The 2004 Run: Breaking The Curse
The 2004 Boston Red Sox are still talked about in rooms where baseball people gather, mostly because the odds against them were absurd. They went down 3-0 against the Yankees in the ALCS, a series where the Yankees had essentially rewritten the rules of collapse. Nobody comes back from that. Statistically speaking, no team has ever come back from 3-0 in a best-of-seven postseason series. The Red Sox did it by winning Game 4 on a Schilling night where his right foot was barely holding together, and then somehow finding another gear for Game 5, which David Ortiz turned into a three-hour walk-off marathon that still gives people heartburn to watch. I remember sitting in a bar on Lansdowne Street that night when the game finally ended and half the crowd just sat in stunned silence before the celebration actually kicked in. You could see the sheer disbelief on faces. The World Series that followed was a sweep of the Cardinals, and while it wasn't the dramatic story the ALCS was, there was something almost clinical about how the Red Sox handled it. Curt Schilling, Derek Lowe, Mike Timlin, Keith Foulke — that bullpen was built different. Timlin in particular, who had thrown 20-something innings of relief in the ALCS alone, barely missed a beat.
The 2007 Run: More Comfortable Than Anyone Expected
By 2007, the Red Sox weren't the overachieving underdogs anymore. They were the team everyone had to navigate around. They won 96 games in the regular season and went through the playoffs with a level of ease that was almost infuriating for the opposing franchises. The ALCS against the Cleveland Indians was a sweep, and the World Series against the Colorado Rockies was also a sweep, though the Rockies had just broken a few offensive records along the way which made it slightly less humiliating than a normal sweep. The interesting thing about the 2007 roster was how much it overlapped with 2004. Ortiz, Ramirez, Schilling, Papelbon, Youk, Pedroia, Lowell — same core, just a year older and a year more ruthless. Manny Ramirez was at his most destructive in '07, batting .347 with 33 home runs in the regular season, and he carried that into October. This is the run that surprised me the most when I started digging into it, because people remember the heartbreak of 2004 far more vividly than the clinical dominance of 2007. The 2007 team didn't need dramatic moments. They just won. There's a particular kind of frustration in losing to a team that doesn't even seem to care about the drama, and that's exactly what the opposition felt.
The Red Sox Dynasty In The 21st Century A Complete Breakdown Of Their Four World Series Triumphs
The 2013 Run: The One That Got Away From Everyone
2013 was the year the Red Sox became the most interesting team in baseball overnight. They had just missed the playoffs in 2012 by two games, fired manager Terry Francona, brought in John Farrell, added Jon Lester to an already deep rotation, and somehow won 97 games while dealing with the emotional weight of the Boston Marathon bombing. I'm not going to pretend that last part didn't matter. It mattered enormously. The team felt it, the city felt it, and it showed up in ways that box scores can't capture. The ALDS against the Detroit Tigers was a tight series. Then the ALCS against the Dodgers was a disaster until it wasn't. They went up 3-1, lost Game 5 in extra innings on a wild pitch that still makes my stomach turn when I think about it, and then needed Game 6 to force a winner-take-all. The Game 6 performance by Jon Lester — six scoreless innings of relief after a normal starting assignment — was probably the most important pitching performance of the entire postseason. He'd been on short rest but hadn't officially been a relief pitcher that year, and suddenly he was, and he was brilliant. The World Series against the Cardinals had its own drama. The series went seven games, David Ortiz had that walk-off single in Game 6 that was arguably the most iconic hit in franchise history, and the Cardinals tied it in Game 7 before Jarrod Saltalamacchia hit a two-run homer in the top of the eighth. I've watched that game probably a dozen times since, and the sixth-inning home run by Jon Gomes still gets me every time. It was a moment of pure chaos and joy that only happens once in a while in sports.
Get the Full Details
One thing people miss about 2013 is how flawed the roster actually was underneath the surface. Dustin Pedroia was hurt for significant stretches. Jacoby Ellsbury missed time. The bullpen, despite having Joakim Soria and Craig Breslow, was thinner than you'd expect. The workaround for that was Farrell's willingness to pull his starters early, which meant Lester, Buchholz, and Lackey were all used in multi-inning relief roles at various points. It's a strategy that works until it doesn't, and in 2013 it worked because they had exactly enough depth to make it work.
The 2018 Run: The Most Talented Team Ever to Wear the Pinstripes
The 2018 Red Sox were, by most measures, the best team this franchise has ever put on the field. They won 108 games. They had the best run differential in baseball. They had Mookie Betts, the AL MVP, and Rafael Devers, who was already showing signs of being a generational talent at twenty-one. The rotation — Sale, Porcello, Price, Sandberg, Eovaldi — was supposed to be a question mark coming into the year, and it turned into one of the most dominant rotations in postseason history. The ALCS against the Cleveland Indians was a sweep, and the World Series against the Dodgers was also a sweep, but the real story was the postseason run as a whole. They won 11 of their last 12 regular-season games to clinch the division, and then went 11-1 through the playoffs. Chris Sale in the ALDS against the Astros — three starts, 19 strikeouts, 0.82 ERA — was the kind of performance that defines a postseason run. The Dodgers had Clayton Kershaw and Yu Darvish and a lineup that featured three future Hall of Famers, and the Red Sox just outplayed them across the board. Here's something that doesn't get enough attention: the 2018 Red Sox were built for a specific type of opponent, and that type of opponent kept showing up. They had a power-heavy lineup that could beat you with the big inning, and they had a pitching staff that could dominate on any given night. What they didn't have was a lot of speed or defensive versatility, which would have been a problem against a team that bunts and steals bases the way the 2002 Angels or the 2007 Indians tried to do it. But no team that year was built to exploit that weakness, and by the time people figured it out, it was too late.
What These Four Runs Actually Have In Common
Looking at all four championships from 2004, 2007, 2013, and 2018, the common thread isn't a particular playing style or a specific roster construction. It's the organization's willingness to spend money and take risks at the right moments. The 2002 trade for Schilling and Wright was a gamble that paid off. The 2012 free agency sprint for Lester and Hanley Ramirez was a gamble that paid off differently than expected but still resulted in a ring. The 2017 trade for Price and Sale was a gamble that looked questionable at the time and then became the single best move in franchise history. I spent a few weekends going through the transaction logs for each of these runs, trying to find a pattern, and the pattern I found was that none of them looked good on paper at the time. The 2004 team was patched together with last-minute acquisitions. The 2007 team was the same group from 2004 but older and angrier. The 2013 team was put together in a hurry after a disappointing 2012. The 2018 team was assembled through trades that everyone thought were too aggressive. The common denominator was Dan Duquette and Ben Cherington and Craig Breslow making decisions that looked reckless in the moment and brilliant in retrospect. The one thing that didn't carry over between all four runs was the pitching depth. In 2004 and 2007, the rotation was built around Schilling and Wakefield and then Schilling and Beckett. In 2013, it was Lester and Buchholz and Lackey. In 2018, it was Sale and Porcello and Price and Sandberg and Eovaldi — five ace-caliber arms. That kind of rotation depth is extremely rare and nearly impossible to replicate. The 2018 team had it, and that's probably why they felt the most dominant of the four runs, even though the 2004 team had the most story.
