NEW YORK — It’s not easy being a Red Sox fan in the city, says longtime fan Joe Cosgriff — New York City, that is.

“[Being] a Sox fan here?” he asked. “I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. I didn’t choose it. It’s just something that happens.”

Every April, Cosgriff and the other 500 members of the Benevolent and Loyal Order of Honorable and Ancient Red Sox Diehard Sufferers of New York pile into a Boston-bound bus to catch the Red Sox home opener. The group of fans are willing to track the passing of decades by the rising price of a cocktail at the Howard Johnson’s on Boylston Street in Boston.

The BLOHARDS began unexpectedly, like many Sox victories, when Massachusetts native Jim Powers rode a train back from a Boston loss at Yankee Stadium in 1967. As he began to sing “Better than his brother Joe, Dominic Dimaggio,” a 1950s anthem referring to the former Sox center fielder, fellow fan Henry Berry recognized the tune, and the pair began a conversation.

That season, the Red Sox won the American League pennant.

“You want to be with people like you,” said member Peter Collery. “I’ve never watched a game in some bar with Yankees fans. It wouldn’t be much fun.”

The group’s website lists other Bostonian-friendly features, including “Boston-Friendly Watering Holes” and a link to home delivery of the Boston Sunday Globe.

BLOHARDS also gets together twice a year for lunches featuring Red Sox VIPs, who have included pitchers Roger Clemens and Calvin Schiraldi and managers Johnny Pesky and Jimy Williams — and even one guest from the “other side,” when a man dressed as Babe Ruth stopped by in September 2004.

The Bambino incarnate was WOR Radio’s Joey Reynolds, outfitted with chains and dirt to assume the role of Ruth’s ghost, but the BLOHARDS’ official minutes say it was the Babe himself. At the lunch, “Babe Ruth” declared his famous curse a myth and said the Red Sox would win the World Series that year.

One month later, they did.

“I had long since given up in my heart of hearts,” Collery said. “It was like waking up from a dream.”

The win boosted membership, as closeted Red Sox fans gained the confidence to announce their loyalty in “Evil Empire” territory. Club members also had the chance to escort the World Series trophy to New York.

Powers, a founder of the club, died at 77, one year after the World Series win, after spending the final year of his life as the happiest person on Earth, Cosgriff said.

“We’re all happier now than we’ve ever been,” he said. “Despite our name, we’re not all about suffering.”

The rivalry that dates back almost a century between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees is mostly a fan-based one, Cosgriff said.

“It’s not between ballplayers,” the Manhattan resident said. “They respect each other.

“But the fans are hot and heavy about the rivalry,” he continued. “There’s nothing good-natured about it.”

As Cosgriff recalled, Powers’s loud-mouthed cheering at Red Sox games in New York was always a prime target for belligerent Yankee fans.

“They’d throw coins in the day games and batteries and bottles at night,” Cosgriff said. “The coins didn’t hurt as much, so we’d go more in the day.”

But the BLOHARDS and its fellow Sox fans deal out as much as they take, according to Boston-based Yankee fan Nikki Fein.

Fein, organizer of a club for Yankee fans who live in Boston, said she suffers the same abuse.

“I like competition somewhat,” she said, “but it’s just too much here.”