How Russ Smith is jinxing the Red Sox.

My doctor has warned me not to do this anymore, but this time, I just couldn't resist.

Last week, this paper's very own Russ Smith, aka MUGGER, took a shot at me in print. I think it's the second time he's done so. And normally I would have ignored it, but I was moved to act by one particularly striking line at the end of a passage denouncing a hang-Bush-by-the-balls column I wrote a few weeks back:

"Matt Taibbi, in last week's 'Cage Match,' uses the left-wing staple that Bush steals from the poor to fortify the rich to put down in words a paragraph I'll bet he's been waiting to write for at least a month."

And then he goes on to quote the offending paragraph.

A quick note here. Writers who have been ribbed by colleagues in public typically begin their responses with the phrase, "I read with amusement last week?," when, of course, their actual feelings were never even in the ballpark of amusement. But in this case I genuinely was amused, because Russ was right. There was a line, actually a whole column, which I've been waiting to write for more than a month. But it wasn't that one.

The line, and the column idea, is this: Russ Smith is the reason the Red Sox lose.

Don't believe me? Just look at the numbers. In the past two seasons alone (i.e., the 2001 and 2002 seasons), the Red Sox record on the print date of a published Russ Smith article is 22-27, which translates into a worse-than-mediocre .448 winning percentage. Meanwhile, the Red Sox record overall for that period was 175-148, a .542 winning percentage. And the Sox record for that period excluding the "Russ dates" on their schedule was a stellar 153-121, a .558 winning percentage.

I ought to know about these things, because like Russ, I am a Red Sox fan. Unlike Russ, though, I, a) actually grew up in Boston, and, b) have enough sense on most days not to bring that fact up while living and writing in New York. The latter issue for me is particularly important, as I long suspected?even before I checked the numbers?that MUGGER's embarrassingly violent public advocacy of the Red Sox in this city was creating a karmic imbalance that was crippling my home team. Karma says: When in Rome, do as Romans do. The MUGGER approach is something like: When from Baltimore, root for Boston in New York.

Russ' fingerprints are all over every Red Sox misfortune in the last decade. Looking over the scores over the past few years, it was amazing to see how often a hideous Sox loss or front-office mistake coincided with the appearance of a correspondingly hideous MUGGER piece. Take 1999. In that year, Pedro Martinez was virtually unhittable. He struck out five of his first six batters of the All-Star game. Batters couldn't even see his fastball, and they were breaking their knees on his curveball. But on Russ dates, Pedro was mortal. Two of his four losses coincide with MUGGER articles. June 9, 1999: Pedro returns to Montreal to take on his old team, the Expos. Result: The Sox are whipped, 13-1, in his worst loss in years. Though he only gives up six runs (four earned) in six innings, the outing costs him a chance at posterity. Minus that game, Pedro's ERA that season is 1.99. With it, he finishes at 2.07.

The culprit? That's right, you guessed it: a gigantic two-page (broadsheet pages, mind you) cum-guzzling MUGGER interview with William F. Buckley, released that same day. The piece reads like a Guitar magazine intern interviewing Steve Vai, with Smith tossing Buckley a steady stream of wounded softballs about how badly mistreated poor deceased Nixon and McCarthy are by the liberals. The streets finally free of weepy paeans to dead anti-communists made in between puffs of premium cigar smoke, Pedro tosses his historic All-Star performance.

There are more telling examples. It is the morning of August 1, 1990, and we cannot exclude the possibility that then-Red Sox GM Lou Gorman has picked up New York Press, which has just hit the streets. In it, he reads this Red Sox item in the MUGGER pages:

"A few hours later the tube's on in the living room, and the Bosox hit seven doubles in one inning against the pitiful Tigers to take an early 7-2 lead. With a more stable team you'd be assured the game was safely won, but not so for MUGGER's nutty Sox?they discover more ways to blow a game than we have nasty names for Danny Longo, the rakish bartender at Tribeca's Riverrun."

Sounds like MUGGER was calling for a little bullpen help. Gorman apparently agreed. That week, he picked up the phone and made a deal with the Houston Astros to acquire a middle-innings reliever named Larry Andersen. All the Sox had to give up in the deal was a young first-base prospect named Jeff Bagwell, who has only since hit 401 home runs and made himself a lock to be a first-ballot Hall-of-Famer. Andersen made a total of 22 appearances in his Sox career.

1988: In an early MUGGER column, Smith prints the Red Sox logo in the middle of his article, over the caption: "The greatest ball club in the world." The Sox had run off 24 straight home wins and were hot heading into the postseason. But the Sox stumble as the season winds up, playing a terrible last two weeks. MUGGER pulls the logo. The Sox are swept in the playoffs by Oakland. Smith, noting that "the better team won," comments: "The is clearly the year of the A's." A few weeks later, the Dodgers kick Oakland's ass in the celebrated Kirk Gibson series.

The book on Smith, generally, is that he had some human characteristics until fairly recently, but experienced a steep descent into madness and incoherent demagoguery sometime early on in the second Clinton term. Therefore it's instructive to look at the earlier Smith, just to see where he was heading emotionally. Around the time of the Bagwell trade, MUGGER's artistic focus revolved around a seemingly endless diary of his repeated, tragic-comic attempts to have elitist weekend experiences in the Hamptons. Here's a telling excerpt:

"?We drifted back to the previous evening's activities at a splendid [note how painful the word "splendid" is here?ed.] dinner party in Sag Harbor, hosted by our friends Gordon & Katherine? Gordon captivated everyone with a blow-by-blow report of a recent 10-day visit to the celebrated Bohemia Grove men's club in California, the oft-maligned white male bastion of Republicanism and silver spoons. Don't know if MUGGER would fit in with such fast company, but the suspicion is, given a proper frame of mind, we'd make do."

That, folks, is Russ Smith in a nutshell, endlessly striving to squeeze in somewhere where nature has denied him a place. The Hamptons, for one example. The Republican elite, for a better one. Smith will never be hardcore enough to really make it into the right-wing inner circle; he's too accepting, too good of a speller, just slightly too human. They'll tolerate one, but the John Ashcrofts of the world have no real use for an "alternative" Republican. And while Johns Hopkins is a good enough school, Smith is still not Ivy enough, not confident enough in his privilege, to be the next Buckley. You'd never catch WFB fretting over his reception at the Bohemia Grove.

Thus he is forced to live out his days as a doomed anachronism, never completely accepted even by the people he spends his life shamelessly praising.

It's the same with us Red Sox fans. A man who so publicly attaches himself to the Sox but ignores the Pats, Celts and Bruins looks to us like a pervert at an Easter-egg hunt. Give it a rest, Russ. You're jinxing us.