PLAYERS, FANS AND THE MEDIA PUT IT ALL
IN PERSPECTIVE
Red Sox first baseman Kevin Millar :
"We wanted to do it so bad for the city of Boston. To win a World Series with this on our chests -- it hasn't been done since 1918. So rip up those '1918' posters right now."
Red Sox pitcher Derek Lowe:
"Unbelievable. No more going to Yankee Stadium and having to
listen to '1918!'"
Red Sox pitcher Curt
Schilling:
"I'm so happy. I'm happy for the fans in Boston, I'm happy
for Johnny Pesky, for Bill Buckner, for (Bob) Stanley and (Calvin)
Schiraldi and all the great Red Sox players who can now be remembered
for the great players that they were."
Red Sox president Larry Lucchino:
"We don't believe in no stinking curses."
Red
Sox outfielder Trot Nixon:
"Any time you don a Red Sox uniform, you have to talk about the
history of this team and not having a World Series championship
since 1918. Sooner or later, that hex had to stop. Everybody thought
it was a curse, but to use it was just a five-letter word."
Red
Sox fan Gene Stamell:
"The soul of Boston is to complain about how we should have won. Now you have to believe that good things can happen. We're a little less Calvinistic."
Bob Ryan, Boston Globe:
"Before looking into the cultural and sociological ramifications
of all this, let's step back for a minute and remind ourselves what
this is all about.
It's about baseball.
This is not the Boston Symphony whipping the St. Louis Symphony.
This is not about Mass. General taking out Barnes-Jewish. This is
not about chowdah getting the measure of toasted ravioli.
This is about the Boston Red Sox having a better baseball team than
the New York Yankees.
This is about the Boston Red Sox having a better baseball team than
the St. Louis Cardinals. This is about the Boston Red Sox, for the
first time since 1918, having the best baseball team in the world."
Jeff Horrigan, Boston Herald:
"Generations of Sox fans went to their graves having never experienced a World Series championship but after an 86-year wait, the descendants of the unfulfilled exulted for family lines. After all, with a Calvinist way of thinking so deeply engrained in the region's collective psyche, few who watched Derek Lowe master the National League champions for seven shutout innings could believe what they had witnessed. When they awoke this morning, however, a major part of their lives had changed forever."
Tyler Kepner, New York Times:
"This was for the believers. For Ted Williams and for Yaz (Carl Yazstremski) and all
the others who spent a career beneath a boulder that kept rolling
down a hill. This was an exorcism of 86 years of anguish."
Mike Dodd, USA Today:
"The Boston Red Sox, the symbol of heartbreak and human foible to
sports fans for nearly a century, are world champions. No more curses.
No more moral victories. No more next year."
Bryan Burwell, St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
"So this is what it looks like when a lifetime of unfathomable baseball
history finally expires right before our eyes, only to rise up again
in a more petrifying and excruciating form in the belly of another
beast. So this is how it feels when nearly a century's worth of
bitter (real or imagined) curses, and agonizing evil spirits at
long last get spit out like some giant loogie by legions of long-suffering
Red Sox fans, only to get abruptly swallowed up by an unsuspecting
Cardinal Nation."
Ken Rosenthal, The Sporting News:
"Sox fans, destined to lose, conditioned to lose, born to lose,
must face a startling new reality: THEIR LIVES HAVE NO MEANING!
All right, maybe that's overstating it. But to be sure, rooting
for the Sox will be different now. It's not all about misery anymore."
Johnny Pesky, former Red Sox infielder:
"I dreamt about this day. I said my prayers every night to the big
guy: 'Bring us a World Series."
ESPN's Peter Gammons, on Oct. 26, if the
Sox win:
"After Beacon Street is renamed Schilling Avenue and it becomes
the Varitek Expressway, there will be time to determine what street
gets renamed Ricky Gutierrez Way."
Jayson Stark, ESPN.com:
"A hundred years from now, how will we make people understand what
just happened here? How will we ever make them understand what happened
The Year The Red Sox Finally Won The World Series? There was no
way they could ever do this the good old normal way. Never. They're
the Red Sox."
Bob Elliott, Toronto Sun:
"As Al Pacino said in The Godfather: 'Today, we settle all family
business.' The pain, the heartache and the futility of being a member
of the Boston Red Sox family or a card-carrying member of Red Sox
Nation came to an end at 10:40 Central time last night."
Larry Millson, Globe & Mail:
"The victory, at least for now, puts to rest the ghosts of Johnny
Pesky holding the ball too long as Enos Slaughter scored the winning
run for the Cardinals in the seventh game of the 1946 World Series,
Bucky Dent's home run in the 1978 one-game playoff with the Yankees,
Mookie Wilson's grounder rolling between Bill Buckner's legs in
the sixth game of the 1986 World Series loss to the New York Mets
and Aaron Boone's 11th-inning home run for the Yankees in the seventh
game of the 2003 ALCS. And it ends for good the pain of the biggest
blow of all, the sale of Ruth to the hated Yankees in 1920, which
spurred the myth of the 'Curse of the Bambino.'"
Geoff Baker, Toronto Star:
"The bat-wielding 'ghost' dressed as Babe Ruth, who fired up the
Busch Stadium crowd of 52,037 with a fourth-inning appearance on
the video scoreboard was a fraud, a sheep in Yankees clothing. For
last night proved the real Bambino was finally dead, any lingering
ghosts having been exorcised in the seven epic games it took for
Boston to throw off its New York shackles in the previous round."
A sign in Busch Stadium during Game 4:
"We Forgive Bill Buckner.'"
Boston Red Sox owner Harry Frazee, after
selling Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees on Jan. 3, 1920:
"Ruth had simply become impossible and the Boston club could no
longer put up with his eccentricities. While Ruth, without question,
is the greatest hitter the game has ever seen, he is likewise one
of the most selfish and inconsiderate men that ever wore a baseball
uniform."
Red Sox pitcher Pedro Martinez :
"I would like to share this with the people of Montreal that are not going to have a team anymore. My heart and my ring is with them, too. … Right now, the city of Montreal is going to be seeing what I thought I was going to have in '94."
