It’s all my fault, this dastardly Curse of the Bambino. Your fault, too, if you share my passion for the Boston Red Sox in their star-crossed glory.

More than 80 years of baseball playoff failures have nothing to do with one foolish transaction to the Yankees or a portly power hitter’s imprecation. Blame the power of negative thinking.

A witch told me so.

“Absolutely, I believe in it,” said the practicing pagan, Julie Bryant of Auburn. “We all have a lot more power in our thoughts than we realize.”

Bryant, 31, is no baseball expert. The reason she knows anything about the Red Sox and their legendary manner of deflating the masses is by association.

She lives with one of her best friends, Helena Woodhead. And Helena’s companion, David Farr, is your basic sports fanatic. Bryant jokes that there are only three seasons in Farr’s calendar year: Patriots, Red Sox and NASCAR.

I’m blissfully ignorant about all things Wiccan. But my childlike faith in the Sox is borderline religious. So I called Bryant on Monday, the eve of this afternoon’s Game 1 in the American League Division Series against the Anaheim Angels.

For educational purposes only, of course.

Selling the Babe

“Fear is the biggest thing,” Bryant said. “That fear is so strong that this curse has become real.”

This supposed curse has been around since 1920, two years after the Red Sox won their last championship, which was their fifth among the first 15 series.

Strapped for cash, then-Red Sox owner Harry Frazee sold star pitcher George Herman “Babe” Ruth to the rival New York Yankees for $100,000.

Ruth became a full-time outfielder, finishing his Hall of Fame career with 714 home runs. More importantly, the Yankees have won 26 world championships since the deal.

Red Sox titles in that span: zilch. And Boston has transformed not winning into art, losing the deciding seventh game of the World Series in 1946, 1967, 1975 and 1986.

Twice, the Yankees dismissed the Red Sox in a deciding playoff game, with light-hitting infielders Bucky Dent (1978) and Aaron Boone (2003) belting game-winning home runs.

Superstition states that Frazee and Ruth had an adversarial owner-player relationship fit for modern times. Perhaps decades of misery are a result of whatever the Bambino wished upon the franchise as his train left South Station that day.

Or maybe we’re the problem for giving such a ridiculous assertion the time of day.

Bryant says the phenomenon is called “thought craft.”

“That means if you get a large group of people together who believe the same thing, like this curse of the Babe, they can make it happen,” she said.

A cancer survivor, Bryant believes the health industry understands this mind-over-matter concept.

“People get better when they go to the Cancer Treatment Centers of America,” she said, “because the Cancer Treatment Centers of America tell you to smile and stop thinking about how soon you’re going to die.”

Into the spirits

At least Bryant was kind enough to explain the cure. Generations of Red Sox sufferers have employed theories much more bizarre than faith.

About five years ago, I met with a table of Sox loyalists at Gipper’s Sports Grill in Auburn. They proposed “buying back” Babe’s spirit from the Yankees by raising $100,000 and donating it to a charity of the Yankees’ choosing.

Wonder why nobody bought the idea.

Last fall, Sox fan Chris Sobotka visited Ruth’s grave in Hawthorne, N.Y., and “offered up” an unopened can of beer at the headstone. Ruth loved his brew, Sobotka figured.

Didn’t work. Thanks to Boone’s blast in Game 7 of the American League Championship Series, the Yankees imbibed champagne at our expense.

Bryant isn’t alone in her thinking. At www.themystica.com, another expert in the language of curses writes, “There is a belief that if the victim knows that he has been cursed and believes that he is doomed that the curse is all the more potent, for the victim helps to cause his own demise.”

So, believe, Sox fans. Or, uh, stop believing.

“My advice is for Red Sox fans to believe with every bit of their being that they will win,” Bryant said. “They obviously have the ability. Fear is what keeps us from going forward.”

Scary thing is, I’m afraid she’s right.

Kalle Oakes is the Sun Journal’s staff columnist. His e-mail is [email protected].