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Some Mormons credit LDS apostle L. Tom Perry with breaking the Curse of the Bambino.

Perry, the towering 92-year-old LDS leader who died Saturday, had a love of baseball that extended from his childhood — when he read baseball scores aloud from the newspaper while his father shaved — to his final days.

And for five decades, that adoration was showered on the Boston Red Sox.

It started when Perry lived and worked in that Eastern hub as a business executive, writes son Lee Perry, and continued even after his call to the LDS Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in 1974.

In 2004, when the then-82 year-old leader in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints learned that he had a chance to throw out the first pitch at Fenway Park during "Mormon Night" there, he started immediately to warm up his pitching arm.

"Although throwing out the honorary first pitch at a Red Sox game was beyond [his] wildest dreams, he was nervous about it. Since his boat accident in August 1982, he had not had a full range of motion in his right shoulder," Lee Perry recalls. "He practiced for several weeks before the Boston trip to find the right arm slot for his important pitch. He finally settled on a three-quarters delivery from approximately 45 feet in front of home plate."

When the moment came, the octogenarian hurled the ball with power right over the plate, Lee Perry said. "It was an inside strike."

Not exactly a Curt Schilling "bloody sock" moment, but an accomplishment nonetheless.

That also was the same year the Red Sox broke an 86-year drought, winning the World Series for the first time since the team sold Babe Ruth, affectionately called "The Bambino," to the New York Yankees in the 1919-1920 off-season.

In 2013, Perry, his son and their respective wives, Barbara and Carolyn, returned to Boston to see their beloved Sox win the title again.

Two weeks ago, Helen Claire Sievers, a longtime friend of Perry from his Boston days, heard about the Mormon apostle's terminal cancer.

She knew he was a Red Sox disciple, so she went to the ballpark, talked her way inside the gate during a night game, and headed straight for the Red Sox souvenir shop. She bought him an official Red Sox sweatshirt and lap blanket.

Sievers' package arrived the Monday before his death, says Perry's assistant, who confirmed that the dying LDS leader received it within a day.

Sievers' gesture was karmic payback to her favorite member of Red Sox Nation.

"Before my father passed away, he was a director of the California Angels and at Elder Perry's request arranged for him to see an Angels-Red Sox game in Anaheim," she writes in an email. " They sat in the owner's box with Gene Autry, the club owner and a good friend of my father's."

Several years later, Sievers' dad died and Barbara Perry attended the funeral, representing the apostle who was out of town.

"They'd seen the obituary in the paper and she came," Sievers' says. "It was these sorts of thoughtful things for ordinary people that made Elder Perry so beloved."

And a hit with Mormon Red Sox fans.

Peggy Fletcher Stack