And Wasn't That Thomas E. Dewey At Shortstop?

By RICHARD CORLISS

It was probably a bad idea for Boston ground-keepers to paint the World Series logo on the Fenway Park grass on Thursday. That was tempting the Red Sox's 85-year-old Curse of the Bambino. Or of Buckner. And now Boone--as in Aaron--who smacked an 11th-inning homer to propel the hated-rival Yankees to the World Series. The only memento that Sox fans had to treasure was an editorial in the New York Post lamenting that the Yankees may have "acquired a curse of their own" after losing the seventh game. The editorial, which ran in 200,000 of the paper's 650,000 copies, was one of two prepared before the game ended. A production person mistakenly transmitted the wrong page.

The Chicago Cubs, another cursed team, had no such solace after failing to end a 95-year dry spell by losing to the Florida Marlins. Are such curses for real? TIME asked Bill James, a baseball statistician who went to work for the Red Sox this year. In all the years of the Sox curse, he noted, "there have probably been 60 when the Yankees had a better team than the Red Sox did. In the other 25, we have had more than our share of bad luck. Does the run of bad luck exceed normal boundaries? The realistic answer is that it doesn't."

With reporting by Sean Gregory