I think I'm an odd fan in the sense that my Red Sox fandom has ebbed and flowed between being a complete diehard in the early-mid 2000s, to not really caring at all in the 2010s, to now coming back during what seems like a down phase for the franchise.
I started to love the Sox in around 2000/2001 as I was taking pitching more seriously and loved Pedro. I grew to love Manny and Nomar, and the history of the franchise and the quest to break the curse. The 2003 and 2004 Red Sox teams are without a doubt my favourite teams out of all the teams I follow. I really liked the 2007 team, but I started to lose interest as I saw the players I loved either retire or move on to other teams, and there was just a different vibe with the team after having won two championships in four seasons. I also hated how I thought Pedro was treated by ownership after the 04 season, and how Manny was always on the trade block, and how Ortiz was only offered a series of one year deals.
In 2009, my wife and I went to Pittsburgh to see the Phillies play the Pirates as Pedro was then playing for the Phillies. Pittsburgh was a place that I had spent a lot of time as a kid, going to a lot of games at Three Rivers and PNC when visiting family in Western PA. The Pirates won the game on a walk-off HR by a young rookie named Andrew McCutchen. I felt the Pirates were a cool, up and coming team and wanted to be part of their ride back to relevance. I was pretty in on them for a while, but after the run from 2013-2015, there was nothing worse than following the Pirates. If you think it's bad right now following the Red Sox with their lack of stars, imagine *never* being in any discussions for *any* free agents. The only hope when you're a Pirates fan is that you'll hit the lottery on a draft pick, and even then, it's just a matter of time before that player prices himself out of your franchise and leaves for a bigger team. To add to that, even when you do hit the lottery on a draft pick, you get the pleasure of seeing that player never develop, get traded for Chris Archer, and then become a superstar for another team.
I continued to watch baseball all the time, but shifted more towards rooting for players on my fantasy team while keeping an eye on the Pirates and the Red Sox. Watching baseball that way was really unfulfilling. You watch games only to see your pitchers do well, or your hitters hit a home run, without ever really caring about the outcome of the game. You flip back and forth between games only to see individual at bats or pitching stats and you miss out on a lot of the drama of caring about the result.
At some point last year, I felt really nostalgic and missed rooting for the Red Sox. No baseball team ever made me feel the way the Red Sox did, and I have a lot of history rooting for them. There are a lot of people who still know me as being "the Red Sox guy" where I'm from. Of course winning matters, but it's not everything. I can live with a rebuild if I think the team will spend to augment a core of home grown players, unlike the Pirates in 2013-2015. I can live with a rebuild knowing that the team will do their best to keep their homegrown superstars. I know the wounds from the Mookie trade are still raw, but a situation like the Devers extension would almost never happen with the Pirates. Yes, they re-signed Ke'Bryan Hayes and Bryan Reynolds, but those players are not the same caliber of player as Devers. They traded McCutchen and they traded Cole just as they were about to get expensive. I don't need my team to win every year, but at least show me you're trying and that there is a plan other than to do the bare minimum while lining the owner's pockets. Despite how this offseason has gone, for the first time in a while, I'm actually excited to root for a team during a baseball season.