Forget the results, if you can. Losing two games in a row is a rounding error for a baseball team in every other month, but in October, it’s definitive. Win and you’re good. Lose and you’re bad. In this telling, the Red Sox rapidly lost to the Yankees, ergo they’re bad. I disagree, and this felt different to me, at least through the first six innings of both games, when things were still close enough. I felt like it was the beginning of the next great era of baseball’s best rivalry.
Despite the result, I still think that.
Prior to this season — and maybe including it — I’ve felt that that the Red Sox/Yankees first-round playoff serieses haven’t been all that consequential or compelling, because the teams are so obviously limited. I mean sure, playoff baseball widens the aperture of what’s possible for good teams, but I thought neither team was likely to truly contend in 2021 or 2025, even with baseball’s chaotic-by-design playoff system. This year is different. While the AL competition was so soft, like it was for last year’s Patriots, both teams were plenty good enough to make the World Series, which is all you can ever ask.
The lack of Garrett Crochet and Aaron Judge left the series with a distinctly large cast of new main characters, personified by the starters, beloved Red Sox Nation blue-collar immigrant Payton Toll, despised Red Sox Nation white-collar emigrant elite Cam Schlittler and (sigh) Ben Rice. Central casting did its job for giving each fanbase its broadly-dreamt personification in a SP1, whether or not the personification has a representation in reality. we got what we wanted. The Yankees, with Rice and former MVP Cody Bellinger, got a little more, and their season continues.
But the broader question is: are we back? And not in a short-term sense? In the sense that the misery of the Yankees will return to the forefront of our minds on a daily basis? I hope so, because it’s so much better that way. I think we are, after a needed cooling off period, and not just for the fans but for the owners and the league. Sometimes you need a moment alone. I live in suburban NY and they’ve hated the Astros since before COVID despite the multiple postseason matchups with the Sox, and I think older Red Sox and Yankees fans as a whole are happy for the interregnum on a broader horizon. Or maybe I’m just projecting, and it’s certainly something I have enjoyed. I’ve had a break, and I’m ready to hate again.
That is, there’s too much gold in these there hills to leave the rivalry comparatively dormant for so long. Not that you don’t want to beat each other, every game, but the feeling of something far beyond that. This feeling, like a sourdough starter, needs time to regenerate; if it ends up taking 25-30 years, whih seems like an eternity in the moment, it’s just sort of how it has gone on a longer time horizon. The last high point was 2003-2004, but before that it was Bucky Dent, in the fertile year of 1978. Before that, DiMaggio and Ted Williams in the pre- and post-war 1930s/40s era. Before that, 1918. So yeah. Every 25-30 years it happens. It doesn’t have to be that way, but it just is.
On that schedule, I suspect or just wish we’re due for a Retvrn to becoming the biggest story in baseball on a daily basis, and one that expands the reach of the game as effectively as Shohei Ohtani, who’s done a decade’s worth of heavy lifting. I am definitely wishcasting this toward existence, but I also think it’s a real possibility for the next 5-to-10 years given how committed both organizations have been to similar projects in the last decade. Now they get to shut down the Dodgers by any means necessary this offseason and return to the top of the heap, even if they have to threaten the game’s survival to do so. And you know what? They’ll fuckin do it. If the Sox and Yankees aren’t top of mind, it’s gotta be a structural problem, right? Right?
True or not, both teams are so close to accomplishing a renovation that puts them back the center of baseball dialogue that we can almost taste it. If I’m right, the good news is that this year’s loss, while a bummer, is still just an appetizer, and hopefully the last one. We’re ready for the main courses. The divisional and LCS rounds beckon, and the identities of the post-teardown squads will further solidify. But the picture is coming in to focus: Schlittler will win the Cy Young; Tolle has won over everyone else. In this particularly illustrative case, the NY/Boston coding, as least as we’d like to conceive of it, is perfectly balanced, as all things should be. I hope this particular infinity war is ready to flare back up.
