It began on a sweltering night at Fenway Park, conjured into existence for the same reason as so many baseball idiosyncrasies before it: The team was struggling to get hits.
On Aug. 29, as the Red Sox trailed the lowly Miami Marlins in the bottom of the 7th, Boston players decided they needed something new to break out of the team-wide slump.
From these innocuous circumstances came the Red Sox shimmy, a noticeable quirk that’s become synonymous with the 2018 team’s winning ways.
Double trouble. ud83dudca5 pic.twitter.com/6YagLPyvDl
— Boston Red Sox (@RedSox) September 3, 2018
In September, Red Sox utility player Brock Holt tried to explain its August origin to Alex Speier of the Boston Globe:
We were talking about that today, “How did we start doing that?