The Rivals: The New York Yankees vs. the Boston Red Sox---An Inside History

Introduction

Dan Shaughnessy of The Boston Globe

Rivalry. It’s an interesting word. Here in Boston, the Hub of the Hardball Universe, we think that the rivalry between the Red Sox and Yankees is the greatest rivalry in all of sports—better than Dodgers-Giants, Cardinals-Cubs, Celtics-Lakers, Cowboys-Redskins, Ali-Frazier, Texas-Oklahoma, Russell-Chamberlain, Michigan-Ohio State, Seabiscuit-War Admiral, and even Harvard-Yale.

But it’s a little provincial of us to think this way. I’m not sure who first said it, but the rivalry between the Yankees and the Red Sox could best be likened to the eternal contest between the hammer and the nail. Since 1918, when the Red Sox won their fifth and thus far final World Series, the Yankees have won 26 baseball championships to Boston’s none. That’s 26-0.

The rivalry, therefore, is more about tradition than competition. It’s not so much a match of equals as it is Boston’s obsession with all things New York. New Englanders grow up trained to hate pinstripes. The Yankees are bullies, buying championships and steamrolling everything in their way. They don’t play fair, they always win, and we spend our lives thinking about how to conquer this team that stole Babe Ruth from under our noses.

Like many regions of America, my hometown has a self-contained Little League with teams of 11- and 12-year-old boys playing for teams named after big-league ballclubs. The Newton North Little League plays its games at Murphy Field and annually features the Orioles, Cardinals, Indians and Yankees. The kids wear replica uniforms. One of my neighbors has a son who played for the Yankees and she admitted, I just have a hard time looking at him sitting there in the kitchen before games, eating his cereal, wearing that uniform with the pinstripes.

In New England, we are obsessed with the Yanks. We like to think that the feeling is mutual, and that the Yankees live in fear of their rivals from Boston, but truthfully, that hasn’t been the case most of the time. There’s an arrogance to the Yankees, a smug contentment owed to decades of dominance. The Yankees in most years have merely thought of the Red Sox as another team they’d beat en route to the World Series. It’s maddening for us. New Englanders carry all the frustrations and near-misses, blaming the hated Yankees for every slight while the Yankee fans sit back and dismiss the Bostonians, secure in the knowledge that the Sox will fold in the fall and the Yankees will win another baseball championship. It is the natural world (Series) order.

When I think of the emotional disparity of this regional baseball rivalry, I am always reminded of a favorite scene from Casablanca, a famous flick which has taken on new meaning in Red Sox Nation. The movie was written by the Epstein twins, Philip and Julius, and one of their better lines comes when a nervous Peter Lorre sits across a table from Humphrey Bogart and says, You despise me, don’t you? Bogey’s response, If I gave you any thought, I probably would.

In many ways, this exchange demonstrates more than eight decades of the alleged Red Sox-Yankee rivalry. And who could have known that in 2002, Philip Epstein’s grandson, 28-year-old Theo, would take over the Red Sox as the youngest general manager in baseball?

Young Theo was at the controls in 2003 when this century-old rivalry reached new levels of intensity. On and off the field, the Sox and Yankees battled as never before and going into 2004 the Red Sox think they’re finally ready to overtake the Yankees and win their first World Series since 1918.

Nineteen eighteen. It is the Yankee answer to any taunt a Sox fan can muster. The Red Sox can sweep the Yankees in a five-game series, winning every game by ten or more runs and the Yankee fan can diffuse all the Boston bravado by whispering, 1918. Just as Bogey and Bergman will always have Paris (there go those Epstein twins again) the Yankee fans feel they’ll always have 1918.

George Herman Ruth was the Red Sox ace left-handed pitcher in 1918, and he was a pretty fair hitter as well. He set a record, pitching 29.2 consecutive scoreless innings, and was on three of Boston’s World Series championship teams. A charter franchise of the upstart American League in 1901, the Red Sox won the first World Series and five of the first 15 that were played. The Yankees, who came to New York from Baltimore and were originally known as the Highlanders, were regularly buffeted by the Bostons in those first two decades of the American League. For Boston, all the trouble started when the Sox were owned by a Broadway producer and theatre owner named Harry H. Frazee. It was Frazee who colluded with fellow New Yorker Jacob Ruppert in the transaction that changed the course of baseball history and permanently altered the fortunes of both the Red Sox and the Yankees.

The transfer of Ruth was only the beginning. Ruppert hired Edward Barrow, who was the field manager of the 1918 Red Sox, and made him general manager of the Yankees. Barrow proceeded to strip the Boston franchise of all of its talent and Frazee was only too happy to stock the Yankees with players in exchange for more cash. Frazee, remember, was the carpetbagger who bragged that the best thing about Boston was the train to New York. After Ruth, the Sox sent Waite Hoyt, Harry Harper, Wally Schang and Mike McNally to New York. Everett Scott, Sam Jones and Joe Bush were next. When the Yankees won their first World Series, in 1923, in the shiny new House That Ruth Built, 11 of the 24 New York players were former Red Sox.

There was another aspect to the Ruth deal which played to the deep-seated fears of all Yankee-hating New Englanders. When Frazee collected his cash for the Babe, he borrowed another $300,000 from the Yankees in the form of a mortgage on Fenway Park. For the ensuing 15 seasons, as the Yankee dynasty took over the American League, the Yankees actually owned Fenway Park. It wasn’t until millionaire Thomas Yawkey bought the Sox in 1933 that the note was finally paid. And Yawkey didn’t fork over the entire sum until Jake Ruppert demanded to be paid after his Yankees were uncharacteristically swept by the Red Sox.

While the Yankees went about winning championships, the Red Sox bottomed out in the 1920s and ‘30s and didn’t start to challenge New York again until a young man named Ted Williams came along in 1939. Striving to be the greatest hitter who ever lived, a goal he may have realized, young Ted went about his work, winning batting titles and triple crowns. By the time Ted arrived in Boston, the Yankees already had his counterpart—a graceful outfielder who could do it all. Patrolling center field in Yankee Stadium was Joltin’ Joe, a man known to Ernest Hemingway’s Santiago as The Great DiMaggio.

Ted and Joe. They were the centerpiece players in the Boston-New York rivalry from 1939 until 1951. They inspired debate at both ends of the Boston-New York corridor: Which one is better? Who would you take first if you were starting a team? What would have happened if Ted had played in New York and Joe in Boston? The individual rivalry was hottest in the summer of 1941 when DiMaggio captured the nation with his 56-game hitting streak. Ted’s answer was to hit .406. Williams would be the last man ever to crack the .400 barrier, but in that magical summer it would be DiMaggio who’d walk away with the MVP award.

In 1999, when I called Ted Williams to ask him about Pedro Martinez getting robbed in the MVP election (a New York Post scribe was one of only two writers who failed to place Pedro anywhere in the top ten), Ted said, Hell, I hit .400 one year. I thought that was pretty good, but I didn’t win it.

Joe and Ted. In April of 1947 Yawkey and Yankee owner Dan Topping toasted one another long into the night and agreed to swap superstars. In the light of the morning, Yawkey realized this was a bad deal (Williams was in his prime while DiMaggio was breaking down) and the deal was off. Scotched might be a better word.

The personal rivalry between the two never waned. In old age, Williams—who had battled with the media throughout his career—became the outgoing, generous ambassador for the game. Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post called Ted the Father Christmas of baseball. DiMaggio, who had been cool but cooperative with the press during his playing days, became a virtual recluse. But the fierce pride remained. Joltin’ Joe insisted on being announced as baseball’s greatest living ballplayer any time he made an appearance. This no doubt annoyed Ted Williams and Willie Mays (to name a couple of contenders), but DiMaggio would have it no other way. The Ted-Joe controversy and competition carried over after their deaths. Both were estranged from specified family members and postmortems stripped much of their dignity, particularly in the case of Williams, whose remains were frozen in a lab in Arizona.

Dominic DiMaggio perhaps had the best look at the Yankee-Red Sox dynamic during the golden years of Ted and Joe. Young Dom, dubbed The Little Professor because of his glasses and scholarly demeanor, was in a unique position. He got to be Ted’s outfield partner for 11 years and Joe’s brother for life. It must have made for interesting Christmas conversations at the DiMaggio family home in the North Beach section of San Francisco. Ever-dignified, Dom played second banana to Ted in the Boston lineup and went though a lifetime of being Joe’s little brother. To this day, he has tremendous regard for both.

Catcher Thurman Munson of the Yankees slides safely home past Boston Red Sox catcher Carlton Fisk in the sixth inning at Yankee Stadium in August 1978, reminiscent of their collision at home plate on a failed Yankee squeeze back in 1973. (Associated Press)

Playing in the shadow of Joe was tough enough, but playing for the Red Sox in the long shadow of the Yankees broke the spirit of many a ballplayer. Dominic played in only one World Series. He played on teams that rarely finished ahead of his brother’s Yankees. He was, alas, a Red Sox.I feel quite privileged, Dominic said in December of 2003. My brother was, in my opinion, the greatest all-around player I’ve ever seen and my friend, Teddy Williams, was the greatest hitter. Even Joe knew that. They usually finished ahead of us, but he didn’t rub it in. But in 1948 we knocked them out of the race and still had to win the last day to make the playoff. I was getting married then and the whole family was there. We got in the car after we beat the Yankees and there was silence for two-thirds of the drive to Wellesley Hills. Then Joe said, You guys beat us today, but I will personally take care of you tomorrow.’

Joe DiMaggio cracked four hits the next day at Fenway and even his mom wondered, ‘Why is Joe doing this to Dominic?" Dom hit a homer and the Sox won, but Boston lost the next day’s playoff against Cleveland. Some blamed Joe DiMaggio. The Yankee Clipper’s tour de force had forced Boston manager Joe McCarthy to wear out his pitching staff with pitchers warming up in the bullpen.

Dom DiMaggio and the Sox trailed the Yankees for most of the summer of ‘49, then got hot after the All-Star break and went to New York for the final two games of the season needing only one victory to advance to the World Series. Alas, the hated Yankees won both games, denying Sox fans and setting the stage for near-misses which would torture New England minds for more than a half-century. Crushed by the double-dip at the end of ‘49, Tom Yawkey would not return to Yankee Stadium for 19 years.

There wasn’t much of a rivalry in the two decades after the 1949 pennant race. The Yankees kept winning pennants and World Series and the Red Sox annually finished near the bottom of the American League. I was born in 1953 and grew up watching the Yankees beat our brains out every summer. The Yankees of the early 1960s had Mantle, Maris, Berra and Whitey Ford. Maris’s record-breaking 61st home run came against (naturally) the Red Sox. Those Sox had clown princes like Gene Conley, a right-handed pitcher who got drunk after losing a game at Yankee Stadium and went on a two-day bender in New York City. The Crown(Royal)ing moment came when Conley went to Idlewild Airport and bought a plane ticket to Jerusalem. He was denied boarding because he didn’t have his passport. When he finally returned to Fenway, he had to go see owner Tom Yawkey to accept his punishment. Seeing the contrite Conley in his office, the Sox owner offered his pitcher a cocktail. No, sir, I don’t drink. said Conley.

Those were the Red Sox of my youth and that was the extent of our rivalry with the Yankees.

When the Red Sox returned to respectability in the late 1960s, the Yankees were free-falling and it wasn’t until the 1970s that both teams were good at the same time. We saw a surge in fighting on the field, much of it involving catchers Carlton Fisk and Thurman Munson, who emerged as the de facto captains of the respective rivals. A generation after Ted and Joe embodied the rivalry, the young catchers picked up the torches and ran headfirst into one another. Early on, Munson was probably the better all-around player, but it was a close call and the grubby Yankee backstop was wildly jealous of his Boston counterpart. Fisk was tall, handsome, graceful and powerful—all things Munson was not. It had a Jack Kennedy-Richard Nixon feel to it. In 1973, the two collided at home plate, sparking a memorable brawl.

At the height of the catchers’ rivalry, former Yankee public relations director Mickey Morabito put together a pregame stat sheet featuring comparative stats on Munson and Fisk. At that particular juncture of the season, the Yankee catcher was leading Fisk in batting average, homers, RBI, runners caught stealing and every relevant statistic. Fisk had two more assists than Munson. Morabito remembers Munson seeing the numbers before the game and mumbling something to himself. That night, Munson dropped third strikes the first three times Boston batters struck out. Each time, Munson would retrieve the ball, and fire to first for the official K, 2-3. Each intentional drop earned Munson an assist. He turned and shook his fist toward the press box after the third assist gave him a lead over Fisk.

Now that’s a rivalry.

With Fisk, then Munson behind the plate, the Red Sox and Yankees represented the American League in the 1975 and ‘76 World Series. Both lost to the powerful Big Red Machine from Cincinnati. The Sox and Yanks went eyeball to eyeball in ’77 with New York finishing two and a half games ahead, en route to another World Series win. This set the stage for the 1978 pennant race, one which would torture Boston and solidify the notion that no first place lead is ever safe. The ’78 Sox were an All-Star cast and led the Yankees by 14 games on July 20. But the Yankees were the defending World Champs and made a crucial move, replacing Billy Martin with Bob Lemon as manager in midsummer. As New York surged, the Sox faltered and on the first weekend of September the Yankees came to Boston and swept four straight by an aggregate count of 2-9. It would forever be known as the Boston Massacre and it left indelible scars in the Boston psyche.

The Sox eventually recovered, winning their last eight regular season games to force the second one-game playoff in American League history. Yankee players convened at Daisy Buchanans saloon on Newbury Street in the Back Bay the night before the playoff. We always knew we could beat Boston when he had to, Reggie Jackson said later.

And so they did. On the fateful afternoon of October 2, 1978, the Sox watched a 2-0, seventh inning lead vanish into the left-field netting as Bucky Dent’s soft fly feathered over the wall and into the screen. The Yanks eventually won when Rich Gossage got Carl Yastrzemski to pop up with the winning runs in scoring position, but the signature blow of that loss is Dent’s homer and to this day he is known as Bucky (expletive) Dent throughout New England.

The Yankees endured a championship drought after ’78, but the Red Sox were unable to capitalize. There was little competition from New York in 1986 when Boston made its strongest bid to win a championship. The ’86 Sox teased New England as never before and appeared to have beaten the New York Mets to win their first World Series in 68 years before an unlikely chain of events again conspired to thwart the Red Sox. The October collapse of 1986 produced probably the most memorable gaffe in baseball history, the Mookie Wilson grounder that skipped between the legs of Sox first baseman Bill Buckner. The Charlie Brown moment has come to symbolize eight decades of Sox frustration.

The 1986 World Series—in which the Red Sox came closer to winning a World Series, without actually winning, than any team in baseball history, gave birth to the cult of the Curse. The Times’s George Vescey penned a column about the Red Sox bad luck beginning with the sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees, and two years later I went to work on a hardover book entitled The Curse of the Bambino which was first published by E. P. Dutton in 1990. In the years since the book’s publication, the Curse has taken on its own life and it is now used to explain anything that goes wrong for the Red Sox.

Cursed or not, it was the 1986 Red Sox team that put fear into the heart of Sox fans everywhere. No lead would ever be safe again.

The fact that the ’86 collapse came at the hands of a New York baseball team only underscored the Boston-New York dynamic that is so much a part of the Red Sox-Yankee rivalry. In the years after ’86 Boston was again made to feel inferior when several of its institutions were engulfed by New York. In 1996, the Hub’s venerable Jordon Marsh department store was bought out by Macy’s, a New York giant. Closer to home for this typist, The Boston Globe, which had been owned by the Taylor family since 1873, was bought by The New York Times in 1993. The purchase expanded a complicated loop: the Taylors had once owned the Boston American League franchise and were the ones who named the Red Sox and built Fenway Park—which had once been owned by the Yankees as part of the Ruth deal.

On the ball field, the Yankees returned to championship glory in 1996 while the Sox drought continued, magnifying the pain of the near-miss of ’86. After 1995 the Red Sox started a run of eight consecutive finishes behind the Yankees (a streak still active going into 2004). This annual, futile chase expanded the cult of the Curse and pushed the vile New England mantra of Yankees Suck into the mainstream.

Yankees Suck. It started sometime in the 1970s and took off in the 1990s. The indelicate couplet has become the New England sports fans’ equivalent of The British Are Coming. Yankee fans, if they bother to respond (If I gave you any thought, I probably would), might retort with Boston sucks, but it doesn’t carry the passion or bitterness of Yankees Suck.

On the surface, of course, the charge makes no sense whatsoever. The Yankees, most decidedly, do not suck. They do not stink. They are not a bad baseball team. It’s like calling Cameron Diaz ugly. You can say it, but that does not make it so. It just makes you jealous. And that is what we are here in New England. Can you blame us?

In the 1970s Fenway fans would hurl darts at Yankee center fielder Mickey Rivers, while those at Yankee Stadium would toss batteries at Dwight Evans. Chants were more civil, even in college dormitories where students from both regions mingled and taunted one another. But somewhere along the way, late in the 20th century, the word sucks lost its sexual connotations and became okay on prime time television and talk radio. Kids got away with saying it in school without being