I never liked the Boston Red Sox, but it has been only the past decade that I have come to loathe them.

For most of my life, they were just the American League version of the Chicago Cubs. Not as loveable, but a similar history of failure, and a turning-point moment. For the Cubs, it’s The Goat, for the Red Sox it was the Babe, and the sale of Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees, and the Curse of the Bambino.

What pushed the Red Sox to the top of my hate list?

Two factors quickly come to mind … the first being that the Angels, a team I have come to admire, suffered at their hands. First in 1986 when the Angels collapsed in Game 5 of the ALCS (which presaged the Red Sox collapse in Game 6 of the World Series) … and then again in this decade, when the Red Sox kept ushering the Angels out of the playoffs (2004, 2007, 2008 …).

And the second? Let’s call it The Bill Simmons Effect.

Simmons is the nation’s best-known/best-read “sports guy” (which is what he calls himself). We can’t really call him a journalist because he is a ridiculous homer for all things Boston.

I have no doubt that Red Sox fans are every bit as obnoxious and self-involved as is Simmons. But it was Simmons who opened the door and shone a light on the ridiculous parochialism of the “Red Sox Nation” … which would have been better off left unseen by the rest of us. (Boston, too, can be a very unfriendly place, still known for heavy drinking, one of the most annoying accents in the country and lingering racism; they were the last MLB team to add a black player to their team.)

As exposed to us by Simmons, Red Sox Nation wallows in a weird stew of self-pity, self-importance, Yankees-hating, Fenway-loving, all-Bawston-all-the-time wildly optimistic/profoundly pessimistic navel-gazing fandom. It’s repellent.

Now, it seems that half of all American baseball fans are Boston fans, which disgusts me. Many of them are bandwagon-climbers who are about as “Boston” as Times Square. But they are inescapable, always blathering on about their team even as Yankees fans seem to sink into invisibility, and the Yankees have so much more to talk about than does Boston.

Plus, the Red Sox still like to portray themselves as some gang of gutty little overachievers when for a long time now they have had the second-biggest payroll in baseball. The Yankees are No. 1 of course, but New York never tries to portray their ball team as loveable underdogs; they embrace their overdoggedness. Red Sox fans want to have it both ways — spend money wastefully but live in a false-reality universe where their team is made up of 25 Dustin Pedroias.

So, this season, they were gonna be so so good. The regular season was just the prelude to the best-of-seven when the Red Sox and Yankees would meet for the American League pennant, and the survivor would go on to win the World Series.

But it was a team without enough pitching, which Boston hitting was able to mask through August. Early in September, the Red Sox were nine games up in the wild-card race, a bulge that turned out to be the biggest lead ever blown in the final when they suffered a delicious, ninth-inning meltdown against the puny Orioles even as Tampa Bay was overcoming a 7-0 deficit to win in extra innings over the Yankees.

So, Boston, out of the playoffs entirely. Biggest Collapse EV-uh. (Think Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting.) Yeah, you, Boston. You and your eternal fans, who turn out to be as fickle, and as prone to scapegoating (see you later, Tito Francona) as anyone else.

Just another choking Red Sox team … and I’m happy they ended this season with a one-forr-the-books collapse. Now see what you can do about losing 90 next year.

* – And “schadenfreude” — a German word for “pleasure derived from someone else’s misfortune.” Oh, yeah.