When I was growing up I think I first
learned about the rivalry between the Yankees and the Red Sox in 1995 when I
read a book on the subject. My guess is Ed Linn wrote it, but I can't look it
up as Casey would say.
To be clear I read the lore of both
franchises, the sagas between them, the legends associated with both teams. And
I think it's now safe to say that calling the Red Sox and the Yankees in the 20th
century a rivalry is really being generous. To be fair by the 2000s even the
most devoted Red Sox fans acknowledge it never really was one in same way that
the Celtics and the Lakers once were or the Dodgers and Giants basically always
were starting back when both teams were in New York and essentially continued when
the moved to California.
Because for a rivalry to be a thing one
of the teams has to win occasionally. And as has now become entrenched
in lore starting after Babe Ruth was sold to the Yankees that never happened
for the rest of the 20th century.
The total after 1918 to 2000 was Yankees 26, Red Sox zero. There've been
football games between the Giants and the Patriots that have been closer – and
honestly the Patriots had a better track record during the second half of the
20th century then the Red Sox ever did.
I get the reason for Boston wanted the
rivalry to exist. It's not like they weren't dominant in basically every other
sport over the 20th century. The Celtics are very much the
definition of a dynasty during the 1950s and '60s and they've always been
formidable ever since. The Patriots, well, everyone in New York hates them with
a passion and we really loved it when the Giants broke the undefeated season in
2007. Bruins, formidable hockey team, definitely have a better track record
then the Rangers or the Islanders during that period.
(Full disclosure: Yes, I live in New
York but I only sporadically root for the Yankees. I'll get to why in the next
article.)
But during the 20th century
baseball was the National Pastime and it must have galled Boston not
just that the Yankees won but that they did so with the Babe. Though it wasn't
only the Babe.
Henry Frazee was selling Red Sox to
the Yankees years before he started on the Babe. He sold them half of the 1918
pitching staff, including Ernie Shore, Dutch Leonard and famously Carl Mays
halfway through the 1919 season. And after the Babe, he kept right on doing it
to the point that the 1923 Yankees had eleven former Red Sox on the
team. The Red Sox went from winning four world series in the 1910s to last
place practically overnight and it kept happening right up until the end of the
decade when they sold Red Ruffing to the Yankees.
Ruth was bad enough, but Frazee
essentially sold three future Hall of Famers and over 900 wins to the Yankees
just on the pitching staff alone. The Yankees dynasty of the 1920s was built on
the backs of former Red Sox. But by the 1930s they had grown their own farm
system and were standing on their own two feet. That didn't change when Tom
Yawkey bought the Red Sox.
Bostonians don't hate me for this, but
Tom Yawkey has no business being in Cooperstown. For one thing during his forty
years as an owner the Red Sox won just three American League Pennants and no
World Championships. For another he famously chose to install cronies who gave
him bad advice and caused him to trade away capable players in his farm system such as Pee Wee Reese. And
worst of all, because of his bigotry the Red Sox were the last team in major
league baseball to integrate. The Yankees and Red Sox were rivals during the
1950s but not in a good way as they seemed to be openly dawdling to integrate
their teams while the National League raced ahead of them.
Both the Yankees and the Red Sox
passed on the chance to sign Willie Mays and the Red Sox actually had a chance
to sign Ernie Banks but they passed on that too. The Yankees were able to
dominate the 1950s because they had a good farm system but the Red Sox never
did.
There's also the fact that because the
Red Sox were a terrible team that they constantly were at the bottom of
attendance. In fact they were drawing so badly in the 1960s that many thought
the Red Sox might have to leave Boston much like the Braves had relocated to Milwaukee
in 1952. At the time the Red Sox were a contending team led by Ted Williams and
had won the AL Pennant in 1946 and come within one game of doing so in 1948 and
1949.
Boston fans must have been cursing
into their clam chowder for the next decade as the Braves became one of the
biggest draws in baseball as well as a perennial contender, winning the World
Series in 1957, the pennant in 1958 and finishing in a tie for it 1959. During the 1950s the only
draw the Red Sox was Ted Williams while the Braves had Eddie Matthews, Warren
Spahn and Hank Aaron. During that era Boston baseball fans must have felt
cursed from both sides.
When the Yankees dynasty came to a
catastrophic end in 1965 the Red Sox's miracle 1967 AL Pennant revitalized the
team in Boston. But the Yankees collapse didn't lead to Red Sox triumphs.
Indeed while the rivalry between Boston and the Yankees may have been at its
strongest during the 1970s, the franchise that owned the American League was
Earl Weaver's Orioles which had the best win-loss record of the entire decade,
won five AL East titles, three American Leagues and the World Series in 1970. Indeed
it was Baltimore who became the dominant force in the American League east and
the Yankees and Red Sox basically were fighting to beat them every year.
To be sure the stigma of bad luck
became prominent for the Red Sox during the 1970s – losing the AL East by half
a game to Detroit in 1972 because the first MLB strike wiped out six games for
the Tigers and seven for the Yankees; the Red Sox shooting out to an
eight and a half game lead over the AL East in August and losing 30 of their
last 40 games in 1974, just missing out on the AL East in 1977 and of course
Bucky F---ing Dent. But the Orioles were always more of a problem. Their
collapse in hitting in 1972 gave the Red Sox and Yankees an opening that
neither could get through and in 1974 they put on a 28-6 drive at the end of
the season to defeat the Yankees by a game and a half at the end of the season.
In 1975 the Red Sox ended up having to fight off Baltimore to win the AL
Pennant. In 1977 the Orioles were tied with the Red Sox for second place, two
and a half games out behind the Yankees. And even though the Orioles finished
in fourth in 1978 they did go 90-71 which is not exactly small potatoes.
The Orioles were the real winners of
that decade but because of the true brutality of the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry,
led by Billy Martin as manager of The Bronx Zoo, it got all the publicity. And
by the time the Yankees collapsed during the 1980s under Steinbrenner's
horrible ownership style during that decade there were no real dynasties to
speak of anymore in either league. The Red Sox actually did much better in that
period before the Wild Card: they won the American League Pennant in 1986 and
the AL East in 1988 and 1990 (they lost both times to the Oakland A's) but
somehow being able to beat a team that had Stump Merrill as the manager didn't
have the punch it once did.
During the 1980s the Red Sox
definitely had better players – Jim Rice was on the team, Wade Boggs was the
best hitter in baseball and Roger Clemens had the best fastball in the majors. But
during the late 1980s and early 1990s the best team in all of baseball was the
Blue Jays. After winning their first AL East title in 1985 they ended up
winning four AL East titles between 1989 and 1993 and of course back to back
World Series in 1992 and 1993. Which is
around the time I started to seriously love the sports.
So if you had told me the Yankees and
Red Sox were the greatest rivalry in sports I'd have said, well they both suck
now. And that would have been a perfectly rational response for a fifteen year
old boy to have.
To be clear I would have had a far
deeper and richer understanding of the game that the average teenager: I would
have known all of the names In Yankee lore and the names in Red Sox lore. I
would have known of all the plaques the Yankees had on their wall and their
retired numbers. And I could have made
convincing arguments, even then, for many members of both teams during the
1970s to be in the Hall of Fame. And
just to be clear I'm still annoyed that two of the greatest players of that
era: Luis Tiant and Graig Nettles still aren't in Cooperstown because they
should have been in decades ago.
But that didn't change the simple fact
that even in 1995: the ledger was clear. Since 1918 the Yankees had won 22
championships and the Red Sox: zero. I thought that the more accurate
description was that the Red Sox were the Yankees punching bag and the
'rivalry' had been coined in during the DiMaggio-Williams era and no one had
bothered to fact check since. (That would have actually been forgivable up
until 1995 because the internet really didn't exist back then.)
And as I was about to start watching
baseball more seriously I was about to see that, for the Red Sox, it was going
to get so much worse.
To Be Continued…
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