World Series defeats happen for a bunch of different reasons, bad bounces, errant throws, untimely slumps, questionable pitching changes, slippery, juiced baseballs, but they mostly happen because of a curse. A curse can be brought on by anything really, it could be linked to an animal or a former player or be triggered by an unwise decision to tempt the gods. For the Dodgers, the curse revolves around Rich Hill.
It was a Wednesday night, August 23rd. It was seventy-three degrees and cloudy that day in Pittsburgh. The Pirates were going nowhere, a place they often go, and less than 20,000 fans showed up, most of them to see the Dodgers, a group that many considered the best team in baseball. Rich Hill was on the mound, and while most fans liked the fact that he was fiery as hell, he was still most famous in L.A. for the blister on his throwing hand that limited his availability and had Dodgers fans muttering about getting damaged goods when they acquired him in 2016.
Hill had crazy-good stuff from the very first pitch. He threw a four-seam fastball and a curveball, that’s it, all night. He threw strikes, to nearly half the batters he faced he threw a first-pitch strike. He would end up striking out eleven batters and as the game wore on, had not walked a batter. He took a perfect game into the ninth inning, but that went away on third baseman Logan Forsythe’s error. The ninth inning ended and still no hits for the Pirates and no runs for the Dodgers. In the bottom of the tenth inning on his ninety-ninth pitch, some dude named Josh Harrison hit a ball into the left-field bleachers. It was an especially gutless performance by the Dodgers batsmen, leaving eleven men on base, nine of them in scoring position.
The Rich Hill Curse started that night in Pittsburgh. Curses happen when you let teammates down, when you fail to seize rare opportunities, when you become an observer of history instead of a maker of history. The Dodgers went on to lose sixteen of their next nineteen games. They lost ten games in a row at one point. A season that was earmarked for one of the greatest in baseball history became, pretty much, a head game.
Curses can be especially unkind in the World Series. The Rich Hill Curse initially flared in Dodgers versus Astros game two (a game Hill started). In the top of the eighth inning, Yasiel Puig failed to catch up to a slicing line drive into the right-field corner. The curse had robbed Puig of a step. It was a step he always takes, a catch he almost always makes, and it bounced into the stands for a double. The perfect script the Dodgers were writing in the first seventeen innings of the World Series would now be torn to shreds. It was the Dodgers’ Deerhunter moment. In the 1978 movie the Deer Hunter there’s a famous wedding scene where the couple drinks a wine toast from an old, double-spouted goblet (John Savage is the groom). If they spill a drop (which they do), it’s a bad omen. I can still see the little drop of wine on Puig’s jersey. It was the curse.
The curse went on to cause 104-degree game-time temperatures, it turned Astros hitters into the ’27 Yankees, it turned the so-called best pitcher of his generation into mush in game five and it, for the second year in a row, made the Dodgers the patsies of baseball franchises that had never, EVER won anything.
Maybe you’ll take solace in the fact that the World Series results were supernatural, that there wasn’t anything you could have done to stop it. But I can assure you that there’s no silver lining here. A hex is a powerful thing. It’s only a sucker who says, We’re young and talented, we’ll be back. That’s not how a curse works. And it’s not Rich Hill’s fault. You could make the case that in the World Series he outperformed every other Dodger, no, Rich Hill is only the catalyst, the vessel the curse travels in.
Next season will be the fifth consecutive season without any Dodgers games on TV (for most of us). So the Dodgers have been screwing fans over for a long time, only this season, they decided to do it on the field. So it’s okay if today you feel like cursing the Dodgers. In some ways, a curse is what they deserve … And now they have one.