“You can’t call any season a success unless you’ve won the World Series.”

—Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein, in the Globe

To newer Red Sox fans, this may seem an innocuous enough statement. But to longtime Sox fans, baseball fans, even Yankee fans, it’s a sort of remarkable assertion, a sign of how the Sox current management has raised the bar on expectations to, well, Yankee-like levels.

In this schema, there are no rebuilding years, no seasons where you don’t win the Series but that’s all right because you did better than expected, no seasons where you were successful but one or two other teams were just a little bit better.

For better or worse, that quote sounds like something George Steinbrenner would have said back in the mid-1970s.

I think it’s a mistake: You don’t have to win the Series to have a great season. (Look at the Sox in ’67, for example.) And to think that every season is a letdown if you don’t win the Series takes a lot of the joy out of the game….