Now that the players have long since washed the last traces of champagne out of their hair and the general hysteria has cooled, perhaps this veteran Red Sox rooter can share some reflections on our unaccustomed championship.

By contrast with the exultant rhapsodizings of many Boston sportswriters, allow me to indulge in some Scroogean thinking about the new status of our favorites. Being on top has its downside, I will argue, so if you are still swept away by the exploits of the Sox, you may wish to stop reading here.

My credentials for freelance musing about the Red Sox must be acknowledged as solid. Endowed with free passes from my newspaperman father, I first became accustomed to Fenway Park and the athletes who performed there in the middle 1930s. Often he would take me to Kenmore Square after my weekly piano lesson, holding out the sweetener of a game after I endured unwelcome instruction at the keyboard.

From the beginning, the Red Sox were my favorites, easily beating in my affections the other Boston team, the Bees. The Fenway sluggers−Jimmy Foxx, Joe Cronin, Bobby Doerr, and later, Ted Williams−used to keep me awed with their home runs, a factor that made me forgive the team’s inconstant pitching.  

My father, however, favored the Bees, a downtrodden team that showed no promise of finishing in the first division, much less first place. In 1940, under Casey Stengel as manager, the Boston Bees finished last with a record of 65 wins and 87 losses while drawing only 241,616 fans for the whole season.

Another credential as a fan comes from my having played baseball throughout my life. Even now I perform, often ingloriously, in a weekly game of softball, the ball being hard enough to come close to the real thing.

Only rarely do I actually attend a Red Sox game nowadays, however. It has been two years since I saw my last one in person. Among other things, the games last too long for my taste. In the World Series of 1918 when the Sox beat the Cubs, every game finished in under two hours; this fall, every one lasted at least an hour longer.

And why must patriotism require spectators to listen, every last of the seventh, to some pop star rendering God Bless America, and then wait until television airs its usual ads?

Late in the season, and certainly by the playoffs, the northern United States is too cold for baseball. I do not relish sitting immobile outside while freezing.

Also, the tickets are too expensive, many for seats that test your eyesight. Every game is a sellout, which means that you have precious little space to stretch. Where have the joys of rooting for a last-place team gone?

Now, by contrast with earlier days, hype plays a major role in every part of the game. The ball players exchange high fives (or head bumpings) for ground ball outs that may have advanced a runner one base. Similarly, they will congratulate a fellow player for hitting a routine fly ball that enables someone to move from second base to third, or for successfully executing a bunt. Such actions belong to an atmosphere of exaggeration that pervades the sport.

Despite its defenders, I still regard the American League’s designated hitter rule as spoiling the game. It enables athletes with only half of baseball’s basic skills to play, and bans from full participation in the contest pitchers who are exempted from doing what every other player must do.

Specialization does not please me either. Must we regard as a full participant a pitcher who appears only in the eighth inning of a game and then retires to the bench?

That so few players remain with one team throughout their career also disgruntles me. There is nothing quite like rooting for a Yaztremski or a Jim Rice for many seasons as you watch their athletic development on your own home ground.

Of course, I am aware of the faults of the past. The players of the 1930s when I first started following baseball were chattels of the owners. And the Red Sox refusal to begin hiring players of color until 1959 still stands as disgraceful.

My principal reason from feeling less than ecstatic about the sudden leap in Red Sox status, I fear, will deserve a special award for perversity. It is because I mourn the loss of the mystique that endeared the team to so many of us fans.

Now they have become winners like all the champions that ever were. Gone is that altogether special character that came with always managing to lose, even when ultimate victory was a single pitch or ground ball away.

Must I now transfer allegiance to the Chicago Cubs in order to reclaim that precious mystique that went with my team being ultimate losers?

Richard Griffin