THE CURSE OF THE BAMBINO

Framing his plaint as a Dad answering his daughter’s question one opening day at Fenway Park, a sportswriter for the Boston Globe recaps Babe Ruth’s early career as a Red Sox star and his infamous sale to the Yankees. Then he goes on to tally the succession of heartbreaking, last-minute bobbles and defeats that denied the Sox a World Series win for the next eight and a half decades. Recalling the art for his edition of Ernest L. Thayer’s Casey at the Bat (2003), Payne presents a series of on-field scenes featuring many recognizable players in old-style uniforms. Over them looms The Babe, sometimes taller than Fenway’s Green Monster, invisibly holding Johnny Pesky back from throwing home in the ’46 Series, blowing Bucky Dent’s homer over the wall in that ’78 playoff game, and giving Mookie Wilson’s grounder a nudge to send it trickling between Bill Buckner’s legs. Curse or just coincidence? Shaughnessy declines to come down on one side or the other, and the Red Sox’s win in 2004, commemorated by a spread that drops the perfunctory plotline and bears other signs of hasty construction, makes it all moot anyway. Or so Sox fans would like to think. (afterword, brief bibliography) (Picture book. 7-9)