It didn’t seem to get a whole lot of attention the other day when he was named to baseball’s Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee, but even now, 40 years later, it’s important to remember the debt New England owes to Dick Williams.

It’s been well-chronicled that the ’67 Sox were the team that turned baseball around in Boston, the one that created the unbelievable fan interest that we now see.

But without Dick Williams, there wouldn’t have been any ’67 Red Sox.

At least not the team we remember so fondly.

In retrospect, it was a baseball version of the perfect storm, a young team coming into its own, superstar seasons from Jim Lonborg and Carl Yastrzemski, and a young manager in his first job who seemed to have stepped out of the pages of adolescent fiction.

There was nothing subtle about Williams in that long-ago summer. He was brash and he was tough and he carried with him the scars of growing up with a father who taught him and his brother how to swim by throwing them in a raging river and having them battle against the current. And if they disobeyed? They were taken into the basement, tied to a pole, and whipped.

This was Williams’ world view, the idea that there was one authority figure, and he made it an article of his faith. He would go on to take two other teams to the World Series, but it was in ’67 that he made his bones, the leader of the team that came out of nowhere to win the pennant and get to the seventh game of the World Series, the season that forever changed baseball in Boston.