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| BILL KOSTROUN/AP |
| Boston's Manny Ramirez goes yard against Yankees starter Mike Mussina in Game 1 of the 2003 ALCS |
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| Diary of a Red Sox Man |
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Robert Sullivan tests the bonds of fandom as a Sox booster in Yankee Stadium as the two teams fight for a spot in the 2003 World Series |
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By Robert Sullivan |
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Posted Friday, Oct. 10, 2003
The first big-league game I ever saw was probably not Sox-Yanks. It was Sox-Somebody, but the reason we were there wasn't because of Harry Frazee or Babe Ruth or curses or even the compelling Mickey Mantle and/or Roger Maris, but it was so that, in 1960, my brother and I might see Ted Williams play before he retired. The Sox well and truly stunk in those days and Williams, as I recall, pretty much stunk that particular day, but the task was accomplished, the rite writ. I've written glancingly in this space about that day once before, and so I'll move on.
As I say, the Sox were a teamful of Merkles back then, Ted and too few others excepted, and so they drew flies. Therefore, folks like my dad and mom and their kids from Chelmsford—i.e., nobodies—could easily be among those 4,000 or 5,000 flies whenever they liked. Artie and Lu, for their coupla bucks per ducat and the schlep down Route 3 to Boston, were adjudged by their neighbors in Chelmsford as romantics or saps, but their kids loved them for these Bosox outings. Dad and Mom had spent a good deal of time a-courtin' in the presence of the 1946 Sox, Dad having returned—praise be—from the war, and so it was hard for them to forsake the team even when they ... well, again, stunk.
I mean it: 4,000 people a night, five grand or six for the Yanks and Mantle—and you can look it up, you who are paying $3,000 for a ticket to the Pedro-Roger Saturday set-to. It's interesting to some longtime Sox fans just how feverish and large Red Sox Nation has become. We'll turn over cars in Kenmore Square these days, and set bonfires on the UNH campus a hour north of Boston. We'll account for 60-plus regular season sellouts at the Fens, and we'll travel to the left coast if we've got a seat for the fifth game of a first-round playoff series. We'll do all sorts of mad things, and if we were like this a century ago in 1903, when our Boston Americans won the first-ever World Series, we were not like this in the formative years of my personal Scarlet Hose fanship. We weren't like this even a quarter century ago, and I'll give you the briefest evidence. In '78 the Red Sox frittered away (as we have been constantly reminded by the New York media during the past few weeks) an all-but-mathematically insurmountable loss-column lead over the Yankees in the dog days of summer and those of earliest autumn. I was in New England at the time, and I remember calling my buddy Jake as the Sox were about to play their last game of the season.
"Bag," I said, for that was Jake's other nickname. "Am I wrong, or are the Sox but one game out?"
"They are one out," Jake confirmed.
"Am I wrong, that if Tiant wins today at Fenway and the Yanks lose in the Stadium, there will be a playoff tomorrow?"
"You are right sir," Bag answered. And so we drove into town, walked up and bought grandstand seats. You see, the loyal rooters had become so disgusted with the team after suffering through the Yankees' Boston Massacre weekend in August, they weren't even cramming the park for what might turn out to be a tie-making win. Not hardly. As for Bag and myself, we watched as the only score they posted on the Green Monster that day indicated that Rick Wise and the Cleveland Indians were getting the better of the Yanks in New York, while El Tiante was laboring mightily to prevail in the contest at hand. Once it was clear that the Sox would win and that the playoff, for which they had already won a flip of the coin, would be played in Boston the next day, it was announced that available tickets for that game would go on sale at the ticket booths right after the final out. Bag and I sauntered to the gated window, easily beating the Johnny Come Latelies who were now bombing in on the Mass Pike from Newton and Wellesley, and scooped up a whole bunch of bleachers seats. Then we repaired to the Dugout bar on Comm Ave and decided which associates we would call on the pay phone and invite to the game. Our many dear friends and kinfolk thereby got the privilege of witnessing...
Bucky Dent. But that's not the point.
The point is that, yes, there has long been a Sox-Yanks rivalry, but it has had its ups and downs, its ebbs and flows of passion. I seriously doubt there was much of a rivalry in the 1920s and '30s because the Sox were so poor, and I know the same was generally true from 1960 through '66. In the years since, the fight has been joined on occasion— '78, '99, a few races for the division title—but I've never seen it like it is now. Right now, this week, today. If it is true (and I'm sure it is) that, in the free-agent universe we live in, most of the players on either side do not hate their opposite number as Munson hated Fisk, it is nonetheless evident that the fans have taken this thing past wit's end in recent years. "I remember one of my first opening games against the Red Sox, with the Rocket pitching, looking out at him," Bernie Williams reminisced last week. "That was my first glimpse of how intense it was. Fans from each side just wanting to beat each other up. I remember looking into the stands and seeing people fighting. It was loud and packed and a rude awakening. To me it was, 'Welcome to Yankees-Red Sox.'"
And it's only grown ruder since. I live, now, with my family in Westchester County, N.Y., about an hour up the train tracks from the city. My wife and I chose to settle there because it was about as far out as we could go and still abide the commute, and because it felt—psychically, physically—like the New England we grew up in. Stone walls. Rolling hills. September foliage. The Red Sox on the radio (albeit via Hartford).
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