Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [55]
Wednesday, September 26, 1990 gave us one of those glorious Vermont fall afternoons that make you feel as if you could work outside forever. A high blue sky, no clouds, and just enough nip in the air to keep you moving quickly. Friends and I were finishing the window frames and cedar siding on my Craftsbury home when the phone rang.
The voice at the other end of the line belonged to the sports director for WZLX, Boston’s most popular music station for anyone with a taste for heavy, butt-thumping rockers like Led Zeppelin or the Stones or Pearl Jam. He invited me to attend a ceremony the disc jockey Charles Laquidara would be hosting near Fenway Park the following Saturday. The sports director offered $500 for my time along with a box seat ticket to that afternoon’s game between the Red Sox and Toronto Blue Jays.
“What sort of ceremony would that be?” I asked
“An exorcism.”
“Come again?”
“You know the Sox and Jays are fighting it out for the American League East title. Whoever wins two of the three games they are playing next weekend will probably go on to the playoffs with a good shot at the World Series. Sox fans are tired of Babe Ruth jinxing their team. We are going to exorcise the curse and ask Babe to let Boston beat the Jays. Charlie wants you on stage to help cast the spell.”
I recalled that scene from The Exorcist in which Linda Blair levitated above her bedroom with her head a roulette wheel spinning on her shoulders while she vomited pea soup on a pair of priests. Not often you get offered a front row seat for a show that entertaining, so I agreed to participate.
Three days later I drove to the Twins Souvenir Shop, a sports memorabilia emporium located just across from Fenway Park on Jersey Street. Over six-hundred fans, many of them wearing Boston caps and jackets, crammed the nearly block-wide store for the event. Posters of great Red Sox players—Ted Williams, Carl Yastrzemski, Dwight Evans, Wade Boggs, and Roger Clemens among them—stared down from the walls at this odd collection of people carrying voodoo dolls, crosses, and other icons.
I shook hands and signed autographs while Charlie led me to an upraised platform in the center of the store. He introduced an exotic-looking woman with long dark hair tufted white wearing a form-clinging black dress and a tall, tri-cornered hat. She carried a broom. Laurie Cabot listed her occupation as professional witch. We had met before. In 1975, Laurie danced on the roof of the Red Sox dugout during a rain delay in Cleveland. After that, our team won fifteen out of seventeen games and went on to meet the Cincinnati Reds in the World Series; I considered her magic potent.
A warlock from Salem stood at her side. Paul Poier, a towering man in his late thirties, resembled Eddie Munster all grown up with his pointy ears, pointy eyebrows, and prominent fangs. He wore his licorice-colored vinyl hair slicked back from a high forehead and dressed in a black suit and flowing dark cape that dusted the floor wherever he walked.
The two witches joined hands in front of an effigy of Babe Ruth and began speaking in fluent mumbo jumbo. While the pair shouted incantations, members of the audience clapped, stomped their feet, and filled the room with a more familiar chant:
“Yank-ees Suck!”
As the ceremony drew to a close, Charlie Laquidara asked me to step forward. The Red Sox had sent over a Louisville Slugger broken only the afternoon before during batting practice. A clubhouse attendant had heavily swathed the handle in electrical tape to keep it intact. Laurie, Paul, and I held the bat aloft while the witches asked the Babe to forgive the Sox and help them triumph over Toronto. Then they presented me with the bat.
I tossed the lumber into my car trunk and walked to the ballpark. The Red Sox began the day in first place, one game ahead of the Blue Jays with five games left to play. Roger