Even in August, stakes are high between rivals

T HIS WILL be it for the prelims. This is it for the undercard. The next time the Yankees and the Red Sox meet will be September, and by then we’ll have a lot better idea of how this American League East will shake out. By then, there will be a whiff of October in the air even as the calendar insists it’s a few weeks early for that.

By then we will be able to retire the qualifier, “There’s still a lot of season left.”

For now we have these four games across the next four days and nights at Fenway Park, and by weekend’s end the teams will retreat to their corners to regroup and plot out the final dash to the finish line. It has already been a unique baseball story, these teams playing ping-pong with the sport’s best record for most of the year until lately, with the Sox edging out a little farther ahead.

The Ya n - kees turned in a classic case of looking ahead Thursday when they dropped a 7-5 decision to the deplorable Orioles, and so when they arrived in Boston ahead of this quartet of games, the deficit was 5 ½ instead of 4 ½, and whatever momentum they thought they might’ve been able to take into this collision had thinned, if not evaporated completely. Still … This is Sox-Yanks. This is Yanks-Sox. This is Boston-New York, which have been battling each other for almost 250 years, back when one city was f illed with tories and turncoats and the other patriots and patricians. It was Oliver Wendell Holmes who once dubbed Boston “The hub of the solar system” (before its citizens, in a wave of hubris to match their current wave of sports fans, expanded that to “the hub of the universe.”

It was Dick Schaap who named New York “Fun City.”

Neither city has ever lacked for self-conf idence, and while that may drive that portion of the country west of the Delaware Water Gap absolutely mad, those feelings occasionally manifest themselves best on baseball fields, in those summers when the Sox and the Yankees really do make it seem like the rest of the sport and the rest of the country is fighting it out for third place.

“This series is always critical,” said Yankees manager Aaron Boone, who 15 years ago etched a permanent place for himself along the pantheon of this epic, ancient rivalry. “There’s a little extra added importance because you’re going up against the team you’re chasing. [Thursday] was a bad day for us but we need to learn from it and flush it real quick, get on a plane and go after it tomorrow.”

This is the kind of series that would be intriguing even if it involved Kansas City and Cleveland (or Pawtucket and Scranton, for that matter) just because of the numbers: The Red Sox are an astounding 75-34, the Yankees 68-38. If they continued at their current paces Sox would win 111 games, the Yankees 102.

Both teams are a little dented; the Yankees will be spared a date with Sox ace Chris Sale due to shoulder inflammation, while the Sox will get to negotiate a Yankees lineup about to enter its second week without Aaron Judge. J.A. Happ is still iffy with hand, foot and mouth disease for the Yankees, while Xander Bogaerts is dealing with a banged-up hand, the same injury that derailed him last year.

But they are both still playing fabulous baseball and, more to the point, they have renewed a rivalry that has essentially lain dormant on the field since their epic encounters of 2003 and 2004. Earlier this year we even got a little extra when Joe Kelly (now buried deep in the Sox’ pen) plunked Tyler Austin (now playing for the Rochester Red Wings).

It isn’t a requirement that big games between these two are accompanied by bruising and bloodshed … but it never hurts, either. In fact, Wednesday was the 45th anniversary of the day the refrigerated Yanks-Sox rivalry thawed out and took a sharp turn that would last for six years.

On Aug. 1, 1973, the Yankees were in first place that late in the season for the first time since 1964. Thurman Munson tried to score on a suicide squeeze but Stick Michael couldn’t get the bunt down so instead Munson and Carlton Fisk collided, then brawled, then were kicked out of the game. The Sox won, and the Yankees never saw first place again.

“We’ l l remember this fo r awhile,” Munson snarled when the game was over.

Only forever, of course. Those are the stakes when it’s these two teams making the stakes.