What exactly is the matter with these people who make out the schedule?
The Yankees were here the exact same weekend last year. It was dumb then,
and it's dumb now. The Yankees aren't supposed to be the 11 a.m. game -
ever. It's against at least seven known laws of nature to have the Red Sox
play the Yankees any earlier than the middle of May, and it should be a
felony worth 20-to-life for someone to make them play such a meaningful
game before 1 o'clock in the afternoon.
So, where were we? Oh, yes, the Yankees. The Yankees were put on this
earth to remind us that all opponents aren't created equal.
Let's go back to Tuesday night when Fenway Park public address
announcer Ed Brickley introduced Chuck Knoblauch as Kansas City's leadoff
man.
''BOOOOOOOO!''
(I'm leaving out the side comments.)
''It was certainly a different feeling,'' laughs the Royals left
fielder, who knew exactly what it meant. ''At least this time I knew they
weren't serious.''
As opposed, of course, to the years when it was deadly serious. They
weren't booing Knoblauch because he was playing for the Royals, or because
he used to play for the Minnesota Twins. They were booing him because he
spent the four years in between those gigs playing for, you know,
Them.
There is no rivalry like it in American sport, and that's a fact.
That's because in terms of championships, it's no rivalry at all, the
score being 26-0 since the Red Sox won their last championship in 1918.
Would that I could take credit for the line offered by the local pundit
(just can't recall which sage it was) who first said, ''Rivalry? What
rivalry? Is the hammer and the nail a rivalry?''
But championships aside - pause here for Yankee fans to snicker - a
fierce rivalry has been raging for decades. The severity does vary
according to the circumstances of the times. If one team is way up, and
the other is way down, the passions aren't inflamed. But when there is
even a remote perception of parity, the rivalry is as good as baseball can
provide.
''Once you get into it,'' says Mike Stanley, who has experienced both
sides of the equation, ''you feel the atmosphere and you feel the tension.
You can sense the animosity and the feeling that both sides have for each
other.''
By ''both sides'' he means the fans, because that is the characteristic
that separates this rivalry from all others in contemporary American
sport. The longer it goes, the less this rivalry has to do with the
players and the more it has to do with the cultures of New York and
Boston. The fans hate each other. The players do not.
The players would really like to treat this like Just Another Series,
but they cannot. We won't let them.
''The fans and the media both make this rivalry with their intensity
and enthusiasm,'' maintains Knoblauch.
You think the players know from Harry Frazee? You think the players
know what happened during the final weekend of 1949? You think the players
know how the Red Sox swept the Yankees with 30 runs, 44 hits, and 16 home
runs during a Fenway June weekend in 1977, and that the Yankees swept them
the following weekend in New York to send the Sox off on a nine-game
losing streak? You think the players really know the full context (14-game
lead, Labor Day weekend massacre, etc.) of the Bucky Dent home run?
''I cried,'' says Luis Tiant. ''I really cried. Yaz, he no feel too
good, either.''
The players on both sides operate under the weight of a history they
neither understand nor fully appreciate. There isn't one player in a
thousand who cares about anything that happened before the day he signed,
perhaps even anything that happened before the day he first pulled on a
big league uniform.
New players don't know exactly what they're in for, but it doesn't take
them long to figure it out. If you're a Red Sox player, for example, you
discover that merely arriving at Yankee Stadium is an experience unlike
any other. When the bus unloads, the fans are ready.
''They spend the offseason thinking of new things to say, other than
`1918,' and `Red Sox [You-Know-What],''' says Stanley.
Any player who is even remotely competitive gets swept up in the
majesty of the rivalry. ''It is very hard for me to control my emotions
when I get to Yankee Stadium,'' Rick Burleson once said. ''I get so jacked
up I wind up hitting stupid fly balls to Death Valley.''
Left-center field in Yankee Stadium (a.k.a. Death Valley) was well over
400 feet in the Rooster's day. It is 399 now, still a formidable distance,
and still a trap-in-waiting for any similarly revved-up Red Sox player.
Fenway offers the converse, a tantalizing left-field wall with a seemingly
manageable power alley that invites overswinging on behalf of righthanded
hitters who would like to provide an answer for a Fenway patron who may
have cast some aspersion on his manhood while he was taking his turn in
the on-deck circle.
The Yankees are in town for four. Some people may think these are
merely baseball games, but we know better.
By Bob Ryan
This story ran on page E1 of the Boston Globe on
4/12/2002
Copyright
2002 Globe Newspaper Company.