Now What?

So, one final time, let's talk about the future by going back to the past. One final time, let's go back to what happened during and after 1918, a year no longer a dark icon in the history of the Boston Red Sox - excuse me, the world champion Boston Red Sox - a year with the poison finally drained out of it. One final time, let's go back and see what the historical record says will happen when the Red Sox win a World Series, since few people alive remember it firsthand.

On the field, there was the feud between Boston owner Harry Frazee and American League president Ban Johnson, and there was the constant trouble with the team's star pitcher/hitter/ drunkard/brothel-hound, Babe Ruth, who ran so wild in the off-season and throughout 1919 that it became quite plain to a great number of people that the Red Sox would be better off without him. This, of course, did not work out so well. Off the field, World War I ended on November 11, 1918, which was a good thing, but, at the same time, people were dropping like flies from the Spanish influenza: 6,508 in the city alone, including a Globe sportswriter named Edward Martin. On January 15, 1919, 21 people died in the Great Molasses Flood in the North End, and, the next day, Prohibition was ratified.

OK, so what does history know anyway? What's history ever done for us and for the Red Sox? Forget history. History began again in St. Louis, a little before midnight on October 27, 2004. Ruth? Dent? Gibson? Buckner? Who are these people of whom you speak? The years 1946, and 1967, and 1975, and 1986 all unfolded in some alternate universe, available now only to the kind of emotional archeology that used to plague some other Boston baseball franchise that we have all but forgotten.

A curse? We've entered an age of enlightenment, an age in which the romantic was abandoned for the empirical and in which hexes and hoodoos, however lucrative and colorful, have been lost somewhere within the box scores of four games between the Red Sox and the Cardinals. All the old chants and charms and spells are hanging in the memorabilia shops now, next to the authentic replica jerseys and the Don Buddin autographed baseballs. The Red Sox and their fans now emerge, blinking, from a deep fog of superstition into a brighter, more rational day. Welcome to Year Zero in Red Sox Nation.

In the purely pragmatic sense, it began almost immediately. Even before Thanksgiving, the Red Sox faced a storm of free agency. Two of their signature pitchers - Pedro Martinez and Derek Lowe - were eligible to shop themselves elsewhere, as was catcher Jason Varitek, who is widely perceived to be the team's unofficial captain. In addition, shortstop Orlando Cabrera, the linchpin of the pivotal maneuverings that sent Nomar Garciaparra out of town in the middle of the season and another free agent, did nothing throughout the season except increase his own worth on the open market.

And nothing is likely to come cheaply. For example, Varitek's agent, Scott Boras, whom baseball owners generally regard the way that J. Edgar Hoover once looked at John Dillinger, quickly shot the moon, asking Boston to give his client a five-year, $50 million deal with a no-trade clause thrown into the bargain. The team proposed a two-year deal for $27.5 million to Martinez, and the offer might as well have been dropped down a well. Given that the Red Sox already have $85.3 million in guaranteed salaries on the books for the 13 players who have contracts for 2005, it seems very likely that the team will lose several signature stars and, perhaps more important, a good chunk of its public identity.

No one is more important to that than Martinez. It was he who changed the crowd at Fenway Park. It was he who brought out the Dominican flags, and the punchados signs on the bleacher walls, and it was he who did so much finally to lay to rest the ghosts of the team's sorry racial history, which always was far more of a burden to the franchise than its sale of that malcontent Ruth. Martinez also was an integral part of the Dominican heart of the world champions, along with David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez. It will be an interesting karmic moment if, next April 11, Pedro Martinez walks out of the New York Yankees dugout to accept his 2004 World Series ring from the Boston Red Sox. That is the kind of thing that can happen now, in Year Zero.

In any event, it likely will be a very different team that watches the World Series banner rise over Fenway next spring. If this were the old Red Sox, and if we still believed in history, this prospect would find the Red Sox faithful with a bad case of the vapors. But perhaps the clearest difference that has come upon the team since Year Zero dawned on the banks of the Mississippi is the presumption on the part of the team's fans that the Red Sox front office actually knows what it's doing. There is no longer reflexive racism, nor idiotic attempts to tailor the team to Fenway's alleged peculiarities. No longer do we see an endless parade of right-hand-hitting meatheads trotted out, year after year. Pitching is important here now, never more so than it was in October, when the Red Sox starters befuddled the heart of the St. Louis lineup. If the economics of baseball force big changes in the Red Sox roster, people trust that the front office is up to the job, as it assuredly was not in the 1970s, when the team lost Carlton Fisk, Fred Lynn, and Rick Burleson in comic-opera fashion.

Central to that faith has been the performance of Theo Epstein, the young Red Sox general manager, and as far from an old baseball guy as Eddie Vedder is from Al Martino. Epstein finally made his bones by daringly shuffling Garciaparra off to Wrigley Field in Chicago, firming up the team's defense in midseason, and removing a gloomy presence from what became a happy, vibrant clubhouse. It was the biggest risk that any Red Sox executive had taken since Harry Frazee got tired of scouring the South End brothels for his ace. It worked out splendidly, even if Cabrera accepts an offer from another team. There is no Curse of Nomar. Not now. Not ever. Not here in the new era. Not here, in the sunshine of the first summer since the dawn of Year Zero.

Charles P. Pierce is a member of the Globe Magazine staff.