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So Which Teams Are Still Cursed?

Now that the Giants have won their first World Championship since moving to San Francisco, that’s another Curse broken. As you know, the Giants left New York for California and were therefore Cursed, even though the Dodgers did exactly the same thing and won a World Series two years after they moved — no one ever said that Curses were consistent. The 1959 Dodgers, by the way, won with a seemingly unimpresive roster that didn’t compare, at least in terms of performance that year, to their great Brooklyn teams or the great L.A. Dodger teams of the ’60s. The Giants this year won with a team that looks even less impressive on paper (particularly the offense) compared to the great Giants stars of the past — Mays, McCovey, Marichal, Barry and Bobby Bonds — but “on paper,” of course, is not where games are won.

So now the Giants’ California Curse is over, but the team they beat, the Texas Rangers, remains Cursed because they left Washington D.C. for the greener (metaphorically) pastures of Texas. Meanwhile, in Washington D.C., the team that used to be the Expos is Cursed for abandoning Montreal and making us Expos fans bitter and angry and inclined to write blog posts. And the Milwaukee Brewers are Cursed even though nobody actually remembers that they used to be the Seattle Pilots — even Seattle doesn’t remember, but the Curse remembers, and hit not only Milwaukee, but also the expansion team that Seattle got to replace the Pilots. Some have argued, however, that the Curse of the Pilots is really the Curse of being associated with Bud Selig. It’s hard to tell sometimes.

It would be nice if we could get some tips on how to put a Curse on a baseball team, instead of waiting for the team to move or do something involving a goat. But for now, the Giants’ victory teaches us that there is no longer any price to pay for abandoning New York, whereas the Nationals continue to be a cautionary tale about what happens when you abandon Canada.

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