Curse of the Bambino

HBO's wry, enlightening account of 80-plus years of the Boston Red Sox's travails is a fusion of wit and history. "Everything's going fine," says one of this documentary's talking heads, speaking of the Red Sox's legacy of 11th-hour screw-ups. "Then: boom. It's like watching The Wizard of Oz and Dorothy is ripped apart at the end by flying monkeys." Comic Steven Wright compares the team's history to a Dickens novel, and Denis Leary says love of the Red Sox is "sado-masochism." The problem is that Boston's doomstruck organization, fans say, has been in karmic payback since 1920 for then-owner Harry Frazee's sale of Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. Historians dismiss claims that Frazee used the money to finance Broadway's No, No, Nanette, and there's evidence the self-destructive Ruth had actually become a liability for the team. In any case, the symbiotic fortunes of the Yankees and Red Sox is entertainingly summarized here. --Tom Keogh