Now that the Red Sox have won their first World Series in 86 years, it'd be a good time to get something straight...

The concept of a curse on the Red Sox is based on anti-Semitism.

The story of the curse is that Boston's owner sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees so that he could finance a musical.

The fact is that Boston's owner, Harry Frazee, never needed the money to finance the musical, and sold Ruth to the Yankees because he was behaving ridiculously. The year before the trade, Ruth was a total nuisance-- he complained that he wanted a new contract, undermined the manager, broke team rules, and left the team before the season ended.

Frazee wanted to trade him, but the only team he could trade with was the Yankees, because the other teams disliked Frazee. The other league owners thought Frazee was Jewish, even though he was Presbyterian.

And even though Frazee could only trade with the Yankees, nobody at the time (not the Red Sox players, the press, nor the city of Boston) thought the sale was particularly unfair or bad for the team.

But the primary historian for the Red Sox in the first half of the 1900s, Fred Lieb, was anti-Semitic and thought Frazee was Jewish. Lieb invented the idea that Frazee sold Ruth to the Yankees to finance a musical. Later writers then connected this sale to the Red Sox failures, based indirectly on Lieb's writings.

In the end, I suppose it's fitting that a Jewish general manager, Theo Epstein, would assemble the first championship Red Sox team since Frazee's team in 1918.

(I've left out a lot of details, as this story isn't easy to summarize. My summary is based on Glenn Stout's article in ESPN.com.)