Fever Pitch as Sox lay the curse at last

Ruth - regarded as the greatest player to ever play the game - is said to have laid a curse on the team after its owners sold him to the New York Yankees following that World Series win.

Rational people laughed but as the decades passed, and Boston's misfortunes mounted, opposition fans around the States revelled in the club's failure.

Meanwhile, Red Sox fans, players and owners have developed a weary fatalism about their failure to win baseball's biggest prize. No longer.

"I don't believe in the curse," said the Red Sox's star pitcher Manny Ramirez after he was named most valuable player of the 2004 World Series. "You make your own destiny." On the evidence of the last eight games, stretching back to Game Four of American League Championship series, no one would argue.

In that series, Boston came within three outs of being eliminated by their most bitter rivals, the New York Yankees.

Somehow, they scrambled a victory and then won the next three games to take the series 4-3 - the first time in baseball playoff history that team has come back from a 0-3 deficit.

That result would have been enough for many Boston fans and for at least one Red Sox executive, who recently described the Yankees organisation as "the evil empire".

The enmity is mutual. The Yankees have now won the World Series a record 26 times, often at the expense of the Red Sox - a fact that the New York club has always been happy to rub in.

But if Boston fans were content to beat the Yankees, the players themselves refused to celebrate a famous comeback, insisting they were only interested in a World Series victory.

They attained that goal in style, although neutrals would judge the 2004 World Series to have been disappointingly one-sided.

Boston dominated almost from the first inning of Game One, although St Louis briefly threatened before succumbing to an 11-9 defeat.

Thereafter, great hitting by the Red Sox batters, combined with great pitching performances - by Curt Schilling in Game Two and Ramirez in Game Three - was more than enough to steamroller the Cardinals' mediocre starting pitching and muted batting line-up.

Last night's game followed the pattern set earlier in the series, with Boston's lead-off hitter Johnny Damon hitting a home run in the first inning.

Trot Nixon's two-run double in the third inning gave the Red Sox a 3-0 lead, which they then defended behind some excellent pitching by Derek Lowe.

The Cardinals did not threaten until the fifth inning. Edgar Renteria smacked a double to left-centre and moved to third on a wild pitch. But Lowe snuffed things out when he struck out John Mabry and Yadier Molina grounded to short-stop.

Lowe said: "It is unbelievable. When a team gets on a roll you feed off each other and that's what happened with us.

"No more going to Yankee stadium and having to listen to them chanting, '1918, 1918, 1918.' Finally, the curse is over."