If, like me, you have been cheering for the Boston Red Sox because your favourite baseball team is whoever the Yankees are playing, London sports history provides no comfort.
In 1920, the Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees, beginning their run of disastrous luck. The next season, the Red Sox played at Tecumseh (now Labatt) Park. They lost 5-3 in exhibition play to the hometown Tecumsehs. The loss hurt, big-time, or at least the Boston skipper pretended it did.
"There is nothing that hurts a big leaguer's pride more than to be beaten at the hands of a bush-league club," Boston manager Hugh Duffy intoned after the loss.
The Tecumsehs were the defending Michigan-Ontario (also called the M-O or Mint) league champs and a fine club, which Duffy also noted after the game.
London pitcher Oscar (Old Twenty) Delottle shut the Red Sox down in the early innings on that afternoon of Aug. 30, 1921. Delottle's nickname came from a 20-inning win in league play. First baseman Bob Donnelly was another London star, with three hits, including a double and a triple, for the Tecs.
London historian Stephen Harding found a local sports-writer's account of the game in a 1949 edition of the Echo, an old London publication. The Echo was stirred by the presence of Donnelly and Delottle at an oldtimers' game here in the summer of '49. (The Red Sox would lose the American League pennant race to the Yankees that season.)
The quick visit had the Boston team arriving after noon, playing ball at 3 p.m. and then boarding the London & Port Stanley train for St. Thomas. From there, the "the red-hosed men of Duffy" were off to the U.S. for another exhibition game.
The deathless prose of Charles S. Grafton, sports editor of the old London Advertiser newspaper, lives on in the Echo. Wrote Grafton: " 'Old Twenty' had the old soundproof wrappings on the visiting striped-hose gents, turning them back in threes in the first four frames without so much as the semblance of a hit, though there were several loud raps in the second inning."
Put less floridly, Delottle didn't allow a baserunner till the fifth inning. The first Boston hit went to Del Pratt, a former Alabama football player known for his ferocious temper.
Earlier that season, the Pittsburgh Pirates had won an 8-7 victory in exhibition play over the Tecs. Along with other losses, that had left the "rabid" London fans eager to prove "the Minters (would) some time wallop a big-league club," said The Free Press.
The Red Sox came, they played, they lost. The eight-inning game took just 70 minutes to play before a downpour stopped it.
Among the Red Sox players in the game was Shano Collins. Two years earlier, Shano had been one of the honest Chicago White Sox. Eight of his Chicago teammates were banned from baseball for throwing the 1919 World Series in hopes of collecting $100,000 from gamblers. Shano and the non-crooks were known as "the clean Sox." Unfortunately, Shano moved on to the Red Sox just in time for the post-Ruth curse to take Boston to the bottom of the American League.
The Free Press story shows Duffy had his cliches ready for the post-game show.
Never was crow gulped down more smoothly.
"Take nothing for granted in baseball and, believe me, my team tried its best to beat London today. . . . I can now understand why your club is leading the league. We swallowed a bitter pill and, if you'll let me predict, I assure London fans that any team that wins the 1921 pennant must beat London," Duffy said.
Duffy was right about the Tecs, who would repeat as M-O champs in 1921. The Red Sox would finish fifth and Duffy would be gone after the next season, when they finished last. That is where they spent most of the 1920s.
Maybe too much is made of "the curse of the Bambino" as an explanation for all the grief suffered by the Red Sox and their fans since that dark day in 1920.
Still, there is one enduring image from that 1921 game in London. It suggests the curse was doing its malignant work.
As any Red Sox fan will tell you, the most painful part of the curse is not simply the failure to win a World Series since the Babe departed.
It is the way that time and again, flashes of glory and hope brighten the Red Sox horizon, only to be obliterated by the latest blast of bad luck.
In London that afternoon, the game ended after Boston's Stuffy McInnis singled to open the top of the ninth. Hope flared briefly. The Red Sox might rally and so avoid that "bitter pill" of losing to bush leaguers.
But a cloudburst that had been threatening all afternoon deluged the park. McInnis "went to first base, but was lost in the darkness and rain," The Free Press said.
The rally was washed out.
So were Boston's hopes.
Haven't the Red Sox and their fans been lost forever in the darkness and rain, too?