BOSTON — Fifty years after the Gold Dust Twins took Boston by storm, there’s a new trio of heralded Red Sox rookies hoping to wake a dormant franchise.

Second baseman Kristian Campbell broke spring training with the team, infielder Marcelo Mayer was promoted in May, and outfielder Roman Anthony, the No. 1 prospect in all of baseball, debuted in June. Though Campbell returned to Triple-A for more seasoning, his eight-year $60 million contract means he’ll be back before long.

Five decades after Fred Lynn and Jim Rice helped lift the Red Sox to the 1975 pennant, these rookies are playing in the same Fenway Park with (most of) the same rules, but for Rice, the throughlines end there.

“The Big 3 is not anything like us. Don’t compare them with us. Don’t compare them with us,” Rice repeated. “You look at opposing teams that we played, (they) were much better than what you see now. The pitching was much better than what you see now. You had a 4-man rotation. You don’t have an 8-man, 9-man rotation. You don’t have that. You had a stacked bullpen when we played. You don’t have that. So you can’t compare us with them.”

‘Ears open, mouth shut’

Mayer’s first career home run came on a blast to right field in early June. The rookie trotted around the bases, popped on a celebratory Wally the Green Monster helmet, and as he made his way through the dugout, Lucas Giolito stopped to give him two kisses on the cheek.

“Marcelo and I developed a little bit of a bond when I was going through my rehab outings, so I give him a couple kisses on the cheek for the home run,” Giolito said during an in-game interview.

The 30-year-old pitcher has been in the big leagues for 10 years.

It’s a stark contrast to the experience Lynn and Rice had when they cracked a major league roster. In the mid-1970s, veterans didn’t acknowledge the rookies, let alone kiss them on the cheeks of a furry mascot helmet.

“You had to earn your respect,” Rice said. “Guys come in now and they just yak, yak, yak, yak and think they already got 10 years in. No, no, no. It’s called respect. You’ve gotta earn it — and that’s what Freddie and I did. We earned it.”

Lynn concurred.

“Rookies today are treated vastly differently than when we were rookies,” Lynn said. “We didn’t speak to the veterans unless we were spoken to, basically. You had to earn your stripes… These guys today, people are helping them. They have people help rookies! We didn’t have any of that!”

Trying to earn the clubhouse’s respect began first with a invitation to big league spring training, where Rice and Lynn were suddenly surrounded by the likes of Luis Tiant, Rico Petrocelli, Bill Lee, Carlton Fisk, and of course, Carl Yastrzemski.

“You knew them, but you wanted them to know you,” Rice said. “The way that you were going to get them to know you was going out and producing, listening. Ears open, mouth shut. I learned a lot.”

‘You learn from experience’

When Anthony hit a grand slam for Triple-A Worcester in early June, calls for him to be promoted to the Major League roster crescendoed. It wasn’t just a grand slam. Anthony belted a 497-foot grand slam with an exit velocity of 115.6 mph. The clip was immediately available for public consumption, as most have been from his minor league career.

Two days after Anthony was promoted, the Red Sox were already using the rookies to sell tickets. “Catch the next generation,” their advertisement read, with photos of Mayer, Anthony, and Campbell on the Fenway Park grass.

The immediate spotlight brings a whole new kind of pressure that Lynn and Rice didn’t have to deal with.

In the early 1970s, rookies were cloaked in relative anonymity.

“I think the first time I gave an interview was when I got to the big leagues,” Lynn said. “I’m not kidding you. And I went to (Southern California) and we won three national titles. We were never on TV. We didn’t have any of that stuff.”

Scouting was vastly different, too. Neither Rice, a first-round pick, nor Lynn, a second-rounder, ever saw a Boston scout in the pre-draft process.

Decades before the rise of analytics, Haywood Sullivan, the Red Sox de facto director of scouting, told the Boston Globe he was sold on Lynn because of something far simpler after seeing him in the 1973 NCAA tournament.

“I watched Lynn against seven clubs. He only made about four hits in the games, but in each game he had to bat against left-handed pitchers, and being left-handed, it seemed that he would be bailing out of the batter’s box a lot. But he stayed in there. And I never saw him flinch,” Sullivan told the Globe’s Clif Keane in 1975. “That was one item in his favor with me. That and the knowledge that he had a very good basic knowledge of the game. Fundamentally, he did everything right.”

Lynn and Rice had no sort of advance scouting on any of the pitchers they’d face. They’d ask teammates who’d faced the opponent what the pitcher threw and that was the extent of it. Now, pitch mixes, tendencies, and velocities are all publicly available, not to mention the private scouting reports.

When Rice was slumping, he’d turn to books, not any sort of iPad video.

His hitting coach, Johnny Pesky, was a close friend of Ted Williams. So Rice kept Williams’ “The Science of Hitting” with him. When Ken ‘Hawk’ Harrelson introduced Rice to “The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance,” he made that a keeper, too.

“So you had the hitting and tell you the way to think,” Rice said. “So you’d listen and you’d pick up things and that’d make you a better player. Why? Because Williams was experienced, Pesky was experienced, and Ken Harrelson was experienced. So you learn from experience.”

At that time, rookies needed to use each other as resources to navigate Boston. They relied on fellow young players to find places to live, where to eat, and didn’t have veterans to help, let alone team personnel.

The first-year outfielders at Fenway Park were on their own.

“Today’s rookies, all that is taken care of for them. So that’s not even an issue,” Lynn said. “All they have to do is play ball — and that’s the easy part.”