The evolution of a rivalry

A few days ago on a cool drizzly Boston evening, a friend and I headed up to Fenway Park to take in that most holy of spring rituals, the first game of the year between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. The rivalry between these two teams and their fans is possibly the most well-documented in sports. When I was a kid in the late 1970s, going to a Yankees/Sox game always carried an exciting undercurrent of possible violence which often erupted into actual violence. If you went to a game at Yankees Stadium, announcer Bob Sheppard’s stentorian tones would be drowned out by fifty thousand people chanting BOSTON SUCKS. Anyone unfortunate enough to be caught wearing Sox gear usually got bathed in thrown beer and some other fluids. People would bet on how many fistfights would erupt during the game. One would hear some of the filthiest, most inventive and therefore hilarious heckling ever. When I went to my first game at Fenway, I found much the same atmosphere, only this time I was on the receiving end of the “Yankees suck” chants and the Budweiser baptisms. Each side genuinely enjoyed abusing the other, and since we liked to be creative in our abuse each team knew the other well. My finest moment was wearing a Bucky Dent jersey into Fenway, back when he was still referred to as Bucky Fucking Dent. It is a testament to the knowledge of Sox fans that all that was on the back of my jersey was a number … but the cries of shock and outrage were the same as if his picture had been there.

For a long time, we Yankees fans had the upper hand. Any time Sox fans started giving us shit, a simple chant of “19-18” or “Buck-ner” would shut up even the most obnoxious taunter. In the 1990s when the Yankees were racking up the World Series, the Sox fans started getting quieter and quieter.

Then came the twenty-first century—2004 to be exact. It was the American League Championship Series. The Yankees had laid their customary whaling upon the hapless Red Sox, were leading the series 3-0, up 4-3 in the ninth inning of Game 4, waiting for Mariano Rivera to do what he did so well—shut the game down. But … it didn’t happen. To the horror of Yankees fans and the delirious joy of Sox fans, the Sox came back and won that game. And the next one. And the next one. AND THE NEXT ONE. They went on to win their first World Series in eighty-six years as Yankees fans reeled in disbelief. How the hell did this happen?

Four years later, the Red Sox have another World Series under their belts, and when a Yankees fan enters Fenway Park now it seems that having “the Curse” off has mellowed Sox fans out quite a bit. Seriously, I was in Fenway for nearly an hour before I heard my first “Yankees suck.” In previous trips I would have heard it within two seconds of me getting out of the car. Oh, sure, A-Rod got booed like Osama bin Laden showing up at a revival and there were scattered “Yankees suck” chants as well as “BAL-CO” whenever Jason Giambi came up to hit and for some reason Jorge Posada got “Posada smells like pee” yelled at him a lot but other than that? It was just people cheering on the Red Sox. No fights. No calling a player’s mother names you wouldn’t call your worst enemy in a drunken bar fight. I actually had to explain to a Sox fan sitting next to me why wearing a Bucky Dent jersey would cause trouble (with success comes bandwagoners). Of course, it’s nice to go to a baseball game in your rival’s stadium wearing your team’s swag without worrying about possible bodily harm, but hearing Yankees fans chatting pleasantly with Sox fans, the Sox fan saying that Robinson Cano looks like the real deal and the Yankees fan acknowledging the lights-out home run swing of Manny Ramirez … that would have never happened twenty years ago or even ten. The Sox fan would have said the best part of Cano dripped down his father’s leg and the Yankees fan would have retorted that Ramirez’s mother was a disease-ridden whore.

But let me offer the most disturbing example of this new-found complacency—the day after the game I walked around Harvard Square on a bright sunny afternoon. On my head was my customary Yankees cap … but I wore the uniform t-shirt of Sox pitcher Josh Beckett. I walked around for a couple hours in this ensemble which in the eighties would have had gotten me beaten by both sides. Only one person out of the thousands I encountered said something. And what was said was “I like Beckett too.” And he was wearing a Yankees cap. I think in the Bible this was followed by a plague of locusts. It doesn’t help that … well, right now the Yankees are kind of boring. There’s no real personalities on the team, no Lou Piniella, no Reggie Jackson. The Sox, however, are loaded with personalities which makes them hard to dislike. I still yell “motherfucker” at Manny Ramirez when he takes one deep off Mike Mussina, but it’s an affectionate “motherfucker” now. The Yankees have never been about having fun. Winning is serious business. Maybe if they man-hugged in the dugout or took the piss out of each other in front of cameras—or even pretended they like each other—it would do them some good. I have hope.

To cement Meghan’s theory that Jonathan Papelbon is indeed insane, I present a video from last summer in which Papelbon gives Josh Beckett shit for “using words you can’t spell.” Dammit, it’s getting really hard to hate these guys …