The 2013 World Champion Boston Red Sox are a lot like New England’s version of the 1969 New York Mets.

Utterly amazing, and all the more so for being so unexpected and hard to define.

So let’s just say they were a team of stand-up guys.

This wasn’t like the 2004 championship team, the self-proclaimed band of “idiots.” That was about removing a monkey from the back of a franchise that hadn’t won a World Series in 86 years. There was an anticipation attached to that title, as there was when another talented team won it all in 2007.

Not so with this version, which explains why slugger David Ortiz, the Most Valuable Player of the 2013 series, said this title might have been the sweetest of the three championships the Sox have won this century.

Looking at the individual pieces that were in place at the start of the year, even the most optimistic Red Sox fan couldn’t have predicted this ending. Not after last season’s 93-loss debacle. The Red Sox returned an intact core – Ortiz, second-baseman Dustin Pedroia, center fielder Jacoby Ellsbury and pitchers Jon Lester, John Lackey and Clay Buchholz – but the team’s nucleus seemed comprised mostly of a bunch of questions.

The answer to almost all of them, it turned out, is that sometimes less is more.

Sox General Manager Ben Cherington started the team’s foray into the off-season free-agent market by signing catcher David Ross. Fans were underwhelmed. Most had forgotten that the journeyman backup had played eight games for the team in 2008, but they’ll long remember his run-scoring ground-rule double in the seventh inning of Game 5 of this year’s Series to put the Sox ahead of the St. Louis Cardinals. The team never trailed in the series again.

Sox fans also were largely unimpressed by the free-agent signings that followed Ross: outfielders Shane Victorino and Jonny Gomes, first baseman Mike Napoli, shortstop Stephen Drew and pitchers Koji Uehara and Junichi Tazawa. They are now household names in much of Red Sox Nation.

There was no reason before the season to think the team was going anywhere special, and maybe even less reason to think so after the Sox lost a home doubleheader to the Kansas City Royals on the weekend after the Boston Marathon bombing tragedy.

But baseball’s 162-game regular season is often itself likened to a marathon, and Red Sox players embraced their role as civic heroes after the bombings and stood up as willing participants in the city and region’s ongoing healing process.

It’s hard to know how those events factored into the entity the team would ultimately become, but it was clear early on that – regardless of how talented they might be or not – it was a team of stand-up guys who were willing to put their city, team and teammates first.

They were stand-up guys who believed – even before the evidence seemed to support such faith – that they could be part of something bigger than themselves if they played the game a certain way.

It is telling that, when manager John Farrell sat regulars Jarrod Saltalamacchia, Will Middlebrooks and Daniel Nava during the World Series in favor of Ross, rookie Xander Bogaerts and Gomes, respectively, nobody complained publicly about being relegated to a lesser role.

Stand-up guys, after all, don’t put ego above group accomplishment.

When John Lackey was removed (albeit against his will) after a masterful pitching performance in the final game of the World Series on Wednesday night, some of the same fans who had heaped abuse on him two years earlier during the team’s historic September collapse stood and cheered. He probably had as much reason as any player in recent team history to give the masses the cold shoulder.

Instead, Lackey tipped his hat like classy ballplayers have been doing for generations.

It was a small but meaningful gesture – one, perhaps, that represented a measure of forgiveness to fans who had been unfairly hard on him at times.

The act of a stand-up guy on a team of them.

Newsletter