The Boston Red Sox began as the 1901 Americans, a charter American League club that won the first modern World Series in 1903 against Pittsburgh. Fenway Park opened in 1912, and its 37-foot Green Monster in left field has shaped Boston baseball ever since. The Sox won titles in 1912, 1915, 1916, and 1918, with Babe Ruth starring as a left-handed pitcher before he was sold to the Yankees in December 1919. That transaction, whether or not one believes in a curse, split baseball’s most famous rivalry and began an 86-year championship drought that became New England folklore.

Ted Williams, the Splendid Splinter, hit .406 in 1941 and .344 for his career, losing prime years to two wars and still finishing as the era’s definitive hitter. Carl Yastrzemski’s 1967 Impossible Dream Triple Crown, Carlton Fisk’s 1975 Game 6 homer, and the 1978 Bucky Dent collapse against New York filled decades with almosts. The 1986 World Series, lost to the Mets after a one-strike-away Game 6, deepened the mythology. Through it all Fenway stayed small, loud, and idiosyncratic — a 1912 yard that refused to become a cookie-cutter stadium.

The drought ended in 2004. After trailing the Yankees 3–0 in the ALCS, Boston won four straight, then swept St. Louis. Dave Roberts’s steal, David Ortiz’s heroics, and a bloody-sock start from Curt Schilling became a regional epic. Titles in 2007, 2013 — the first Boston sports championship after the Marathon bombing — and 2018, when the 108–54 club rolled through October, turned the Red Sox from tragic heroes into a modern power. Ortiz’s Hall of Fame career, Pedro Martínez’s peak, and Mookie Betts’s 2018 MVP season sit alongside Williams and Yaz in the franchise pantheon.

Nine World Series championships, the oldest major-league ballpark still in use, and a rivalry with the Yankees that has structured American League history for a century define the Red Sox. Ownership changes, big payrolls, and rebuilds have not changed the essential texture: night games under the Monster, a city that treats April as a civic season, and a history that runs from Cy Young and Ruth through Williams to Ortiz. Boston baseball is Fenway, the drought, the comeback, and the expectation that every October might be the next 2004.