In Brief
After the lights go out at Fenway Park in Boston and 37,000 fans head home, the night cleaning crew say they hear Babe Ruth taking batting practice — the crack of a bat, cheers from empty stands. No one has ever seen him. They only hear him.
The Full Story
At Fenway Park in Boston, the cleaning crew works the empty stands long after the last fan has gone, and some of them say the park doesn't go quiet. After the towers go dark, they hear batting practice — the rhythmic crack of bat on ball down at home plate, cheers swelling out of 37,000 empty seats, swing after swing in a ballpark where nobody is standing at the plate. They think it's Babe Ruth. No one has ever seen him. They only hear him.
Ruth played here, before he was the Babe. He pitched for the Red Sox and won the 1918 World Series with them, back when this team won four titles in seven years and Fenway was the newest ballpark in the league. It had opened on April 20, 1912, five days after the Titanic went down. The Green Monster wasn't even green yet then — the 37-foot left-field wall was raw wood, painted its famous color only in 1947. Now it's the oldest ballpark in the majors, and the crew sweep it out in the dark.
Then the owner sold him. Harry Frazee was a Broadway producer who needed cash, and in the winter of 1919-20 he shipped Ruth to the New York Yankees for $100,000 and a loan against Fenway itself. Ruth became the greatest hitter the game has known. The Red Sox did not win another World Series for 86 years.
People called it the Curse of the Bambino, and they meant it. The Sox reached the Series in 1946, 1967, 1975, and 1986, and lost each one in Game 7 — Bill Buckner letting the ball roll through his legs in '86 the cruelest of them. Fans burned a Yankees cap at Everest base camp. Someone hired a witch. Nothing took until 2004, when the Sox became the only team in baseball history to climb out of a 3-0 hole against the Yankees, then swept the Cardinals and finally broke it.
The curse is gone. The sounds, the crew say, are not. And Ruth is not the only one who lingers — former pitcher Bill Lee swears the late owner Tom Yawkey came back as birds, a pigeon in the players' lot, a crow that dove at him in Medicine Hat, a pigeon on the field the very day Ted Williams died. Lee always seemed half-serious about it. The night crew never claim to be joking.
