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Red Sox-Yankees is baseball's ultimate rivalry
NEW YORK — Too bad baseball clutters October with the World Series. What a distraction. A rematch between the Yankees and Red Sox is what we need. Talk about anticlimactic. That's what the October classic will be this year.
Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio were almost traded for each other, the Red Sox nearly landed Alex Rodriguez, Aaron Boone's homer sunk Pedro Martinez, Grady Little and the Sox a year ago.
AP file photos
It always has been after the Yankees and Red Sox, with all their contempt for each other, have staged another of their gasping death marches.
The best-of-seven American League Championship Series that ended Wednesday night at Yankee Stadium is the best I've ever seen.
Of course, that doesn't come as a surprise, because the Yankees and Red Sox were in it.
Wasn't it just a blink ago that Aaron Boone was launching that almost unbelievable 11th inning home run off Tim Wakefield to send the Red Sox Nation to a bitter cold winter as the Yankees frolicked off to the 2003 World Series?
And manager Grady Little was losing his job because the Evil Empire Yankees got life when he left a tiring Pedro Martinez in the game too long?
Or that Martinez was tossing old folk Don Zimmer to the Fenway Park turf in the heat of battle a few days earlier?
Pleasant dreams and nightmares. The Yankees and Red Sox.
There's no rivalry in sports that comes close. The hostility and tensions explode onto TV screens all across America and on the baseball field whenever these two teams collide. It's an embedded part of our culture.
"It's the greatest rivalry in sports," Commissioner Bud Selig says. "You can talk about the Dodgers and Giants, the Cardinals and Cubs, the Packers and Bears, Ohio State-Michigan, but there's nothing like the Red Sox and Yankees. It has history, intensity, proximity and goes all the way back to Babe Ruth. There are all the brawls over the years."
In fact, they don't even have to be on the same diamond. They can be miles apart, but it seems whatever one does it affects the other. Always has.
Origins of the Curse
Maybe this disdain never would have been born had Red Sox owner Harry Frazee not sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees after the 1919 season. Boston won the World Series in 1918 and has endured nothing but frustration in four trips (1947-67-75-86) since.
By 1920 a deadly flu epidemic that killed 500,000 Americans and World War I had ended. So had the Red Sox success in the World Series.
The Yankees have won the World Series 26 times since, and Boston — well, not one.
Thus, the Curse of the Bambino. That's when the smoldering hatred was ignited.
How they stack up
Comparing the Red Sox and Yankees:
Red Sox
Yankees
8,263-7,817
All-time
record
8,979-6,809
865-1,055
Record vs. other
1,055-865
10
AL pennants
39
5
World Series titles
26
1918
Last World
Series title
2000
Ted Williams, 521
Career home run leader
Babe Ruth, 659
Roger Clemens, Cy Young, 192
Career wins leader
Whitey Ford, 236
16
Hall of Famers
24
5
Retired
numbers
15
Fenway Park, opened in 1912
Classic
ballpark
Yankee
Stadium, opened in 1923
us information go here.
The curse was hanging by a one-strike thread in '86. But the Red Sox crumbled when Mookie Wilson's grounder went through Bill Buckner's legs allowing the New York Mets to win Game 6 of that World Series. They won Game 7 after Boston blew a 3-0 lead.
The Yankees and Red Sox make the Hatfield and McCoy hostilities look like Jack and Jill at a Sunday school picnic.
Years ago I sat with Ted Williams in a hotel room early one morning, talking about hitting and other baseball subjects.
I'd been around the Red Sox in three World Series, knew about the curse, et al, but it wasn't until that moment that the full impact hit me.
Ted reminded me the Red Sox won their first American League pennant since 1918 in 1946.
"I had just returned from the war," Williams said, his eyes becoming bright. "It was all about me and Joe DiMaggio then. I hit .342 that season, and we went to the World Series. There was so much competition between Joe and me."
The Red Sox played the St. Louis Cardinals that October and lost in seven games when Country Slaughter scored the winning run in a 4-3 decision with daring base running in the eighth inning.
"It hurt," he said.
Williams recalled the 1949 season when Boston needed just one victory against the Yankees the final weekend of the season to take the AL pennant. The Yankees won both games and went to the World Series, a run of five consecutive titles.
"I can still remember the last two games of the '49 season and the intensity of the rivalry then," says Selig, who grew up a Yankees fan. "But the intensity today? I've never seen anything like it."
The Red Sox and Yankees have always battled each other for the best players. The cross-pollination of talent is uncanny.
Many of Boston's best players have ended up in pinstripes — Roger Clemens, Wade Boggs come to mind. There's talk this October that when Martinez becomes a free agent next month, he might choose New York.
Last winter the Red Sox beat the Yankees to Curt Schilling, but after working out a vigorous deal with Texas for baseball's best player, Alex Rodriguez, were rebuffed when the players union wouldn't agree to the deal. The Yankees landed A-Rod around Valentine's Day.
There's nothing better in this contentious rivalry than the obvious disdain the two owners have for each other. George Steinbrenner vs. John Henry. They not only try to outplay each other, they're intent on outspending each other. Both have two of the deepest pockets in baseball, which adds to the fray.
In the spring, they were involved in a statement vs. statement battle until Commissioner Bud Selig scolded his two "children."
Movie-type moments
Even this year there have been Hollywood-type story lines, none better than Schilling, blood seeping through his sock, gallantly pitching the Red Sox to their 4-2 victory Tuesday night.
"I don't believe in that curse thing," Schilling says. "That's just tremendous fodder for the media, a tremendous excuse for whoever needs to use it. I'm not belittling it, but I just can't factor that part in."
But wasn't that Schilling fidgeting in the dugout, his hands clasped, looking straight up?
Or the three games in Boston, starting with Saturday's 19-8 massacre of the Red Sox, followed by those two mind-boggling extra-inning marathons. They were almost too much for Red Sox fans — TV images of men and women with their hands clenched in prayer, tears rolling down faces painted like clowns.
Before the ALCS, the Yankees and Red Sox had met 19 times this season, with Boston winning 11. Eight of the games were decided in the last at-bat.
The July 24 game at Fenway Park was a key for the Red Sox this season. That's when A-Rod and catcher Jason Varitek fought down the first-base line, with both benches clearing. Eight players on the two teams were disciplined.
When I look back on Yankees-Red Sox, there has been a major event in every decade since I started covering major league baseball in 1958.
This might be forgotten, but on Oct. 1, 1961, the Yankees' Roger Maris blasted the home run (61) that surpassed Ruth's 1927 record. It came off Boston's Tracy Stallard.
In 1978, the Yankees were 14 games behind Boston in mid-July but finished in a first-place tie, forcing a one-game playoff.
You know the rest: Bucky Dent's three-run homer in the seventh inning gave the Yankees a 3-2 lead. They won 5-4.
In the 1990s? Joe Torre manages the Yankees. Where do you start — or end — with the frustration?
