This was the final Sunday of the 2005 baseball season, inside the broom closet that doubles as the visiting locker room at Fenway Park. The Red Sox had pounded the Yankees, 10-1, meaning the teams had ended their seasons with identical 95-67 records.
In essence, this meant little: The Yankees had wrapped up the division the day before because they owned the tiebreaker; this was little more than a glorified exhibition determining who would play whom where and … well, even that didn’t seem to make a difference.
Because everyone knew what was coming.
“I think it’s inevitable,” Alex Rodriguez said, dressed to the nines as the Yankees readied for the long trip to Anaheim. “We know that to get where we want to go, we need to go through the Red Sox. And I think the Red Sox know that for them to get where they want to go, they need to go through us.”
Honestly, Rodriguez wasn’t breaking any kind of code of omerta, looking forward to one series before finishing — or even starting — the first. Everyone believed that — both locker rooms, both cities. Maybe A-Rod — finishing his first MVP season as a Yankee — was the only one with the gumption to utter the words, but his was hardly a lone opinion.
Surely the Yankees would do what they needed to do to whisk the Angels out of the playoffs (even if Anaheim had home-field). Surely the Red Sox would do what they needed to do to escort the White Sox (and the 87-year championship drought they carried, topping the 86-year dry spell the Red Sox had ended the year before) away from the postseason (even if Chicago had home-field).
That is how spoiled we had gotten.
What we found addictive the flyover states found abhorrent, Northeastern preening taken to repugnant levels. Maybe they were right, maybe they were wrong.
That was the standard we all had come to believe was not only achievable, but inevitable, Constitutionally protected. Twice the previous two years, the ancient rivals had collided in October and the result had been beyond epic, beyond dramatic, beyond belief.
In 2003 the Yankees rallied from three runs down in the eighth inning of Game 7 before handing the pixie dust to Aaron Bleeping Boone. In ’04, the Sox had come back from a three-games-to-nothing rabbit hole. And they had spent 2005 chasing each other like Ali and Frazier, shadowing each other, eyeing each other, spying each other, haunting each other, taunting each other.
Of course there had to be a Round 3. Of course there had to be a rubber match. Except a funny thing happened: The White Sox swept the Red Sox. The Angels beat the Yankees in a do-or-die Game 5 when Mike Mussina couldn’t make it out of the third inning. The ChiSox would beat the Halos, end their jinx, and, truth be told, much of America was delighted to be rid of Boston and New York.
What we found addictive the flyover states found abhorrent, Northeastern preening taken to repugnant levels. Maybe they were right, maybe they were wrong.
But this much is certain: This rivalry hasn’t been the same since. Yes, the Yankees winning the ’09 title stung a bit in New England. And there were some Yankees fans who really went off the rails last year when the Red Sox won for the third time in 10 years. The feelings between the fans remain raw and relevant.
But the teams?
“Well, we’re two teams that are expected to win every year,” Joe Girardi said Wednesday. Girardi has managed against the Sox for six years, and played in the middle of the Yanks-Sox feud for four — including 1999, the first time the teams ever met in the playoffs, the Yankees easing to a five-game ALCS win.
“Has it changed at all?” he asked. “Probably not a whole lot. There’s always an intensity in these meetings. They met in the playoffs [in 2003-04] that increased it a lot, obviously, and there are still guys who’ve gone through a lot of that on both teams. There’s a lot of history. I think it’s pretty good.”
It is pretty good. But also different. Every inning from 2003 through 2005 felt like it was played in a tinderbox. At any second, you thought — you believed — someone could light a match. And usually did. It was easy to believe that could last forever. It’s just that a funny thing happened on the way to forever.