Digital Extra: The Journal's 175th Anniversary

07.21.2004

1967. The dream was indeed impossible

From ninth place to first, in a one-year turnaround?

Seemed like an impossible dream.

"Incredibly," The Journal reported Oct. 2, 1967, "the 100-1 shot did it.

"The Boston Red Sox, whose chances before the season started had been considered about as good as those of a snowball in Hades, yesterday won the American League championship for the first time in 21 years.

"Heroes? The list was imposing, though at the top must go the names of Carl Yastrzemski, the likely winner of the league's most valuable player award, and Jim Lonborg, a prime candidate for the Cy Young Award, symbolic of pitching supremacy."

After winning the pennant, Boston played heavily favored St. Louis in the World Series, and pushed the Series to a deciding seventh game, with a win in Game 6.

"The World Series now has been pushed to the absolute outer reaches of credibility, with yesterday's victory by the Red Sox, bringing it to the irreducible factor of today's one and final game with the St. Louis Cardinals," the paper reported Oct. 12. "Now that the implausible, quivering climax is here, with the pitching match up of Bob Gibson versus Jim Lonborg at Fenway Park for the entire prize. It is all too much."

But no dream lasts forever and the headline the next day mourned:

The Dream Is Ended.