Silva: Each NFL team enters the offseason with a series of pressing needs. Sometimes a team can address them all, sometimes they ignore them all. But if a team's smart, they'll listen to us. These are the most crucial aspects for NFC teams.
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Instead, in New York the news is all about the latest public flogging inflicted on the Yankees by Yammerin’ Hank Steinbrenner. The Baron of Bloviation is outraged — a fairly normal state in Steinbrennerland — that his team has failed to hit of late and has been getting its expensive backside kicked by the Texas Rangers.
Meanwhile, in Boston, the media is either debating what’s to be done about Manny Ramirez’s assault on the team’s traveling secretary or tearing its collective hair out over the Tampa Bay Rays. The upstart whippersnappers from Tampa Bay had the gall to whup the Sox in three straight games, opening up a 3 1/2-game lead in the American League East.
Who has time for the Yankees when the Red Sox are in second place?
There will be stories, to be sure. No teams are more mutually hated by their respective fan bases than Boston and New York. And no intradivisional series is more hyped than this one.
Good reasons exist for that beyond the intensity of the rivalry. For years, these series have been viewed as indicators of how the AL East would sort itself out. For at least six straight years, either the Yankees or Red Sox have been in first place in the division at this stage of the season. Four times in those six years, the team that wasn’t in first place was in second. In the other two, the Yankees were third and the Red Sox first. And in those years, everyone knew the Yankees weren’t going to stay in third.
The other teams in the AL East simply didn’t count. Everyone knew the team then known as the Devil Rays would be last and Baltimore would struggle and the Blue Jays would ultimately fail to contend. With everyone else out of the way, you could look forward to every meeting of the Bronx and Boston.
But this year the hype will have to wait until Thursday morning, when the four-day holiday set begins. There’s no time for it now.
A big part of that is Tampa Bay, which continues to be the surprise of the season. The Rays created their own intense rivalry with the Red Sox and are threatening to stick around for the duration of the season, fighting for their first-ever playoff berth.
But there’s more to it than that, and it echoes in the regular rants of Hank Steinbrenner. When Joe Torre was tossed overboard after last season’s first-round playoff loss to Cleveland, Yammerin’ Hank let it be known that the new Yankee skipper, Joe Girardi, would not be under pressure to finish first this year. Steinbrenner had come to understand that the team needed to rebuild with kids from its own farm system and to foreswear the failed formula of his father, George. The Yankees were headed back to those less-than-thrilling days of the 1982-94 seasons, when a dysfunctional roster stocked with overpriced veteran free agents failed to get to the playoffs for 12 straight years (The 1994 strike made it 13). Hank said he understood that it might take a year or two to get back to the tippy-top of the game.
His patience didn’t last into May. First it was the pitching that was unacceptable. Now it’s the hitting. And while his regular eruptions have been annoying, they are based on reality: the Yankees aren’t what they used to be.
The fans know that, so the anticipation of battling Boston doesn’t come with the same tinge of urgency as it has for so many previous years. And in Boston, there seems to be a sense that the Yankees aren’t quite the threat they used to be. Red Sox Nation still hates the pinstripes and wants to beat them with all its heart and soul, but Boston went into this season believing that it had taken over ownership of the AL East from New York. Events have so far confirmed that. So it’s not about overthrowing the Evil Empire. It’s about hanging on to what they see as theirs.
Except it’s not theirs, and that’s what is holding up the hype in Boston. First there are the Rays to worry about, then the Yankees.
That said, the series remains a centerpiece of the baseball calendar. As was the case last year, the Red Sox will be able to put some distance between them and the Yankees and help make the East a two-team race with Tampa, and not a three-team race. As for New York, it can cut into a deficit, but can’t overcome it. Regardless of who’s in town, the Yankees just have to win ballgames.
Neither can afford to lose. The Rays are hosting Kansas City and Boston can’t fall further behind by getting wiped out in the Bronx. As for New York, it can’t worry that much about who’s occupying the visiting dugout. They don’t have to beat Boston, they have to beat everybody.
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Wesseling: Each NFL team enters the offseason with a series of pressing needs. Sometimes a team can address them all, sometimes they ignore them all. But if a team's smart, they'll listen to us. These are the most crucial aspects for AFC teams.
Ryan Callahan scored for the fifth time in four days and defenseman Ryan McDonagh snapped a second-period tie to lift the New York Rangers to a 3-2 victory over the Washington Capitals on Sunday.
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