Now that donkeys can fly, hell has frozen over, and the Red Sox have been champions for an entire year, there exists here a palpable desire to peer even more deeply into victory for social significance, if there is any to be gleaned. It is an exercise peculiar to Boston baseball. When the Anaheim Angels won the World Series in 2002 after blowing it in ’79, ’82, ’86, and ’95, it was sufficient to merely be champions. The same was true for the Patriots, who suffered through magnificent forms of failure, associated with names like Hugh Millen, Ron Earhardt, and Tommy Hodson now notable as much for obscurity as for infamy. Now that the Pats are Super Bowl champions three times over, Bill Belichick and Tom Brady are household names, a status once foreign to anyone associated with the Patriots. Being winners instead of losers was gift enough. This is the routine, the natural order in sports.

The Red Sox, of course, are anything but routine.

If nothing else, that night of October 27, 2004, when the plastic draped over each locker in the visitor’s clubhouse at Busch Stadium in St. Louis not only protected the real estate from champagne spray but served as proof that the Red Sox were indeed champions, signified a line of demarcation like those crossed by the Angels or the Patriots. But for the Red Sox, because of their history, because of the way the team’s struggles along racial and social lines paralleled those of the city, jumping around like little kids that night was not its own reward.

The championship wasn’t enough, nor was finally beating the Yankees along the way. Winning needed to erase the sins of the famously racist Tom Yawkey. Winning needed to rehabilitate the image. Winning needed to heal the original wound, the Jackie Robinson tryout of 1945, when the Sox decided Robinson was the wrong color to play for them. It needed to ease Pumpsie Green’s pain, as the belated breaker of the Boston color barrier. It needed to make those conflicted diehards feel not just ecstatic about the present, but better about the past. It needed to wipe the slate clean.

That’s a lot to ask of a single championship, even one the city waited 86 years for.

omehow over the years, the connection between the team’s prolonged inability to win a World Series and its pathological humiliation of its black players became intertwined in the Red Sox storyline, as if the team’s historical racism could not stand on its own as an egregious offense. The transgression somehow required a greater, more tangible price to be digested by the baseball fan.

The Red Sox racial infamy took on greater importance because the team did not win, even though the two elements are not wholly related. Embarrassing Robinson somehow became linked with pitching Galehouse over Parnell in ’48. Integrating last when the Red Sox could have been first explained Bucky Dent. Indeed, race became a subplot that somehow illuminated the team’s perennial failure not to win, but not to win the whole thing.

None of which is to suggest racism did not affect the product on the field. The Red Sox could have fielded Hall of Fame players Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, Billy Williams, maybe even Hank Aaron, and those players certainly would have affected the win column nearly as much as the mediocre white players the Red Sox selected in their stead during the losing days of the 1950s. In turn, the unlucky Sox never took home the big prize and—as 1949 morphed into ’67 which became ’75, ’86, and so on—a new piece of the Sox legend seemed cemented as fact: The Red Sox did not win because, when it came to race, they were bad people.

The converse of the racial axiom—that winning the World Series once or twice during the bad years would have lessened the import of the way the Red Sox conducted their business—seems almost perverse, and yet one need only look to the Bronx for evidence of such a mindset. During the dynasty years of 1947-64, when the Yankees appeared in 15 World Series and won 10, the Yanks were racially bulletproof because the victory column was mountain high. The Yankees were just as racist as the Red Sox; some might argue more so, because of the ugly public statements against integration, in the stands or on the field, by the owners. When the Yankees were finally criticized for their aggressive and unrepentant institutional racism, it came in the mid-1960s, at the onset of the losing.

(Of course, race is not just about white and black, but that has been the dominant dynamic in Boston, in fact and in symbol. Latino players have always been popular in Boston, if lacking in influence, but that ethnic group has never been the focus of the city’s racial dynamic, so the parallel between Latino Boston and Latino baseball is not as strong.)

The two—victory and organizational attitude—become linked to make one’s case of racism’s crippling effects, but the two are not always related. The Red Sox prevailing in 1986 would not have mitigated the damage done by manager Mike “Pinky” Higgins, who once said, “There will never be any niggers on this team as long as I have anything to say about it.” Nor would it have made Mo Vaughn or Dan Duquette, with his aggressive hiring of players of color, less relevant to racial change in the clubhouse.

ow, in the sunlight of championship, it is fashionable to attribute victory to the end of the Yawkey regime. This is a tale comforting to the right-thinking folk long conflicted by their passion for their team and its own unforgivable roots, and it should make them feel good.

The facts are a little less sunny.

The Red Sox have not fielded a black regular since the uncomfortable final days of Duquette, Joe Kerrigan, and Carl Everett. In three seasons under Theo Epstein, the Red Sox have not employed a single African-American player who took the field every day. Pokey Reese was the regular shortstop in 2004 only out of the necessity of replacing the injured Nomar Garciaparra. In 2003, the Red Sox employed more black coaches (hitting coach Ron Jackson, first-base coach Dallas Williams) than players (utility player Damian Jackson being the only one). When new ownership took charge in 2002, the principal owner, John Henry, said he was committed to adding a person of color as a limited partner. Three years later, he has not done so.

What the championship has provided, however—and this is no myth—is a real sense of inclusion, even if it has not translated to a seat in the boardroom, or the right-field roof box seats. The difference is in the feel, and it comes with the surprising, and surprisingly welcome, lifting of an element of the team’s mystique: The Red Sox are no longer a mirror of the city.

It is an odd development for a club that so long stayed in lockstep with Boston’s brittle racial temperament, but one that may simultaneously diminish and elevate the Red Sox as a franchise. The Red Sox have become just another team, no longer burdened by a history both unflattering and persistent.

If the team mirrors the city today, it is in another way. Whatever gaps the Red Sox have bridged racially, the club has created an equal chasm economically. In becoming a team of high fashion and desire (with accompanying prices), the Red Sox have paralleled a city surpassed only by glamorous San Francisco, New York, and Honolulu for expensiveness. For the past four seasons the Red Sox have boasted the highest ticket prices, a status unlikely to change in the age of Monster Seats. Yesterday’s lament was the lack of black faces at the ballpark. Today’s is the lack of seats that anyone can afford.

The Red Sox are no longer bound to the city’s sharp edges. Nor, it seems, do they have to be. Where the Red Sox are concerned, the numbers of blacks may not have changed on the field or in the bleachers, but the hostility has dissipated. The result is an inclusion of a cosmetic, emotional sort that may one day translate into real diversity.

Today, the Sox insignia is ubiquitous, whether in Jamaica Plain or Brookline, on a Puerto Rican or on a descendent of Lodge, Curley, or Douglass. Kids of all sorts wear the “B” hats, showing their fandom without sending any social signal. With every neighborhood sharing in the celebration, the Red Sox are now something they’ve never been. They are a team instead of a symbol. 

Howard Bryant is a sports columnist for the Boston Herald and author of Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston.