popped wrist tendon and played hardly at all during the first half of the season.