There famously came a time during the 1987 NFL players’ strike when the alarm clock clattered in the predawn hours and Bill Parcells discovered something positively terrifying to him: He was still in bed, still under the covers.
And pondering hitting the snooze button.
“I’m a guy who was getting coffee by the time my alarm clock was going off, because I want to run to my job, I love that job so much,” he would say years later. “But ‘coaching’ that bunch — whatever you want to call it — I realized that it was different than the job I thought I had.”
He laughed.
“It got better later on,” he said. “But that morning I didn’t think a construction crew could’ve gotten me out of bed.”
The Yankees-Red Sox rivalry will get better. It always does. There have been plenty of lulls across the decades, plenty of years — decades, even — when they went their separate ways, retreated to their respective corners, and regrouped to fight — sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally — another day.
Still, it was hard to shake a similar melancholy malaise Friday night the moment A.J. Pierzynski grounded meekly to second base, Brian Roberts flipping over to Mark Teixeira, the Yankees putting the finishing touches on a thorough 6-0 thrashing of the Red Sox. Because a second after that happened and a second before Sinatra started spreadin’ the news, there came this announcement in the press box:
“TIME OF GAME: TWO HOURS AND FORTY-TWO MINUTES.”
Two hours and forty-two minutes? Goodness, when both teams are at the peak of their powers, the Yankees and the Red Sox are lucky to hit the 2:42 mark in the sixth inning. There are some at-bats that seem to last two hours and 42 minutes. Country Joe West probably will call the local newspaper office and point out the obvious typo at the bottom of the boxscore Saturday morning.
We have been detailing the signs of stagnation in this rivalry pretty regularly and, to be fair, it has been sagging on both sides of the great abyss. After all, it was only a year ago when the Red Sox won the World Series, and the Yankees failed to qualify for the playoffs for only the second time since 1995.
And the year before that, it seemed like the Red Sox had actually touched bottom during the 69-win Bobby Valentine fiasco, this coming on the heels of the September collapse that got Terry Francona exiled to Cleveland. So this had been losing steam for a couple of years.
But this feels a little … well, extreme.
There was no gloating, for one thing. Oh, the Stadium was packed with happy Yankees fans, 48,522 of them, and they were treated to home runs from Kelly Johnson, Brett Gardner and Brian McCann, and they saw Vidal Nuno make like Ron Guidry for 5²/₃ innings.
But it looked, sounded and felt like this could have been any summertime game against any old team. If there were the old-stand-by “BOSTON [STINKS!] chants anywhere, they were brief and they were quiet. Even David Ortiz only earned the bare minimum of scorn, and that’s hard to believe.
But, then, how do you hate on the hideous?
And right now, there’s no other way to describe the Red Sox, who don’t work counts, who don’t hit the ball hard, who don’t score against anyone. All due respect to Nuno, who was terrific, but his most recent starts more resembled a batting-practice pitcher than someone who actually belonged in a major-league rotation.
It all just looks so … so very strange. The Yankees used to stare at the Red Sox and see co-conspirators in an epic baseball arms race, macho-and-macho, mano-a-mano, dollar-for-dollar, the two of them pushing each other higher, higher, higher.
Now the Yankees look at the Red Sox and think: Maybe we don’t have it so bad after all.
This isn’t forever. It never is. The Red Sox and the Yankees always circle back to each other eventually, always invade each other’s space. Just not now, just not this year. The Yankees have their own problems, and we’ll go back to obsessing over those soon enough. But the Red Sox are in town, and for now it’s the Red Sox who must be having a hell of a time answering the alarm every morning.