Red Sox-Yankees
would be best ALCS
Sorry to Twins, Angels;
AL East rivals are best matchup
Ezra Shaw / Getty ImagesThe midseason fight between Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez and Red Sox catcher Jason Varitek is just one example of the bad blood between Boston and New York.
COMMENTARY
By Ron Borges
NBCSports.com contributor
updated 8:16 p.m. ET Oct. 3, 2004
Here we go again.
Red Sox-Yankees. Yankees-Red Sox. Can they have American League playoffs that count without it coming down to the two of them?
No one wants to hear that in Minnesota or Anaheim.
They don't want to hear it because the Red Sox and Yankees have to get through them to get at each other, a happening they would like to avoid.
That will not be an easy task, either. Although Boston has the best 1-2 starting pitching punch in the American League with Curt Schilling and Pedro Martinez and the Yankees have a lineup stacked with big bats from top to bottom, the Twins and the A's have pitching and firmly held beliefs they can beat anyone. Minnesota, in particular, boasts of likely Cy Young Award winner Johan Santana, who is 18-2 since opening the season 2-4, and of their newfound faith in themselves.
"We don't have the best talent in the world like those guys do, but we can get the job done,'' Twins' All-Star outfielder Torii Hunter said.
"We're ready to play anybody. We can play. Whoever comes our way, we're going to try and beat them. It's as simple as that.''
Surely they'll try, but even if you're from Mankato or Lotus Land, be honest about it. What matchup in sports is better theatre than the Red Sox and Yankees on cool fall nights when mania is in the air?
Last season, the ALCS ended the way it always seems to end for the Red Sox. In abject failure and crushing disappointment. Basically, the Red Sox and Yankees played down to the ninth inning of the seventh game of the ALCS and were still dead even. There was nothing to pick between them.
Nothing but The Curse of the Bambino, which came into play as it always does. In the end, the Sox would stay too long with a fading Martinez, thus blowing a three-run lead, and then would be beaten in extra innings by one swing of a Bucky Dent clone named Aaron Boone. Cheers rose in the Bronx. Hearts sank in Back Bay. What else is new?
A lot of damage was done to TV sets all over New England that night, as Boone's home run rose into the dark heavens in New York, but this is a new year and, as always, Red Sox fans beee-lieeeve. In exactly what is the question.
They say they believe in a team that entered Thursday night 32 games over .500. They finished at 98-64, a record most everyone but the St. Louis Cardinals would envy. Certainly it's one the Twins or Angels would envy. But it's not one the Yankees envy because they are 4 games ahead of Boston's sterling record.
Little distance separates these two after nearly a full season of baseball. It doesn't matter that the Yankees have won the AL East championship. They still have won nothing. The way these two teams think about each other, if only one of the two biggest payrolls in the sport reaches the ALCS, they will feel like Siamese twins when one moves out of town. Something will be missing.
For the American League pennant to be decided in Minnesota's baggie-laden Homer Dome or in L.A.'s second cousin of a city is possible, because those are teams with talent and pride, but it just wouldn't be right. Not this year, at least. Not after all the drama and melodrama that has been a part of this season dating back to the end of last season.
There was not only the nasty way The Evil Empire, as Red Sox's club president Larry Lucchino labeled the Yankees, won the American League pennant a year ago. There was not only how they then collapsed in the World Series like a spent fighter who had all the scrap knocked out of him by an opponent he beat but did not survive. There was also the off-season checkbook slugfest between the two over the services of Alex Rodriquez . Nothing that has gone on during this season has altered the way the two look at themselves or the way their fans look at their hated enemy.
In other seasons perhaps you could say it would be fine, maybe even touching, if the Twins or the Angels or the A's ended up representing the American League in the World Series. Sort of the baseball reincarnation of the Little Train That Could. But not this year.
For the American League pennant to be decided anywhere but at Yankee Stadium or Fenway Park just wouldn't be civilized, as the old deodorant commercial used to say, even though much of what happens in the stands in those two places when a pennant is on the line is barely on the edge of civilized behavior. Of course, that's part of what has made this rivalry the greatest in baseball.
Red Sox-Yankees. Yankees-Red Sox. They are the essence of American League baseball. Both have powerful offenses. Each has strong pitching. One has a glorious history, the other a tragic-comic one.
For all to seem right with baseball, how can the American League decide who it will send to the World Series without the Yankees and Red Sox having the final word?
The Twins, who have won 90 games, have strong pitching and a firm belief they can beat anybody. The Angels know it wasn't so long ago that they were in the World Series at the Yankees' expense.
Any of them may be right, but although they have good teams, they don't have what the Yankees and Red Sox have. They don't have shared history and mystique and a national following and the kind of bad blood that usually only surfaces in border disputes.
They don't have the two highest payrolls in baseball or a strong hatred between them. They don't have any rivalries that have authored a library shelf full of books or a shared history that goes back to Babe Ruth.
So how can this season end without the two of them pounding away at each other like two old heavyweights with bad intentions on their mind and a World Series seat at stake?
Ron Borges writes regularly for NBCSports.com and covers the NFL and boxing for the Boston Globe.
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