Charles Pierce. The Red Sox. This is a really good article.

[NRaleighLiberal]

http://grantland.com/features/no-nonsense/

No Nonsense
Where do the defending World Series champion Red Sox go from here?

BY CHARLES P. PIERCE ON MARCH 3, 2014
"So, on Sunday, the Red Sox announced that Jake Peavy would miss a couple of starts because he cut himself with a fishing knife. (Outside of being bitten by an alligator, or being chased by cops while wearing only your underwear, it’s hard to think of a more purely Florida injury than cutting your hand with a fishing knife.) This is terrible. The season is ruined. The worst things happen to Boston fans. If we hadn’t traded Babe Ruth, Jake Peavy’s flesh would have been invulnerable to fishing knives of all kinds.

Last fall, against considerable odds, the Red Sox won their third World Series in 10 years. They did it with a roster of bearded castoffs, journeymen, and a Japanese closer who was close to unhittable throughout the postseason. They did it by hitting the ball at the right time against some of the greatest pitchers in Major League Baseball. If the 2004 championship was the end to 86 years of frustration, heartbreak, and noxious self-regard, and the 2007 championship was a validation of the new era, the 2013 championship was a nice little semi-fluky lagniappe that laid to rest forever all the cosmic talk of cosmic curses and offered the final proof that the Red Sox had jettisoned most of what made their fan base obnoxious around the major leagues. Most of it, anyway.

What is left is pure normality. That will be the lasting legacy of the 2013 champions: Boston was a well-constructed baseball team — and better constructed than it appeared on Opening Day — that had solid pitching, a few reliable stars, and a collection of guys having career years. The team was unburdened by history. It did not have the deadweight of decades hanging around its neck. It was as loose as the 2004 team was and, when it had to be, it was as coldly efficient as the 2007 bunch. And it was those things in the immediate wake of two of the worst seasons the team ever had seen, and two of the most unlikable Red Sox rosters ever assembled, and that is a considerable distinction. First was the 2011 Fried Chicken and Beer crew, who collapsed down the stretch, cost the team Terry Francona, and generally did their best to obscure the accumulated goodwill of the previous seven years in a thick, foul coating of Original Recipe. Then came the Unfortunate Bobby Valentine Experiment, about which not much more can be said. The team cratered to 69 wins, and finished 26 games out of first place, and managed to do so by being almost as insufferable as the previous year’s team was. Hiring Bobby Valentine to come back from the 2011 debacle was like injecting yourself with cholera to get over the flu.

At that point, more than a few people around the country were happy to see Red Sox fans get a kind of comeuppance for the way their self-indulgence had been, well, indulged since 2004. (Two HBO specials? A Jimmy Fallon Fenway-themed remake of a vastly superior Nick Hornby book? It was a world gone mad.) It was a two-year stint in deepest purgatory for what had been an extended exercise in hubris. For years, slumming Harvard poets had compared the Red Sox–Yankees rivalry to Athens and Sparta. Well, there was the real Greek drama, the House of Atreus, disgruntled, emptying the right-field grandstand.

+++++++++++++++++++++snip+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

describes it all pretty well....being close to his age, and becoming a fan in 67, like he did.

[DrewFlorida]

1. Nice read, that pretty much sums it up. I'm a lifelong Red Sox fan since 1965.

[NRaleighLiberal]

2. 1967 is when I caught the bug - 11 years old.

Should be an interesting season...

[DrewFlorida]

3. Last year my son took my grandson (3 years old at the time) to Boston for his inaugural visit...

to Fenway Park for a Red Sox game. It's priceless to see the fourth generation of our family now enjoying the Sox. We visited Jetblue park in Fort Myers, Florida last weekend and we're looking forward to another season of high hopes, without Bobby Valentine.