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BOSTON — Look, on a certain level, it wouldn’t matter where in the standings the Yankees and the Red Sox happened to reside on any given day they collide. You throw that uniform on one collection of players, and that uniform on another collection of players, fun (and fireworks) will likely ensue.
Heck, just put “Boston” on the T-shirt of one chess player in Washington Square Park, and scrawl “New York” on the porkpie hat of another, and you’ll draw a crowd. And someone will invariably start the melodious chant of “BOSTON BLEEPS! BOSTON BLEEPS!” before long.
So, yes, there will be passion and energy present and accounted for across the next three days at Fenway Park. The Sox and Yankees enter the series tied atop the AL East, and you have to go clear down to the Rangers, eight games south, to find another team within spitting distance of either one of them.
VIDEO: BATTLE FOR FIRST AT FENWAY PARK
The baseball summer has become a laughable split between three uber-teams — Yankees, Red Sox, Phillies — and a gaggle of others who, while assessing their chances, invariably use the catch-all phrase: “Well, in a short series . . .”
Parity has perished for now. There are three varsity clubs, and two of them will squint at each other from across ancient battlements this weekend.
It’ll be good.
But it won’t be great.
And this is a time when we should be aspiring for great, and it’s possible that if baseball’s decision makers are paying attention, this will be the final shove needed to add the final ingredient to what would be a perfect postseason plan. Add a wild card, force teams to care about first place for the first time since grunge was in vogue, and we’ll really have something.
The Red Sox and the Yankees will intrigue each other this weekend, and will do so again at the end of the months for three games, and at the end of September for three more. But they are so far clear of the field — the second-place team in the wild-card “hunt,” Anaheim, trailed the Yankees by nine games in the loss column as morning broke yesterday — that even that intrigue won’t be so . . . well, intriguing.
Do the Yankees want to prove to themselves that they can beat the Red Sox? Sure, that would be nice. But do you really think if they don’t over these nine games that they’d be terrified enough to concede the ALCS if it shakes out as Yanks/Sox IV? Please. And these Sox win at almost exactly the same pace on the road as they do in Fenway; surely they won’t quake at the prospect of playing a seventh game in The Bronx.
That’s the only surcharge for finishing second now.
But if you add the extra wild-card, everything changes. It becomes a blood war between Gotham and the Hub to finish first and avoid what likely would be a one-game play-in with the other wild-card qualifier. How would you like the Yankees — even if they survive the extra game — to start the five-game ALDS with anyone other than CC Sabathia pitching Game 1? How about if you’re the Sox and you have to throw either Erik Bedard or Tim Wakefield in what could be a
Game 3 elimination test?
OK. Now we’ll hear from the precincts who’ll scream at the unfair requirement that the Yankees or the Sox endure a do-or-die play-in against a team that, by season’s end, they may outpace by 12 or 14 games. And, yes, that’s a hard break. But not as bad as the one that sent the ’93 Giants and the ’80 Orioles and the ’54 Yankees and the ’42 Dodgers home with 100-plus wins and zero playoff innings. Look at it that way and what you see is bright side and upside.
What we have now?
It’s first place as a by-the-way, a title viewed as a trifle. Yankees fans and Red Sox fans should be nervous wrecks this morning pondering the import of the weekend to come. Not happening. It’s Boston and New York, so these games will mean something.
It’s just that they should mean everything.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com