Winners

The Red Sox have not won a World Series championship since 1918, the last year of World War I. Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein said "there's no real reason" for this hapless record, and many fans simply attribute it to bad luck or persistently poor management. Others believe Babe Ruth cursed the team when the Red Sox sold him to the Yankees in 1919, causing a consistently talented team to frequently fall just short.

But sports psychologists believe that science explains the drought better than sorcery: They believe the losses result from a self-fulfilling prophecy. In part, Boston loses late in the season because fans, the media, and the players themselves expect Boston to lose.

"[If players] are surrounded by media stories, by fan reactions, or even by relationships with team officials that reflect a history of low success, then they will quickly meet the expectations that others have of them," said Mark Anshel, a sports psychology professor at Middle Tennessee State University.

The explanation from sports psychologists begins with fan expectations, which can be very negative in Boston. In tight situations, the fans "are waiting for something bad to happen," said former pitcher Calvin Schiraldi, who was the losing pitcher for the Red Sox in the last two games of the 1986 World Series. "I think they are in love with this curse thing."

Current Red Sox players deny that low expectations, or talk of a curse, affect them. Pitcher Derek Lowe said, though, that he understands fan unease: "They are diehard fans and the team hasn't won in 80 years." Player expectations matter a great deal, too, and, at the least, the history of the Red Sox increases confidence among opponents. "When you were with the Yankees, you just handled the Red Sox," Reggie Jackson, a longtime Yankees star, said to a Globe reporter in 1993. "You knew you were going to beat them."

Jackson's proclamation holds up in pressure situations. In games played between the two teams in the September and October pennant races during the past three seasons, the Yankees have won 12 times and the Red Sox have won twice. The Red Sox, winners of only 12 out of 40 playoff games since 1975, have now finished second to the Yankees in the regular season five years in a row.

Confidence helps players concentrate and to let go of what's around them, say sports psychologists. Concentrating relaxes muscles, keeps the body using long-honed instincts, and keeps the brain from thinking too much.

This principle is illustrated in the dramatic single-game playoff the Red Sox and Yankees played in 1978 after finishing the season tied. That game ended when Rich Gossage, the Yankees ace reliever, induced Red Sox star Carl Yastrzemski to pop out and end the game with two runners on base and the Yankees ahead, 5-4, a moment that Gossage describes as one of near-ideal athletic assurance. "As Yaz headed toward the batter's box," Gossage writes in his autobiography, "I took a deep breath -- my very first of the day -- and amid all the noise and nervous energy in Fenway Park, experienced a moment of total clarity."

Yastrzemski was not available to comment for this story. But in 1980, he said, "There's nothing you can do," when he was asked about the prospects of having Gossage enter a close game -- except ''try to have a big lead.''

Research published in 1990 by University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman, which looked at all player quotes in the National League during the course of two seasons, found that optimistic professional baseball teams not only did better overall but improved over time. Highly talented teams with pessimistic players tended to decline, particularly in high-pressure situations. The most optimistic team that Seligman found was the 1985 New York Mets, a terrific second-place team that improved the following season and defeated the Red Sox and Schiraldi in the World Series.

Overconfidence isn't good if it reduces effort, but self-confidence helps people focus in stressful situations. This composure can prevent what sports psychologists call "choking," a process in which our automatic reflexes turn off, blocking our ability to do habitual tasks. In the first game of the 1988 playoffs against the Oakland Athletics, Boston star third-baseman Wade Boggs swung and missed to strike out twice at crucial moments, despite having done so only once in the entire previous month. His last strikeout occurred with two outs and two runners on base in the ninth inning, leading to a 2-1 loss. After the game, Boggs said, "It was a real bad swing. . . . I blew it." Boggs choked.

Dan Wegner, a psychology professor at Harvard, has shown that people who try not to do something specific are much more likely to do it. A white polar bear is hard not to think about if someone says not to think about it.

Wegner said the same phenomenon could well be occurring with the Red Sox. Because collapses are perpetually predicted, collapses become more likely. If someone is thinking about not making an error, "it concentrates the mind and tunes his body to produce that error," Wegner said. This could explain how first baseman Bill Buckner let a ball skip through his legs to lose a heartbreaking game in the 1986 World Series.

Wegner said that such problems are most likely to happen in stressful situations, and Boston creates substantial baseball stress. Red Sox fans are both passionate and paranoid. In Yankee Stadium in early July, one Red Sox fan named Patrick Coan predicted September troubles for the team because "I know if I say that they'll do well, the opposite will happen." A few rows away, Yankee fan Rich Esperon predicted certain victory for his team, added that Fenway Park opened right before the Titanic sank, and said, "If Boston wins the World Series, the Titanic is coming back up."

Anshel frets about the impact on Boston of a fatalistic fandom. He cited what he calls a "classic" study from the journal Social Forces that if a team draws a large crowd that is expecting victory, the home team's likelihood of winning went up from 53 percent to 64 percent. "If the home team perceives that home fans expect failure, the players do not perform well," Anshel said.

The low expectations of fans and players also may carry over to umpires. According to many psychological studies, expecting to see a particular outcome increases the odds one will see it, whether it happens or not.

In the 1999 playoffs between the Red Sox and Yankees, umpires admitted that they blew two crucial calls, both times believing that the Yankees had properly executed a play they had actually botched. In one, a Red Sox runner was called out even though the Yankees second basemen missed the tag by at least a foot.

The Boston media also fixate on the curse, particularly during late-season pennant races. Jim Lonborg, an ace Red Sox pitcher in the late 1960s, said that he had never heard of any curse or jinx until Dan Shaughnessy of The Boston Globe, who later wrote a book about it, started including it in his stories two decades ago. Current relief pitcher Alan Embree scoffs at the curse, but said he was asked about it "within 30 minutes of being traded to the team."

Bob Tewksbury, a former all-star pitcher now studying sports psychology at Boston University, noted that some players can thrive well in tough environments such as Boston. But, he said about the Red Sox, "Every year that goes by without winning the championship, the burden gets heavier and heavier."

As a former pitcher for the Chicago Cubs, a team that hasn't won a World Series since 1908, Tewksbury said he knows that other teams have it worse. Perennial cellar-dwellers, Cubs fans have different pathologies from fans of the perennially contending Red Sox. "The Cubs are out of it by July," he said, "and everyone just goes to Wrigley Field and gets drunk."

And most players would prefer to play someplace where fans are intense rather than intoxicated. Red Sox reliever Chad Fox said that talk of losing and the curse just drives him to win a World Series because, if the team did, "Boston would be just an incredible place to be in."