All of the curse believers are going to love this.


Photo reveals double curse in '86

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/st ... d=tab2pos1




By Paul Lukas
Special to Page 2

If you want to imbue a discussion with an air of gravitas, you start by identifying the main character by his full name: George Herman Ruth. Dwight David Eisenhower. Homer Jay Simpson.

So consider the case of one William Joseph Buckner, who almost two decades ago (the precise anniversary is Wednesday, Oct. 25) bent over to field a grounder hit by Mookie Wilson. We all know what happened after that -- you've seen the video a few jillion times, you've read about the scapegoating, and the subsequent reaction to the scapegoating. After 20 years of scrutiny under the electron microscope of modern media, the Buckner play has been dissected so thoroughly that you pretty well know everything about it.

Well, almost everything.

It's not often that a new chapter can be added to a story that's been told so many times, especially two decades down the road. But that's what Uni Watch has for you today -- a bona fide addition to the historical record of the most infamous error in World Series history, courtesy of a sharp-eyed photo editor and a 12-year-old kid, both of whom spotted what a generation of baseball historians had missed. And this new find goes a long way toward explaining what happened on the field that night at Shea Stadium.

The tale begins with ESPN.com photo czar Sean Hintz, who was recently cropping and sizing a photo for an article about the Buckner play's 20th anniversary. The best-known photos of the incident are probably this one and this one, but Hintz chose to use the following Associated Press photo, which ran with this story:

As you can see, it shows Billy Buck walking off the field after his historic miscue, and he has removed his first baseman's mitt from his right hand.

"I'd worked with that photo maybe half a dozen times in the past," Hintz says. "It's definitely one of my go-to shots for that play." This time, though, for whatever reason, Hintz noticed that Buckner was wearing a batting glove under his mitt. Nothing unusual about that -- lots of first basemen do it. But Hintz, perhaps influenced by having worked on too many Uni Watch columns, was curious about what was printed on the glove. So he zoomed in on it. Then he zoomed some more.

Take a look at what he found:

That's right: What Hintz spotted -- and what Uni Watch and countless other researchers had missed over the years -- was that Bill Buckner was wearing a Chicago Cubs batting glove under his first baseman's mitt. (And no, that's not a Photoshop job -- it's the real deal.)

The poor Red Sox. It's bad enough they were saddled with one curse; they didn't know they were actually fighting two of them. No wonder Buckner missed that ball. He never had a chance.

And it gets better. An examination of Buckner's at-bats from that game shows that he was wearing dark Franklin gloves while hitting. So apparently he went out of his way to wear the white Cubs-branded glove in the field.



Sharp-memoried fans will recall that Buckner had previously played for the Cubs, but he had been traded to the Red Sox in May 1984. Why would he still be wearing Cubs gear more than two years later? More importantly, why would he tempt fate by commingling baseball's two most famously star-crossed franchises? It's like being inside a house made of kerosene-soaked newspaper and then saying, "Hmmm, it's a little dark in here. Lemme just light this match …"

Whatever the explanation, it's not going to come from Buckner, who is understandably weary of discussing the play. When approached by a Uni Watch intermediary, he declined to comment, saying, "I'm all '86ed out." But wait, Bill, we don't want to rehash every gory detail -- we just want to know about the batting glove! To which one William Joseph Buckner replied: "I didn't even realize I was wearing it." End of discussion.

Buckner, by all accounts, is a class act who deserves better than the role in which history has cast him. So it pains Uni Watch to say this, but his disavowal doesn't ring true. After a bit of additional photo research, Sean Hintz turned up this photo, which shows Buckner's Cubs-clad hand in 1985 game -- more than a year prior to the Mookie Wilson grounder:

Look how beat-up the glove looks, and then compare that to the World Series shot above. Looks like the same well-worn, loved-to-death gauntlet, no? Face it, you don't hold on to a glove like that over the course of two seasons unless it means something to you -- something special. Don't buy it? Then ask yourself this: Would Buckner really have gone out of his way to find more than one Cubs glove to wear while playing for the Sox?

The obvious conclusion: This was Bill Buckner's lucky glove. Not.

Whatever the glove's double-whammy properties, the most amazing thing about it is that it went unnoticed for 20 years. Uni Watch has approached a slew of researchers and historians over the past week, none of whom was aware of Buckner's double-cursed right hand. Uni Watch then queried the membership of the Society for American Baseball Research -- again, a big whiff. The enormity of the scoop was confirmed when Uni Watch consulted uniform designer Todd Radom, a passionate BoSox fan whose knowledge of historical logo-related arcana dwarfs Uni Watch's own. "I remember where I was when this happened (of course) but have never noted the Cubs detail," he responded. "Partners in misery indeed!"

Even Rusty Kennedy, the Associated Press photographer who took the photo, was unaware of what he had documented. "It's funny, the photo has been published so often, but I never noticed the batting glove," says Kennedy, who still works for the AP. "If it were shot today, it would be digital and you could blow it up and study it all different ways, but in those days it was pretty superficial, because you just looked at the print. I'll bet I would have noticed it given another 20 years, though."

As it turns out, the only other person who did notice the glove -- or at least the only one whose observation is part of the public record -- was 12-year-old Kevin Mahon, the son of Philadelphia Daily News sports reporter Tom Mahon. The evidence, turned up via a LexisNexis search, is in a very small item that the elder Mahon wrote in October 2003, the key passage of which reads as follows:

"While leafing through the book Greatest Moments in Sports History, published by Sports Illustrated, Kevin Mahon (son of yours truly) noticed a picture showing Buckner -- a former Cub -- walking off the field after that fateful error during the 1986 World Series. On his right hand he is wearing a batting glove. And while the photo is not crystal clear, there appears to be a red-white-and-blue logo on the glove with four letters: C-U-B-S."

But Mahon's story was tiny and understated (a charge that will never be leveled at Uni Watch's treatment of the topic), had no accompanying photo, and was buried at the bottom of a hurriedly assembled column, so it was the journalistic equivalent of a tree falling in the forest with nobody around to hear it. "We got no response from it -- none," says Tom Mahon. "Anyway, Kevin's the one who put two and two together in terms of the double curse. I wouldn't even have thought of that."

Kevin Mahon, now 15, hadn't even been born when Mookie Wilson stepped into the batter's box back in 1986. But he was familiar with the Buckner play and understood its place in baseball history. "I remember seeing a TV show about it," he says. "And I thought, 'Wow, how could he miss that?'"

He answered his own question when he found that Greatest Moments in Sports History book at a flea market in October of 2003. The Boston and Chicago curses were both fresh in his mind, because Aaron Boone and Steve Bartman had just become household names. So when he saw the Cubs logo on Buckner's glove, everything clicked into place. He showed it to his dad, and that's how it ran, however sotto voce, in the Philly Daily News.

And just how did a 12-year-old manage to spot what everyone else had overlooked? "I don't know," says Kevin. "I get interested in things sometimes."

Spoken like a true uni watcher. Kevin Patrick Mahon -- welcome to the club.

I just read that. Crazy stuff.

i feel for this guy. What happened to him sucked, it happened 20 years ago, and he still can't live it down.

As a Sox fan, i was heart-broken when Game 6 happened, but there's so much blame to go around (Schiraldi, Gedman, Stanley, McNamara). 2004, in my mind, took away the sting and gave me closure on the whole episode. this guy needs to be able to live his life, and i'll tell you what, look up the numbers, he had a helluva career.

That's the sad thing about it, almost every baseball fan knows Buckner's name because of that error and know nothing else about his career. It seems from a outsider's perspective though that Bucker's sort of been forgiven by Boston fans. Maybe forgiven isn't the best word to describe it, but I think that the people don't hate him like they used to. It's not like he has Dent and Boone connotation anymore. Can you comment on this from an insider's perspective?

This article sure is interesting, though. I'd never seen those pictures.

the interesting thing is that he hasn't forgiven them...at least that's what I read a couple of years ago.

why should he? They made his life hell and he's not even really the guy that should get the blame for the loss. Sharaldi (sp?) and Stanley are way more responible. If Buckner makes that play the game still would have been tied.

I have Buckner's and Mookie's autographs on a ball together. They were doing co-signings together for a while. I'm not into autographs really, but that one is a prized possession.

I'm not disagreeing with his stance...just pointing it out. It's kind of sad IMO.

Yeah, I remember watching that game, and the point where the tension lifted for me was not Buckner's error, but the wild pitch that allowed Kevin Mitchell to score and tie the game. Once that happened, the Sox were doomed, in the game and the series, as far as I was concerned. Buckner's error just hastened the arrival of Game 7.

Wasn't Buckner actually quite a good player? Somebody told me he could have maybe made the hall of fame if the error never happens, is there any truth to that?

Not really, he was good but never a HOF caliber player. He just made one all-star team I believe.

he hung around long enough to put up 2700 hits...but he's no HOFer.

He's actually become overrated now because of the error. Media types who like to show off how smart they are love to say things like, "nobody knows how great Buckner was because of the error"...but when you look at his numbers...he was just ok.

We never really "forgave" him because we never hated him, that was mostly a media creation. When he came back to the Red Sox briefly near the end of his playing days he got a huge ovation at Fenway.
I think it was more ESPN playing the worst moment of his life 5000 times that drove him crazy.

Sure enough, even now they can't shut up about it.

similar situation with A-Rod this past summer. Ravech would make it seem like there's 50,000 fans cursing him when it wasn't even close to that.

gotta love that espn

'curses'? hahah what a bunch of bullshit. keep on making excuses.

As a loyal fan I can agree with Rich 100% that all should have been forgotten after '04 but unfortunately for Buckner and his family, there are still PLENTY of people that still harbour some hatred for the guy. He was offered by the organization an oppotunity to be part of the ring ceremony and he adamently refused.... I can't entirely blame the guy since they made his life a living hell in NE but at some point don't you just have to forgive and forget?

I just checked his numbers out too...not HOF caliber I agree, but some very good stats nonetheless. I couple things that stuck out for me was how rarely he struck out (or walked for that matter). He struck out only 453 times in about 10,000 career at bats with a season high of only 39 K's in 22 seasons...pretty insane. He also only walked 450 times with a season high of 40. He put the bat on the ball. Another thing that surprised me was that he had 183 career stolen bases (31 & 28 were his highs), I guess that surprised me because of the image burned in my mind of the way he was hobbling around late in his career.

That's a good point, even in Game 2 at home when he didn't come through I didn't hear much booing. You'd think fans were forming a lynch mob by media accounts.

some fans were...but it wasn't even close to being a majority. It was mostly the usual clowns in the NY media who love to stir stuff up...and certain assholes in the national media with an agenda.

The difference with A-Rod and Billy Buck is that A-Rod hasn't really had one "defining" blunder, he's just had a sad history. You could argue that the ball-slap was his moment, but honestly that was just a dumb reaction by a guy that was playing hard, I don't really mind that he tried, he just looked ridiculous doing it and it's fun to make fun of A-Rod.

As for Buckner, like I said, you have to feel for the guy and you can't really blame him for his bitterness. I just hope that at some point he can let it go because you'd hate to see him in a rocking chair at 85-years old mumbling about the stupid Boston fans.