Red Sox

The American League needed a Boston entry to compete with the National League's existing club, and the franchise took the field in 1901 as one of the league's eight charter members, playing at the Huntington Avenue Grounds before Fenway Park opened. For its first seven seasons the team went simply by "Boston" or "Americans," and only in 1908 did it settle on Red Sox, after the colour of the hose on the uniform.

Fenway has been home since, its capacity split by daylight — around 37,305 for day games, 37,755 under lights.

Nine World Series titles run through the club's history, but the shape of that list matters more than the count: five came in the sport's first two decades, 1903 to 1918, then nothing for eighty-six years. Owner Harry Frazee sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees in the winter of 1919-20, and the drought that followed earned the name Curse of the Bambino. It ended in October 2004, when Boston came back from three games down against the Yankees in the American League Championship Series — the first team in the sport's history to do so — and went on to sweep the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series. Titles in 2007, 2013 and 2018 followed within the next decade and a half.

That 2004 comeback sharpened a rivalry with the Yankees that already had the Ruth sale behind it; nothing else in the American League East, not Tampa Bay nor Toronto, carries the same weight. Ted Williams and Carl Yastrzemski both spent their entire careers in Boston and went into the Hall of Fame wearing this cap; David Ortiz, the face of the 2004 breakthrough, joined them in 2022.

Betts and Bogaerts came up through the same system before the 2018 championship.