Some young snot nose who knows what happened in baseball from '67 to now? Yeah, I also know they didn't win a championship. There's only so much about that time period you can successfully condescend your having lived through, because there's a little thing called preserved history. It includes newspaper articles, common opinions and statistics.
The Red Sox weren't premier s*** until they won. Premier teams win championships, not finish 2nd or worse. You can insert your subjectivity all you want about how much harder the writers were on the Sox back then, but that has to do with championships. Writers and fans don't ease up because you won 95 games but couldn't quite get the job done, because thats human behavior. Everyone's reaction after the collapse last year, in 2003, and other mon-championship years, is evidence of that.
Some day an old grandpa will try to tell you how much smarter they are than you. Oh wait.