One of baseball’s most peculiar streaks is no more.
When the Red Sox defeated the Mariners on Saturday afternoon at Fenway Park, it marked the club’s first win in a game played on Ben Affleck’s birthday since the release of Good Will Hunting, ending a streak of 15 losses spanning nearly two decades.
Affleck, a New England native and Fenway Park regular who turned 43 on Saturday, became a household name overnight when the 1997 film about a troubled South Boston genius, which he co-wrote and starred in alongside Matt Damon, earned the childhood friends the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
But for years it seemed the fame and fortune that followed came at a cost: specifically, the inability of Affleck’s beloved Red Sox to win games scheduled for 15 August.
No longer.
And Saturday’s streak-buster, which saw Boston pound out 26 hits and four home runs in a 22-10 laughter, was never in doubt.
The Red Sox feature prominently in Good Will Hunting, most notably when Robin Williams’s Sean Maguire shares a story with Matt Damon’s Will explaining why he skipped Game 6 of the 1975 World Series. (Spoiler alert: he had to see about a girl.)
The Affleck curse, while utterly trivial and devoid of meaning, was one of those wonky nuggets of baseball arcana that grew in mystique with each year. Last season, the two-time Oscar winner himself made reference to the hoodoo in a widely circulated tweet.
The lopsided victory offered a rare bright spot amid a bleak season for the cellar-dwelling Sox (52-64), who sit 13.5 games behind the first-place New York Yankees in the AL East standings.
