BOSTON – There have been times the past few years when you could hear the palpable dread as these games approached, Red Sox versus Yankees, so many exhausted cries of been-there, done-that.
These teams had given us four-color trips through baseball heaven and baseball hell, simultaneously, in 2003 and 2004. Nothing could hope to surpass that two-year stretch, and it would take something awfully special to approach it. Nothing did. Nothing has. Not really. Not once you shake away the muscle memory of New York-New England mutual angst.
“These games always mean the most when the baseball is more meaningful than the drama,” said Johnny Damon, who has seen the rivalry from both sides of the abyss, who was once the most loathsome of Red Sox as a hirsute pest, who is now hated enough in Boston to give both Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez a run for their championship belts. “The manufactured stuff isn’t nearly as interesting.”
The baseball is plenty damn meaningful now, you’d better believe that. The Sox come home after righting themselves in Seattle. The Yankees arrive after dismissing the Athletics and the Twins as the wild-card wannabes they are. We get some varsity ball this weekend. We get Yankees-Red Sox, with the baseball more meaningful than the drama, even though there has been plenty of drama already.
“It ought to be an interesting test,” Sox manager Terry Francona said in Seattle the other day, “to see where both of us are.”
This is a perfect time for this rivalry to be renewed, for these baseball teams to come together, for the summer to heat up on this ancient playground known as Fenway Park. The Yankees and the Red Sox have always done their best dancing in September and October, of course. But July usually isn’t so terrible, either.
In some ways, it’s a shame they couldn’t have started this series during yesterday’s mutual off day, because July 24 has been a seminal date in the rivalry’s history. Thirty years ago, it was the day Billy Martin, wearing dark sunglasses and a pallid expression, resigned from the only job he ever wanted, fresh off his “one’s a born liar, the other’s convicted” observation.
That night, the Yankees lost to the Royals in Kansas City under interim manager Dick Howser, fell 10 games in back of the Red Sox with 67 games to play (and no wild-card safety net to protect them), and it sure seemed like Bob Lemon would be managing out the string when he arrived. History tells us a little different story.
It was four years ago, though, on the very same date – July 24, 2004 – when the very fabric of this rivalry may have changed for good, or at least for the time being. The night before, the Yankees had rallied from four runs down to top the Sox, 8-7, shoving themselves nine games in front in the AL East, threatening to run away and hide and reduce the Sox to so much gum in their spikes.
Then rain threatened to wash all of New England away. Red Sox officials, in fact, already had agreed to postpone the game before a crush of Sox players, led by Kevin Millar, argued to wait out the rain, which they did. What followed was one of the fullest, busiest, most improbable days in the rivalry’s history.
Before the game, the Boston punk band Dropkick Murphys introduced their version of “Tessie,” which would become the Sox’s rallying cry in September and October. Then Bronson Arroyo plunked Rodriguez with a pitch, and A-Rod took exception to it, and Jason Varitek famously sneered at A-Rod, “We don’t throw at .260 hitters,” before the two men famously went after each other’s throats. And then, most remarkable of all, the Red Sox erased a 10-8 ninth-inning deficit by scoring three runs off Mariano Rivera, capped by Bill Mueller’s walk-off, two-run homer.
The Red Sox were close to being dead and buried that day. History tells us a little different story.
The Yankees have waited for an opportunity to reassert themselves as the alpha dog in this rivalry ever since. No better time than the present.