Sat, Oct 30, 2004 page20

• 'The Curse' gets laid to rest

  • By Dave Anderson / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  On the morning after, shrubs and small trees shaded Babe Ruth's tall tombstone on which Jesus stands with a little boy in a baseball uniform. Knowing that pilgrims would surely appear Thursday on this grassy slope at Gate of Heaven Cemetery now that the Red Sox had finally won the World Series for the first time since 1918, a network television crew awaited the Yankee mourners and the Red Sox strutters who arrived every so often.

  "It's over, Babe," a man in a Red Sox cap said. "It's over."

  When a self-described Yankee fan was asked a few minutes later what he thought of the Curse of the Bambino, he shook his head solemnly.

  "What are you gonna do?" he said.

  Scattered near the name Ruth chiseled into the base of the tombstone were a Yankee batting helmet, a red rose, a Baby Ruth candy bar, a box of Kleenex tissues inscribed, "Babe, dry your tears, they'll be back," a baseball glove with a softball in it, several pennies and a denim cap with a red B perched upside down on a pumpkin.

  Nobody there seemed aware that less than a mile away in Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, the name Harry H. Frazee, the Red Sox owner and Manhattan resident who sold the Babe to the Yankees in 1920, was on a gray crypt on a grassy slope.

  "We have Lou Gehrig, Jacob Ruppert and Ed Barrow here, too," Chester S. Day, the Kensico cemetery president, said, referring, respectively, to the Yankees' Hall of Fame first baseman, the Yankee co-owner who bought the Babe and that era's Yankee general manager. "Not many seem to know that we've had Mr. Frazee here since his death in 1929."

  Up near Frazee's crypt there were no flowers, no Red Sox cap, no Red Sox strutters willing now to forgive him. But in the quiet of both cemeteries, if you knew where to tune in, you could hear the Babe and Frazee talking across all those other tombstones, maybe for the first time since 1920."Harry," the Babe was saying, "it's time to let bygones be bygones now that the Red Sox have finally won the Series for the first time since 1918, when I won two games as a pitcher. But you know I didn't put the curse on the Red Sox. You know you did that yourself. It was never the Curse of the Bambino; it was the curse you put on the Red Sox by selling me to the Yankees for US$125,000 and that US$300,000 loan."

  "I needed the money, Ruth."

  "That's not what you told the writers. You said you would have preferred to get players in exchange, but no club would give you the equivalent, and the Yankees were the only team that could give you that much cash for Ruth - that's what you always called me. You never called me Babe. And then you said that you thought the Yankees were taking a gamble in getting me because of my carousing and my demands for a new contract."

  "The Yankees were taking a gamble."

  "Some gamble," the Babe said. "In my 13 seasons with the Yankees, we won four World Series and seven American League pennants, and I hit most of my 714 homers."

  "But I was really hurt, Ruth, by what you said."

  "You mean when I said you weren't good enough to own any ballclub, especially one in Boston, and when I said that you had done more to hurt baseball in Boston than anyone who was ever connected with the game in that city? You hurt baseball in Boston so much, it took 86 years before the Red Sox won another World Series."

  "Nobody in Boston felt that way?"

  "What about the cabdriver?" the Babe said.

  "What cabdriver, Ruth?"

  "The one in Boston who recognized you a few years later and asked if you were Harry Frazee, and when you said you were, he slugged you."

  "Oh, that cabdriver."

  "But I've got to thank you not just for selling me to the Yankees, but for dealing all those other players to the Yankees -- Waite Hoyt, Herb Pennock, Joe Dugan, Everett Scott, Wally Schang, Joe Bush, Sam Jones, Mike McNally. We couldn't have won all those Series and pennants without them. Hoyt and Pennock even went to the Hall of Fame. Thanks, Harry."

  "You're welcome, Ruth."

  "And when you sold the Red Sox in 1923 for US$1.25 million, not one player from the 1918 Series team was still with the Red Sox. Not one. How could you do that to Boston? I loved Boston. If you hadn't sold me, I would have been willing to stay there my whole career."

  "You loved Boston?"

  "You know I loved to go back to Fenway with the Yankees. My first wife and I even had a home outside Boston, in Sudbury. I would've stayed in Boston forever if you hadn't sold me. So don't ever think that I put the curse on the Red Sox all these years. You did."In the quiet of both cemeteries, the conversation seemed to end, but then Harry Frazee spoke.

  "It's nice to talk to you again, Ruth, and it's nice that you want to let bygones be bygones."
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