Sox-Yanks in playoffs is all we could want
THE CROWD, 49,620 strong, was nice enough to wait until 10:33 p.m. before clearing its collective throat and declaring what had been on its mind the whole game, the whole night, from the moment an old friend named Bernie Williams threw out the first pitch and cracked the seal on October.
Luke Voit had just chugged home with the fourth run of the sixth inning and the sixth run of the night, and the Athletics had finally gone from feisty to finished, from gamers to goners. The A’s had earned the right to stand toe-to-toe with the Yankees, and had done just that for five innings, and the Stadium had shown a proper amount of angst and respect til now. It was the neighborly thing to do. But there was no need to be polite any more. The Yankees were going to shoo the A’s out of the playoffs, 7-2, and they wouldn’t have to break a ninth-inning sweat to do it, and at last the sweet clatter began tumbling out of the upper deck and the bleachers, all around The Bronx, loud enough they could surely hear it on the other side of the Mass Pike. “WE WANT BOSTON! “WE WANT BOSTON!! “WE WANT BOSTON!!!” In other words: enough with the preliminaries. Let’s get on with the varsity games. “I think they can’t wait,” said Aaron Boone, a decorated veteran of past Yanks-Sox skirmishes, speaking of his players who’ll be entering this cauldron for the first time. “They’re ready and relish the opportunity to go up against the game’s best this year. We’re very familiar with them. We know how good they are. We know we have to be at our best and they’re very tough at Fenway.” Boone smiled then. “But [the Red Sox] would say the same for [us], probably,” he said.
This is what we will get beginning Friday night at Fenway Park, the 108-win Red Sox and the now-101-win Yankees, with all the fear and loathing and blood and rancor that’s gathered and grown across the past 115 years. It’s been 14 autumns since these ancient antagonists met in the crucible of October, and if that was a break most welcome for baseball’s flyover states … well, they had their fun.
The A’s were a speed bump, a pothole, a patch of crabgrass impossible to ignore. A month ago they’d taken two out of three from the Yankees and they chased them all over September to try and get this game 3,000 miles in the other direction, and they’d fallen three games shy of that quest. They were a worthy opponent. Just not an equal one. Starting now, the Yankees get their equals, their mirror images, their fellow practitioners of big spending and big talent and big ambition. There was a time not so long ago when we’d grown to believe we’d get one of these throwdowns every year, because the Yankees and the Red Sox weren’t just richer than everyone, but better too.
But baseball’s a funny game. The Sox have won three titles since last they met on October fields — but have also finished in last place three times. The Yankees haven’t won a World Series since 2009, haven’t finished in first place since 2012, actually went through a brief but bountiful rebuild (a notion that was once considered preposterous).
Now here they are. Here they come. Here they have been since April, 1 and 1A for so much of the summer (even if the Astros, who are only the defending champions of the world, wound up honoring their own elite pedigree by winning three more games than the Yankees did). From April to July to September, it felt like this was predestined, predetermined, preordained. And here they are.
Theirs is an entanglement that has already yielded three best-of-seven encounters in the ALCS (including the Homeric back-to-back masterpieces of 2003 and ‘04), one forever one-game showdown (40 years ago, climaxing the epic pennant race of 1978) and one fabled two-game staredown to end a regular season, in 1949.
Now we get this best-of-five, starting Friday, the Sox and the Yankees, New England and New York, the Hub of the Universe and Fun City. “WE WANT BOSTON!!!!,” the people cried. WE WANT BOSTON!!!!!,” they roared. WE WANT BOSTON!!!!!!,” they thundered. Oh, hell yeah, they do. Everyone does. Do we really have to wait till Friday?