There never was any mickey-mouse curse with the Red Sox. I hate those easy, quick explanations. They cover up sixty to seventy years of monumental incompetence with this franchise. If there was any curse, it was the Curse of Tom Yawkey. There was always a decadence around this team, an awful lot of odd behavior that had nothing to do with any freakin' curse. For thirty years, Yawkey had only one way of building a team: sign a $60,000 check, which was a lot of money at the time, for someone like Mike Batts. There was no plan. The place was filled with some wonderful characters, but underneath it all there was this strain of darkness with the Yawkeys. It was all very weird. How long have the new owners been here? Three years. That's how long it took once the Yawkey organization was out of the picture. That's your curse that has bothered this team forever.