THERE ARE no former Boston Red Sox fans. And it isn’t a sustained act of perversity to stick with the Red Sox over the years. Failing to win the World Series for 86 years didn’t create a masochistic love for the team. Instead, the attraction of the Red Sox is very simple: they were always in the hunt, a good team with attractive players, but not a great team until this year. So nobody gave up on them. There was hope.

I became a Red Sox fan when I was 6 or 7 years old. It was the day my dad gave me a baseball autographed by players on the team he coached at the Presidio of Monterey in the mid-1930s. One player was a ringer. He was a teenager named Dom Dimaggio, Joe’s brother. When I got the ball he was the centerfielder for the Red Sox, a very good player but not a Hall of Famer. At that moment, I became a Red Sox fan for life.