The New Favorites

I found a really cool article on espn.com, and it's pretty long, but it's definitely worth reading the rest of it here. Below are some of the best lines:

Unless you're older than Eddie Joost, older than Dom DiMaggio, older than Zsa Zsa Gabor, you've never lived in a world like this.
You've never lived in a world where a baseball season was about to begin and the Boston Red Sox could be described with a word millions of New Englanders were once completely unfamiliar with: Favorites.

The Boston Red Sox, as we know them now, are not expected to choke, or gag, or fizzle. They're expected to win. They're built to win. And they're darned sure good enough to win.

"The story has changed now," says Tim Wakefield, now in his 14th season with this team, a man who has witnessed this transformation from the best seat in the house. "It's changed from tragedy every postseason -- from: 'They did it again. Blahblahblahblahblah' -- to something different."

But watching the Red Sox go from "A Team Doomed by Fate, Curses, Sunken Pianos and Assorted Bucky Bleeping Dent-Type Villains to Never Win a Stinking World Series for the Next 8,000 Centuries" to "Only Franchise in History Not Named the Yankees to Sweep the Series Twice in Four Octobers" -- that supersedes "different," doesn't it?

It's kinda like waking up one morning and finding your family just moved to Mars. That's how unfamiliar we are with this universe -- a universe where even the Yankees are trying to catch the Red Sox. Where everybody, in fact, is trying to catch the Red Sox -- except, possibly, Hank Steinbrenner.
If Hank truly believes there's no such thing as Red Sox Nation, by the way, he needs to get out more. Not only does Red Sox Nation exist, we're pretty sure it's now larger than Bulgaria. And definitely Mauritania.

In this universe, there's apparently not even any such thing as a Red Sox "away" game anymore. We're not sure where all these Red Sox fans in Bradenton and Vero Beach, in Baltimore and Kansas City, in Arlington, Texas, and even the Tokyo Dome come from. But they're there, all right.

"It's not a circus here anymore," says Timlin. "There's not 150 media people here, and cameramen taking pictures because it was the first time we'd won in 86 years. Now we can just be normal. We can be a normal team and just go play."
Actually, "normal" isn't the best word to describe this group now, either. The Royals are a "normal" team. The Reds are a "normal" team. The Red Sox are always going to feel like an earthquake rolling through your friendly neighborhood seismic fault.

So aren't the Red Sox taking a gigantic chance in thinking that this group can recreate the formula to do it again?
"I don't think so," says first baseman Kevin Youkilis. "I think it's a good thing. It's only a good thing if you have the right guys, but we have a lot of hungry guys. We have guys who are hungry every day. We don't have guys who think one World Series is good enough. Our guys here want to win 10. And that's the kind of guys you need."

And so, for the first time in about nine decades, the Boston Red Sox have positioned themselves as The Team. The clear-cut favorites. What a thing.

"The thing about this team is, we don't just want to win one," Youkilis says with a laugh. "We want to try to catch Yogi."