Nobody needs to tell a Red Sox fan how to celebrate a World Championship. The franchise leads the 21st Century with four World Series titles. Yet, the Red Sox fans face a strange new challenge: What exactly is the proper way to celebrate fiscal responsibility?

In reportedly trading Mookie Betts, as well as David Price, half of his money and all of his baggage, the Red Sox have prioritized maximizing profit over winning pennants. No way around that.

One hundred years and 40 days ago, that didn’t work out so well for the Sox, who had won five World Series titles in the first 18 years of the 20th century. Then they sent Babe Ruth to the Yankees, a financially motivated trade that put a hex on the Sox for the rest of the century. “The Curse of the Bambino,” immortalized by Dan Shaughnessy’s book of that title, showed what can happen when money, money,, money becomes more important than winning pennants.

Do you fear the Curse of Mookie Betts? Or, if you prefer, the Curse of MLB, aka Markus Lynn Betts? It’s a fair question, not to mention a frightening one.

Bad karma ruled the night Tuesday and started the fade to oblivion. Can you say .500 ballclub?

Blindly loyal fans will want to find a way to like the idea of the Red Sox trading Betts. Good luck coming up with a reason to party like it’s 2004, 2007, 2013 and 2018 because the Red Sox found a way to get under the luxury-tax threshold.

The Fenway Sports Group, headed by John Henry and Tom Werner, was a marriage arranged in profit heaven by former Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig. The professional marriage had served the fan base well, until now.

John Henry and Tom Werner purchased the Red Sox for $700 million. In Forbes’ most recent value estimate of professional sports franchises, the Red Sox checked in at $3.2 billion. Forbes also valued Fenway Sports Group, which includes Liverpool Football Club, at $6.6 billion.

To find the right means of celebrating the accounting-driven trade, perhaps it’s best to study how accountants recognize their biggest day of the year. Shortly after April 15 passes, CPAs across the country rent limousines, let their hair down, and paint the town red in recognition of their hardest work being behind them for a year. Again, not the case here. Chaim Bloom’s toughest days start the moment he trades Betts: That the Red Sox would make a salary-dump move 100 offseasons ago after they did so with Babe Ruth is more than a little eerie. It’s downright frightening. The Red Sox won the World Series in 2004, 2007, 2013 and 2018.

The Red Sox won five World Series in the first 18 years of the 20th century and they won four in the first 18 years of the 21st century.

You have to strike when you have an abundance of talent and the Red Sox went in the other direction. They became worse when it was time to become better.

It’s fruitless to hope that nobody will compare Alex Verdugo, a nice left-handed hitter who can make highlight catches here and there, to Betts. It’s inevitable since Verdugo is the centerpiece of a money-motivated deal. The challenge for Verdugo will be to find a way to ignore Betts comparisons. Ignoring them doesn’t mean resenting them, which would be the worst of all possible responses.

Oh well, at least for a while longer the Red Sox can boast of winning the most 21st century championships, just as they dominated at the beginning of the 18% of the 20th century.

The franchise that became known as the Red Sox in 1908 won the World Series in 1903, 1912, 1915 and 1916 and 1918. They might have had another in 1904, but the New York Giants, winners of the National League pennant, already had established that they would refuse to play in a World Series by the time the Boston Americans won the AL pennant.

Then the Red Sox did the unthinkable and traded Babe Ruth the day after Christmas in 1919. They have done it again. That’s not to say Mookie is as dominant as the Babe, but bad karma is bad karma, not to be taken lightly.