There is a school of thought when it comes to the Red Sox and the Yankees that all but forbids anyone from being able to fully enjoy what the two teams accomplished in 2013. These are baseball’s heaviest heavyweights, the sport’s heaviest of heavy hitters. They don’t do feel-good and scrappy. They don’t do overachieving.
Which, of course, is precisely what both teams did in 2013.
The Red Sox? Go ahead and look at the predictors and the prognosticators from a year ago. Many thought 2012 was a preview into a lengthy abyss awaiting the Olde Towne Team, that a lot of bills were going to come due for their profligate ways. The hot start? Surely that was a mirage. Surely they would fall back to earth.
Instead, they produced one of the most unexpected championships in recent memory, a feel-good salve for the mental, physical and emotional wounds of the Patriot Day bombing, a group of guys who shouldn’t have fit together at all yet provided a reminder that chemistry in sports is real, tangible, and amazing to see.
The Yankees? Nobody ever feels badly for the Yankees. Nobody ever feels sorry for the Yankees. And yet day in and day out, the Yankees were putting lineups together that barely looked competitive, let alone championship worthy.
Injuries ransacked them. Age sabotaged them. It could have been a calamitous year.
And yet manager Joe Girardi did a magnificent job keeping the team in the race for 5½ months, mixing and matching, squeezing everything out of the team that it could yield. Playing backups and then backups’ backups, and even if it wasn’t near enough to yield the kind of fairy-tale ending, it was still a feel-good story almost every day, something to hang an interlocking-NY hat on beyond Mariano Rivera’s farewell tour.
It was enjoyable while it lasted.
Because we are back to more of the same, more of how we’ve seen the Yankees and the Red Sox from 1999 until 2011, the arms race of talent and money and can-you-top-this and I’ll-see-you-and-raise-you-and-reraise-you-and-now-I’ll-go-all-in.
You want fuzzy, feel-good stories? Go watch the Royals or the Pirates. You want to study how smart organizations go about the business of winning baseball games when they don’t have the kind of cash to throw at problems like the Sox and Yanks always have? Go study the A’s or the Rays. Want to see how small-market teams operate?
Turn on SNY, click on the Mets.
(Oh, come on. You saw that coming …)
The Sox? The Yankees? They spend, and they spend unabashedly, and they have mostly enjoyed their places high atop the MLB food chain, a perch that is only due in part to their financial muscle and is more a product of an unquenchable thirst for winning, for championships, for feeding the insatiable baseball beasts that rule both cities.
And so the Yankees spent half a billion dollars to update and upgrade their team, bringing in Carlos Beltran and Brian McCann and Carlos Beltran and Masahiro Tanaka, luring Jacoby Ellsbury to the other side of the rivalry. And so the Red Sox fought to bring as many pieces back as possible, save for Ellsbury and Stephen Drew, learning for the third time that winning the title is far easier than defending it, especially when it was won in an expectation-free zone and when it will be defended back in the forum of free enterprise.
It was Joe Torre in 2003 who said, “Nobody ever weeps for David over Goliath,” and it was Terry Francona in 2005 who said, “Fans aren’t spoiled, they just want their teams to win as much as possible and sometimes that can seem demanding,” and it was Girardi in 2010 who said, “You just have to go out and play and hope that that’s enough, and that you win enough so it has to be.”
Yes, the Sox and the Yanks had an interesting run in ’13, two teams used to soaring above the ionosphere allowed to spend a portion of the year cruising beneath the radar. Hope they both enjoyed the respite. They aren’t likely to see another soon.