BOSTON — In 2004, they wore their hair long and had a goofy, irreverent attitude.
Nine years later, they are bearded, bedraggled and relentless, a formula that has carried them back to the pinnacle of baseball, where they will face the St. Louis Cardinals, a familiar foe, in the World Series.
The Boston Red Sox are American League champions again, a title they earned with a dramatic 5-2 victory over the Detroit Tigers in Game 6 of the league championship series Saturday night, in part because of another grand slam off Detroit's suspect bullpen.
With Boston trailing by a run with one out in the seventh inning, Shane Victorino hit a bases-loaded blast off relief pitcher Jose Veras for the second grand slam of his postseason career. And for the fourth time in their storied history, and second time since 2004, the Red Sox will meet the Cardinals in the World Series beginning at Fenway Park on Wednesday.
Just as they did in Game 2 of this compelling series, the Red Sox patiently waited for Max Scherzer to leave the game and then punished the bullpen.
David Ortiz did the honors in Game 2, and Victorino joined in in Game 6 Saturday, and in the process tied Jim Thome as the only other player to hit two grand slams in the postseason.
Victorino, one of Boston's many off-season additions who helped cleanse a toxic clubhouse from the two previous years, hit his other slam in the 2008 National League division series as a member of the Philadelphia Phillies, who went on to win the World Series.
His blast on Saturday, which sailed over the Green Monster and into the dense pages of Red Sox history, came one at-bat after Detroit's shortstop, Jose Iglesias, botched a potential double-play ball that could have ended the inning with no runs scoring.
"We went crazy in the dugout," said David Ross, the Red Sox' backup catcher. He said that he and Mike Napoli "were jumping around like we won the World Series."
So the 2013 World Series will be a rematch of the '04 series, when Boston ended its 86-year championship drought and put to rest the supposed curse levied on the team for selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees after the 1919 season.
The Cardinals and the Red Sox also met in the 1946 and 1967 Series, both of which St. Louis won in seven games. More recently, Boston went to the World Series in 2007, sweeping the Colorado Rockies in four games for their second title in a four-year span during which they were dominant, winning their last eight series games.
The current Red Sox, who have cultivated team unity with their outlandish beards, completed a remarkable transformation that was similar to the 20-game turnaround the team accomplished in 1967.
The 1966 Red Sox won only 72 games, but only a year later they won 92 and the pennant behind the hitting of Carl Yastrzemski and the pitching of Jim Lonborg. The 2013 Red Sox improved by 28 games over the 2012 team, which went 69-93 and never seemed to coalesce behind Bobby Valentine, whose tenure as manager lasted only a season.
This season's Red Sox succeeded with the addition of several new players who, like Victorino, were solid but not superstars, a new manager in John Farrell and a reborn closer in Koji Uehara, who earned his third save of the series and was named its most valuable player.
"Certainly we hoped for it," Larry Lucchino, the team president, said after the game, "but we didn't specifically plan for this. We just wanted to get it going in the right direction."
Jarrod Saltalamacchia, Boston's starting catcher, said, "We've got so many M.V.P.'s on this team."
The Tigers, on the other hand, were injured and slumping offensively, and their hopes were often dashed in this series when they handed the ball from their often-dazzling starters to their suspect relievers.
The Red Sox got Scherzer's pitch counts up, both in Game 2 and in Game 6 Saturday night, when he threw 110 pitches in six and a third innings. The game was tense through the first four scoreless innings, and Boston scored first in the fifth before the Tigers rallied in the sixth. Clay Buchholz, Boston's starter, walked Torii Hunter, the leadoff batter, and then surrendered a ground ball single to Miguel Cabrera.
Buchholz, who received an appreciative ovation from the fans, left the game, and gave it over to Franklin Morales, who didn't get quit the same reception when he left shortly thereafter.
Morales walked the slumping Prince Fielder to load the bases with nobody out and then Victor Martinez drove a ball off the Green Monster in left, scoring Hunter and Cabrera to give Detroit a 2-1 lead. Morales was booed off the field.
But the Red Sox met with good fortune after that, turning a double play that ended with Saltalamacchia chasing Fielder all the way back toward third base in a rundown and applying a diving tag. The hefty Fielder flopped to the dirt several inches short of the bag.
The Tigers' offense never got untracked in the series due to the slump that ensnared Fielder and the groin and abdominal injuries that limited Cabrera. Fielder came into the game with a .211 batting average in the series (4 for 19) with no runs batted in.
Cabrera, unable to generate power from his legs, was 5 for 18 with one home run, and can barely run.
"It breaks your heart as a manager," the Tigers' Jim Leyland said before the game. "It's really a shame for the whole baseball world because they're not getting a chance to see him at his best."
The Red Sox, too, have had several players mired in slumps in the series. Victorino was one of them, carrying a .229 postseason batting average into the game, with no home runs.
That changed in the seventh after Leyland summoned the right-hander Jose Veras to face Victorino with the bases loaded. For the second time in the series, Boston rode a grand slam to victory, and another October meeting with the Cardinals.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 20, 2013
An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of a Tigers relief pitcher. He is Jose Veras, not Joe Veras.
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