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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.