So, it looks like the Red Sox will finally banish the demons and win a World Series for the first time since 1918. As a Yankee season ticket holder, I’m rooting for them–the Sox were the better team this year (The Yankees better record was bloated by feasting on the likes of Tampa Bay and Baltimore), they came back in historic and gusty fashion and I happen to like many of the Sox players (Manny Ramirez is my homeboy from the Washington Heights ‘hood).

But, my real purpose for this diversion is to say this: would progressives who root for the Red Sox and paint the Yankees as the Evil Empire get a grip? Far from being a story of small triumphing over big, the Red Sox have the second highest payroll in baseball; if you want to play that tune and embrace a small-market team, go be a fan of the Minnesota Twins or the Oakland A’s. While the Yankees have a team that plays in front of a very diverse crowd who come to a stadium in a minority community, the Red Sox crowd is essentially 100 percent white, 50 percent of whom still hate busing and are probably racists. Yankee owner George Steinbrenner is a belligerent oaf and a Republican but the Red Sox are owned by capitalist buccaneers; if you want to root for a team in sports that exemplifies anti-corporate values, take up the football Green Bay Packers, who are owned by the town. Every other sports team today is a corporation, some bigger than others.

And, by the way, the Sox are partly owned by The New York Times. Who has hurt our country more, obnoxious George or The Times with its woeful Iraq coverage, not to mention other failures to challenge the ruling powers?

You could, oh dear progressives, make the case that all this Sox love is just self-indulgence, as Charles Pierce , a long-time Sox fan, does in the new issue of Sports Illustrated. “It is not a curse that’s haunted the team so much as the conspicuous pride that Red Sox fans have taken in being uniquely the victim of Fate’s great cosmic whoopee cushion,” he writes. “It is one thing to acknowledge a run of bad luck. It’s another thing to wallow in it. It’s one thing to decide that you’re born to be Destiny’s doormat. It’s another to turn it into a tourist attraction…The culture of the curse is equal parts mystical self-love and karmic exceptionalism…”

I give the Red Sox their due and tip my cap to their players and fans. But, only because they played baseball as it should be played, not because they are some paragon of truth and justice.