This Red Sox Team May Not Be Magical, But It's Still Great

Cue the corny music.

The Boston Red Sox are back in the World Series, and they did it in what can certainly be called dramatic fashion, overcoming a three-games-to-one deficit against the Cleveland Indians to win the American League Championship Series four games to three.

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It is baseball tradition and, certainly, New England tradition, to immortalize just about everything the Red Sox do in October. There was Johnny Pesky holding the ball in 1946, Bob Gibson overpowering Jim Lonborg in 1967, Carlton Fisk waving the ball fair in 1975 -- only to have his team lose Game 7 the next night ¿ and Bill Buckner booting the ball in 1986. (Most people remember that play wrong, thinking the Red Sox were still leading with two outs in the 10th inning, when in fact, the score was already tied. Many also forget that the Red Sox led 3-0 in Game 7 two nights later before collapsing down the stretch one more time.)

But then there was 2004, the year the Curse of the Bambino finally ended when the Red Sox not only became the first team in baseball history to overcome a 3-0 deficit in a postseason series, they did it against their rivals, the Yankees. They did it after trailing going into the ninth inning of Game 4 against Mariano Rivera, arguably the greatest postseason closer in baseball history. They did it thanks to a stolen base by journeyman Dave Roberts and thanks also to a complete collapse by the Yankee pitching staff in the final two games.

They will still be writing books and making movies about that comeback 86 years from now and 186 years from now. The only thing that will ever compete with that in the melodrama category will be the year the Cubs finally get around to winning the World Series again. When that happens, ESPN will start a network devoted to recapping the Cubs' victory 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Of course 2004 was extraordinary, so much so that a World Series devoid of any drama at all didn't matter. It was the comeback against which all future comebacks will be measured.

And that's why what the Red Sox did last week felt so anti-climactic. If you were watching the series, you felt as if the Indians had one real chance to win and that was in Game 5 in Cleveland. If C.C. Sabathia had been able to keep his team even until late in the game, maybe the home crowd, momentum and the Indians' outstanding bullpen could nudge them over the finish line.

But Josh Beckett, who is rapidly becoming one of the best postseason pitchers in recent history (remember 2003?) outpitched Sabathia by a fairly substantial margin to send the series back to Boston. If there was any doubt the series was over at that point, it went away when J.D. Drew -- who was just about zero-for-the-season -- hit a grand slam in the first inning of Game 6.

The Indians never led for an instant in the final two games. Consider this: the final margin of the last three games was 30-5. Sure, the Red Sox blew a couple of the games open late, but 30 to 5? Not too much drama in that.

What's more, let's consider who the Red Sox are in 2007. The Curse of the Bambino is dead. The Red Sox may not outspend the Yankees, but they outspend everyone else. They overspent for Drew, who would be a difficult person to root for if he played for Charlie Brown's team, and they outspent everyone for Daisuke Matsuzaka, who was only pretty good, but good enough. They lucked into Mike Lowell when the penny-pinching Florida Marlins insisted they take his salary off their hands two years ago if they wanted Beckett. They overcame the fact that their big deadline trade, acquiring Eric Gagne, was a complete bust.

That's not to demean what they've done. They were the best team in baseball all season, building a huge early lead in the American League East, then holding on when the Yankees found themselves late in the season. They are a big-money team with one lock Hall of Famer on the roster -- Manny Ramirez -- and another potential Hall of Famer in David Ortiz, who, at the very least has been the game's best clutch hitter for five years. Think about this for a second: at a moment that truly matters, who would you rather have hitting for you, Ortiz or Alex Rodriguez?

But the days when the Red Sox saga can be turned into the stuff of romance have long passed. If you want romance right now, your team is the Colorado Rockies. If they had done what they have done in the past month in New York or Boston or, heaven help us, the north side of Chicago, there would already be a dozen books in print and Disney would be preparing a movie trilogy.