Another Curse For The Sawx
The media loves curses. Maybe you thought you'd heard the end of it when the Red Sox beat the Cardinals in 2004, but there's still the SI curse, the Madden curse, the curse of suck (sorry, Cubs fans). And now, another curse has swept the Fenway faithful, and has slowly degradated the Red Sox season. It's the Curse of Mark Bellhorn.
Just think about it. It started when Johnny Damon left the Sox for New York, scorning Massholes everywhere. Despite the loss of Damon, most believed that, with a staff led by Curt Schilling and Josh Beckett, the Sox had the pitching depth to compete for another championship. Beckett is only 14-10 and has an ERA of 5.11. Keith Foulke lost his gig as closer to Jonathan Papelbon, who's had a great year but is currently out indefinitely as the Red Sox look up at the playoffs. Damon's replacement, Coco Crisp, proceeded to break his finger in the fifth game of the season, and is only hitting .261, almost .25 lower than his career average. Manny has missed time with a knee injury. Boston savior David Ortiz missed the last 8 games with a bad heart. That's usually troublesome. Jon Lester, one of the Sox bright spots this year, has lymphoma. And that's not even including the five-game sweep they suffered at the hands of the Yankees, something that hasn't been done in over 50 years. Not only did they lose every game, they lost by a combined score of 49-26.
Now they're 8 games back in the division and 6 out from the wild card, and the teams ahead of them have been playing very well. Trading Bellhorn was a mistake. I'm not sure from a baseball perspective because, well, I'm no baseball stat geek. I save my geekiness for football. But the man was revered in Boston -- people wore shirts around the city saying "Who died and made you Mark Bellhorn?" and "Don't blame me, I voted for Mark Bellhorn." And the man owns four Dunkin Donuts in Boston, and as we all know, America runs on Dunkin. Therefore, America runs on Mark Bellhorn.
Welcome to another 85 years of hell, Boston.
