This is how it was – or at least as it looked – during the sociable 86 years that connected 1918 and 2004. For years, we, from New England, would hear torturous stories from “The Rivalry,” about how the Red Sox could never quite get over the hump against their old rivals, the Yankees.
Jinxes. Poksen. Hexes. Curses.
You remember the choir.
And the funny thing, always, was this: Rivalry? Really? In those 86 years connected in 1918 and 2004, the Yankees won 26 World Series championships. They won 39 pennants. The Red Sox won at that time 26 fewer championships and 35 fewer American League titles. When rivals go, it’s hard to think of one-sided then.
Hammer versus nail, perhaps.
Lucy versus Charlie Brown, sure.
Notre Dame vs. Marine, sure.
Before the 1999 ALCS 1999, Yogi Berra took the famous Bernie Williams aside, smiled and offered a word of advice from the bright side of the feud: ‘Relax. We’ve been slapping these guys for 80 years. “They beat them that year too. And again in 2003.
Generations of Yankees fans knew only relentless prosperity against the Red Sox. If a significant portion of Yankees’ DNA fans always believe that the fellows in the pinstripes would figure out a way to end things, an important string also included this caveat: and the Red Sox will always fill in as cellophane when it absolutely matters.
You may have noticed: this has not been the case for the last 16 years. Since 2004, the scorecard reads as follows: Red Sox, 4 World Series, Yankees 1. The two times they met in October, the Sox won in epic fashion (2004) and in a breeze (2018). It’s funny, too: during that time, the Yankees never had a losing record and the Red Sox actually ended up not once, not twice, but three times in the AL East (2012, 2014, 2015).
But even in those terrible years, the Red Sox did not look like that, the way they look in 2020, that is to say non-competitive, soft, lacks both talent and effort. The pitching staff was fired. Mookie Betts has moved his Hall of Fame track 3,000 miles away. There are still some good players on the team, but not nearly enough of them.
And it’s jarret to see. On Monday, the Yankees put the wood back on the Red Sox, beating them 6-2, the 10th straight time they beat the Sox last year. Before the end of the season, they will have three more games at Fenway Park, at which point they can tie their all-time record and win against the Sox, 12, set in 1936 and tied in 1952-53.
Back in ’36, the Red Sox were still in the early stages of their drought, but they had already forgotten the American League against the Yankees and were fighting for survival against the Braves, still in Boston. This was another three years before Ted Williams would arrive and the Red Sox helped regain some respectability in the relationship. It is no coincidence that the other 0-12 run – 0-9 to exclude 1952, 0-3 to start ’53 – almost exactly coincided with the second stint of Teddy Ballgame as a fighter pilot, this time in Korea.
Well, “jarring” does not mean “unpleasant.” Yankees fans should enjoy this little cramp of one-sided fun. And the Red Sox, honestly, do not seem to exactly camouflage at all about what certainly looks like an epic tank track. Monday’s loss, their eighth in a row, dropped the Sox to 6-17 on the year. That’s the most loss in baseball.
Two years after a regular 108-54 season, after winning 119 games and a World Series and enjoying a place in the talks ranking teams of the time (all of which made Yankees fans understandably react as if they were in a closet of spoilers were round meat), they are a baseball carcass and it’s something to see for Yankees fans who liked what the old world order looked like.
Of course they are the Red Sox, they are Boston, they print money (even if they did not do so this way when they were still betting Betts), and they are managed by a young ex, Chaim Bloom, who is likely to come out of this with his reputation intact, as a bit of a mystery. There is little doubt that they will soon find a return to relevance, and for those without a dog in the hunt, a revitalized Yankees-Red Sox rivalry will certainly be welcome.
For the time being? Fans of Yankees will enjoy the way things are, thank you very much, because they totally resemble the way things were.
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