LOS ANGELES -- What in the name of Ted Williams has happened to the Boston Red Sox? The franchise that was cursed for more than eight decades has once again staked its claim as the premier franchise in baseball.

Boston put the wraps on a dominating season with a 5-1 win over the Los Angeles Dodgers on Sunday in Game 5 of the World Series. The Red Sox secured their first title since 2013 -- a blink of the eye on the Boston-baseball time scale -- and fourth in 15 years. Boston has now won nine titles in franchise history, tied for third-most of all big league teams.

The Red Sox beat teams in every possible way this season, and in the clincher, Boston used the long ball to finish the Dodgers for good. Steve Pearce hit a two-run homer in the first inning off Clayton Kershaw and added a solo shot in the eighth off Pedro Baez. Mookie Betts and J.D. Martinez added solo shots in the sixth and seventh.

The homers were more than enough in back of a lights-out David Price, who rewrote his postseason narrative once and for all. Price dazzled the Dodgers for seven innings for his third win this postseason.

The 2018 Red Sox have stated a pretty solid case as being the best team in franchise history. Their 108 wins set a team record. Their plus-229 run differential matched the 1949 Red Sox, who didn't win a title, for the second-best in team history. The record, plus-255, was set by the 1912 Red Sox team that won 105 games and beat the New York Giants in seven games (plus a tie) in the World Series.

But what really sets the Red Sox apart is their dominance of the rest of the field in this year's playoffs. This was a loaded bracket, with the American League in particular being more top-heavy with power teams than any circuit in recent memory. The National League was more egalitarian, but the Dodgers featured as much talent as any AL team and had the pedigree of six straight division titles working for them.

Despite all of this, the Red Sox plowed through three opponents -- the hated Yankees, the defending-champion Astros and the mighty Dodgers -- who combined to win 295 games during the regular season. The final series totals -- 3-1, 4-1 and 4-1 -- almost read like a peak-Pete Sampras score from a Wimbledon final.

The Red Sox did in the postseason what they had been doing all year: They mashed at the plate and caught the ball in the field. Boston combined the power and patience of a three-true-outcomes (home run/strikeout/walk) team with the situational excellence of a traditional sequential offense. The most stark evidence of this was Boston's two-out production, which accounted for 45 of its 84 runs during October.