Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, August 16, 1993                   TAG: 9308160086
SECTION: SPORTS                    PAGE: B2   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: BOSTON                                LENGTH: Medium

DID 1918 SNUB PUT A CURSE ON THE RED SOX?

The 1918 squad, the last Red Sox team to win a World Series, apparently was denied commemorative championship mementoes because of a labor-management dispute. Members of that team, and their descendants, have sought the mementoes for decades.

The Red Sox are studying the possibility of holding a special ceremony this season for descendants of that 1918 team and are considering creating a commemorative emblem.

"I'm one of those people that treasures history, so if you can right a wrong that would be great," says Larry Cancro, the club's vice president of marketing. "But it's shrouded in some controversy."

Cancro says the team has been in touch with descendants of 17 members of that 1918 squad, which had 20 players - including Babe Ruth - on its World Series roster.

"If we do anything, we want to do justice to it. There is a sense from some of the families that the story has been passed down through the generations and that it means something to them," he says. "We're certainly thinking about it, but it's a question of what we do."

New England Sport, a Boston-based magazine, is campaigning to have the achievements of the 1918 team commemorated and urged readers in a recent issue to write to baseball officials on behalf of such an effort.

The magazine claims the Red Sox have been cursed since denying the mementoes to the 1918 team, which it says is the only World Series champion to not have such commemorative items.

"The sin perpetrated by the lords of baseball against the members of the 1918 Red Sox provides more than enough fodder to fuel any notion of a curse," Glenn Stout writes in the magazine. "To a man, the 1918 Red Sox got a raw deal."

The fifth game of the 1918 World Series between Boston and the Chicago Cubs was delayed for more than a half-hour when players from both teams went on strike to protest a management decision to change the way World Series receipts were being distributed.

World Series winners at the time received mementoes - watches, stickpins or even shotguns engraved with a commemorative message - but Stout says the 1918 team was denied such a reward because of the strike and other disputes with baseball officials.