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| "The Great Bambino" |
Ruth was both a great left-handed hitter and left-handed pitcher. Boston would never see these traits in one package, again, and would find it hard to attract either side of the equation to their team.
Great left-handed pitchers don't generally want to squander their careers at Fenway Park where home runs are so easy for right-handed hitters — whom they would inevitably be "platooned" to face — due to that "Green Monster" in left.
Left-handed hitters, meanwhile, are at a distinct disadvantage to their right-handed counterparts in Boston, as the distance to the fence in right field is considerably greater. To add to all this, Red Sox owners tended toward filling the hitting line-up with righties to maximize crowd enjoyment (and get bums in the seats).
That's great for the home field, but what about when the team goes on the road? Without a good mix of both righties and lefties on the mound and at the plate the team can't do the proper "platooning"* to compete well in away games.
What happened when the Red Sox convinced a sufficient number of pitching aces and great left-handed hitters to join the team?**
They won the World Series.
*any baseball team has a mix of right- and left- hitters and hurlers. This is partly natural and partly strategic: hitters often have better luck against opposite-handed pitchers — for a number of reasons — and certain defensive positions favor one wing or the other.
**being relatively small, and located downtown, the limited number of seats in Fenway Park has historically restricted ticket sale revenues needed to attract the sort of talent the Red Sox need to compete at home and on the road. As ticket prices soared across baseball, leading to the creative addition of seats, and new sources of revenue arose — cable, internet-driven, merchandising — Boston was better able to convince such talent to sign.
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