Wrong Call Is All Right to Yankees

The clocks in the Bronx struck one minute shy of midnight, the plump fastball struck Bernie Williams’ bat, and the curse took it from there.

Lifting the ball high into the cool air toward center field.

Pushing, pushing, pushing it over the head of staring and stunned Darren Lewis.

Dropping it beyond the blue fence and into another page of baseball’s most sordid history books.

“Nineteen-eighteen,” sang the swaying, laughing New York Yankee fans as they spilled onto the puddled streets. “Nineteen-eighteen.”

It was not a chant, it was an explanation.

Not to mention the most important number Wednesday night of the Yankees’ 4-3, 10-inning victory over the Boston Red Sox in Game 1 of the American League championship series.

It was in 1918 that the Red Sox last won a World Series.

It was the sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1920 that is blamed for cursing the franchise since then.

It is appropriately through the fires of this 161st Street hell that the Red Sox travel if the curse is to be lifted in the 1900s.

It ain’t happening.

Not if nearly four hours in intermittent rain and Red Sox fumblings Wednesday were any indication.

The Red Sox scored two runs in the first inning, and another quickly in the second, and had runners on first and second with none out.

The Yankees were backpedaling. Their visitors were hooting and backslapping.

Then, inserting itself as a pinch-hitter, was the Curse of the Bambino.

The Red Sox stranded those two runners with three consecutive popouts or flyouts, two impatiently fashioned on the first pitch.

For Red Sox fans, the rest of the night was as explainable as 80 years of failure.

The record books and pitcher Rod Beck will bear witness that Williams won the game for the best team in baseball with a home run to lead off the 10th inning.

“It was pretty much down the middle, and he pretty much whupped the stuff out of it,” philosophized Beck.

But occultists will note that, moments earlier, in the top of the 10th, baseball’s most bewitched team was cost a runner--and possibly the go-ahead run--when second-base umpire Rick Reed wrongly ruled that Lewis had been forced out even though the ball popped out of Chuck Knoblauch’s glove.

“As an umpire it was my job to get it right,” said Reed. “I didn’t. . . . I feel awful.”

Not in recent memory--maybe never--has an umpire so quickly admitted a mistake this big in a game this important.

Thousands of Northeasterners are kicking through their backyard leaves this morning over the fact that of course it would happen with the Red Sox.

The record books will also show that the Yankees arranged for the winning hit when Orlando Hernandez and Mariano Rivera combined to hold the Red Sox to only four hits and no runs in the final eight innings.

But occultists will note that if Lewis could have dropped a simple sacrifice bunt in the sixth inning--a mandatory assignment for a ping hitter--maybe the Red Sox could have turned one of those hits into a run.

“I just bunted it a little too hard,” Lewis said of his none-out bouncer to first basemen Tino Martinez, who easily forced Jason Varitek at second, snuffing an inning before it started.

Finally, the record books will also show that the Yankees should be commended for rebounding from a 3-0 deficit logged before the game was even two innings old.

But occultists will note that the comeback would have been impossible if something--who knows what?--caused a seemingly perfect relay throw from Nixon to bounce inches away from Varitek’s glove at home plate, allowing Scott Brosius to slide across with the tying run in the seventh inning.

“I thought I was going to make the play, I stayed in there to take my lumps, but I never got the ball,” Varitek said.

The Red Sox say they know nothing about a curse that occurred while their grandparents were walking the earth.

‘We don’t look to things that have happened in the past as an excuse,” Lewis said. “That’s a sign of mental weakness.”

But they know.

You could see it in the darting eyes in the clubhouse.

You could feel it in a stadium that knows--and is happy to convey--its history.

Since the sale of Ruth, the Yankees have won 24 World Series championships, the Red Sox none.

When the Yankees won their first World Series in 1923, it was with help from 11 former Red Sox.

In 1949, the Red Sox went into New York needing to win only one of two games for the pennant. The Yankees won both.

In 1978, the Red Sox led the Yankees by 14 games on July 20, but blew it all, and wound up losing to the Yankees in a one-game playoff won on a homer by Bucky Dent.

And so it continued Wednesday, with a man more surprised then he should have been.

“I didn’t think it was going to be gone,” said Williams. “I figured he was going to play it off the wall.

“When it went, I was so surprised, it was unbelievable.”

Quite the opposite.

Williams certified the Red Sox’s doom with two swift pumps of his right arm through rainy skies in the dead of night.

All that was missing was a boiling black pot and very loud cackle.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com.