Ninety.

"Wake up the damn Bambino. Have him face me. Maybe I'll drill him in the ass." --Pedro Martinez

My mother's uncle was a war photographer during World War II. At the beginning of the war he was stationed in England but by 1944 he had been transferred to Hawaii. I have no idea how it happened (short of my great uncle and my grandmother being a pair of spies--they were from the German part of Poland, after all) but somehow my grandmother ended up with copies of a lot of photographs that her brother took. There are eight books filled with photographs and a cigar box with overflow pictures. Going back to the spy thing, my mother never knew any of those pictures existed. They were stored in my grandmother's closet and only when she died did they come to light.

The pictures from England are hard to look at. They show a lot of rubble and charred buildings. But the photos from Hawaii are less emotional. They show lots of guns and cannon and airplanes and battleships and cannon going off and barracks and military parades. There are some pictures of scenery but they mostly seemed to be taken to experiment with colorization.

So you're flipping through these books and the pages are crumbling under your fingers. There are pages and pages and pages of guns. And then suddenly, without any sort of context around it, staring grumpily out at you from the facing page is Babe Ruth. It's very shocking the first time you see the picture. He's so instantly recognizable and so out of place that it prompts a response of "Wait! Is that..?" from everyone.

It would be interesting to know how my great uncle felt about taking that picture. On one hand, it's Babe Ruth but on the other ninety years ago today Ruth was sold to the Yankees. I assume that Ruth was in Hawaii as a morale booster/USO type thing. And since there are no other photographs in any of the other books of even a remotely similar nature, I think that it's safe to assume that the mystique of Babe Ruth overtook any sense of bitterness or resentment or cursed-ness that my mother's uncle might have felt.

But whether the Curse of the Bambino was a figment of Dan Shaughnessy's imagination or an actual sentiment that existed before he put a title to it, it deserves to be acknowledged--if only because it became such a large part of our collective conscience. Who doesn't know "No, No, Nannette"? And while this is almost certainly a severe case of hindsight, maybe it wasn't such a bad thing. 2007 was great but it was no 2004. 2004 was an amazing ride. Mind you, 2003 sucked.