BOSTON — The memories still hit like a catcher’s mitt to the face.
Last Friday, during the season’s first matchup between the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees, Boston’s NESN broadcast showed a 21-year-old clip of Red Sox catcher Jason Varitek smacking Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez in the mouth, a home plate brawl that still resonates from Brookline to the Bronx.
“Ah, the good old days,” former Red Sox infielder Lou Merloni said on the broadcast. “That was a moment, wasn’t it?”
It sure was. And it happened more than two decades ago.
What would it take for baseball’s greatest rivalry to boil over like that again?
As the Red Sox and Yankees play another three-game set at Fenway Park this weekend, there is temptation to declare the rivalry dead. It’s certainly cooled to a relative simmer, but history doesn’t stop breathing that easily. Fans still care, viewership numbers are high, and players say the games still feel different than most any other series.
They just don’t look and feel the way they used to — at least for now.
Twenty years ago, the rivalry was an inferno. A century of animosity was the tinder, two championship-caliber teams provided the spark, and the steady flow of gasoline came from the polarizing players, the national intrigue, and the fans out for blood. The Yankees and Red Sox duked it out on the field, and in the stands, and in the playoffs. Rarely does a sports rivalry spike the way this one did at the start of the 21st century. A relative lull was, perhaps, inevitable.
“It always feels big to me, and I know it does to our guys, too,” said Yankees manager Aaron Boone, who played for the Yankees at the height of the tension. “But is it as intense as it was in ‘03 in a snapshot? ‘03 was as hot as ever.”
Could it ever burn that hot again?
around at the Cask ’N Flagon or debating it at Stan’s Sports Bar, we might come up with seven things that define a truly great sports rivalry.
1. History. Spats come and go, but rivalries last.
2. Fan animosity. It’s one thing to root for a team. It’s another to truly loathe an opponent.
3. Amplification. Television coverage. National interest. People tuning in even without a dog in the fight.
4. Elite players. Main characters drive the story. Familiar characters keep audiences coming back.
5. Irrational passion. Every player wants to win. Some want to do more than that. Fans know it when they see it.
6. Narrative. Heroes and villains. David and Goliath. Good and bad. Whose side are you on?
7. Championship stakes. The games have to matter. No one cares about a battle for last place.
This current iteration of Red Sox and Yankees has at least three of the seven, maybe three and a half. Their history is obvious, their fanbase hostility has never gone away, and last weekend’s viewership numbers from Fox and ESPN — more than 3 million viewers on Saturday, up to 2 million on Sunday despite going head-to-head with the NBA Finals — make it clear that a national audience still tunes in to see these two teams. These are not typical regular-season matchups.
“I still get nervous playing (at Yankee Stadium),” Red Sox left fielder Jarren Duran said during Sunday’s broadcast, “and I’ve played here quite a bit, knowing you’re playing the Yankees, and they’re always good, fans chirping in your ears.”
But the current rivalry is largely missing the other ingredients.
The elite players are there, but injuries to Gerrit Cole and Alex Bregman have taken away some of the immediate starpower, and recent turnover has taken away the element of familiarity on both sides. True loathing takes time, and a lot of these guys haven’t been around for more than two or three years. Max Fried and Garrett Crochet are offseason acquisitions. Duran and Anthony Volpe are homegrown regulars who haven’t had time to truly annoy the other side.
The franchise mainstays, Aaron Judge and Rafael Devers, are far less polarizing than Rodriguez or Derek Jeter and less bombastic than David Ortiz or Pedro Martinez.
The last time the rivalry boiled over was April of 2018 when Red Sox reliever Joe Kelly drilled Yankees outfielder Tyler Austin at Fenway Park, but neither Kelly nor Austin has been a part of the rivalry in six years. The current managers, Boone and Alex Cora, are old friends who text often, while Rodriguez, Ortiz and Jeter share laughs on the set of Fox Sports. Even the front offices have become friendly. The Yankees and Red Sox have made four trades in the last five years, matching their total of the previous 49 years.
Within that overlap and fraternization, the organizations no longer stand alone. Although the Yankees remain near perennial playoff contenders, they long ago stopped being a monolith. The Los Angeles Dodgers have largely supplanted them as the sport’s marquee franchise, while both the Dodgers and New York Mets now spend more on payroll.
The Yankees are not the league’s common enemy, the Red Sox are no longer the bearded, curse-breaking, due-for-a-win underdogs. After four championships in the past 21 years, New England is no longer beset with grandparents longing for the Sox to win one before they die. There are, instead, fifth graders who can bring championship parade keepsakes to show and tell.
The Yankees are not the Evil Empire, the Red Sox are not the plucky rebels
promoted 21-year-old Roman Anthony to join highly touted infielders Marcelo Mayer and Kristian Campbell. Outfielders Duran, Wilyer Abreu and Ceddanne Rafaela are also good young players with staying power. If that young core can lift the Red Sox to relevance in Boston — the Yankees returned to the World Series last year — they can also become a familiar set of enemies in the Bronx.
Put players of that caliber into regular high-stakes competition, and they’ll inevitably develop a bit of an edge. Even the gentle Judge managed to troll the Red Sox in 2018 by playing “New York, New York” on a portable speaker system while walking the Fenway Park concourse after a Yankees win. When Red Sox rookie Hunter Dobbins said last week that he’d rather retire than play for the Yankees, he revealed an obvious misunderstanding about his father’s playing career, but he also exhibited a clear grasp of the way to rouse a rivalry out of his slumber. Even Yankees second baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr. appreciated the return of such harmless but antagonistic banter.
“I like it, though. I do like it,” Chisholm said. “I like the competitiveness. I’m a huge fan of college baseball right now just because of how they are right now. They’re super competitive, and they’re super fiery. I like that.”
The chippiness of today’s college game rarely reaches the major leagues these days. There are fewer hard slides into second base, fewer fastballs to the ribs, and hardly any catcher’s mitts smacking the faces of MVPs. The rules have changed so that even the most passionate rivalries might never again play out like when A-Rod and Varitek went at it in ’04.
But put the Yankees and Red Sox at the top of the sport again — with familiar, homegrown players on the field, the same hungry fans in the stands, and real championship ambitions on the line — and it might start to feel like the old days, the way Red Sox reliever — and former Yankees reliever — Greg Weissert remembers it as a kid growing up on Long Island.
“Everybody remembers back then, it almost felt personal, you know?” Weissert said. “It’s still like, obviously you want to beat them — and the same with the Yankees, you always wanted to beat the Red Sox — but I guess it was a little different back then. And it’s a weird thing, right? You can’t manufacture that stuff. It happens the way it happens.”