FROM THE BABE TO BUCKY TO THE BOSS
Moments in time in the beautiful history of sports’ greatest rivalry
Tensions between the teams began to simmer right from the beginning.
The first game pairing American League representatives of Boston and New York took place on May 7, 1903, at Boston’s Huntington Avenue Grounds, a relatively uneventful 6-2 Boston victory. There was already an underlying friction between the franchises, given that the Highlanders had spent the previous two seasons as the Baltimore Orioles, and Baltimore had long been Boston’s most bitter municipal enemy on baseball diamonds.
The next day, though, the paying customers at the Grounds received the first hint that a fresher, fiercer feud had officially arrived, the moment New York’s Dave Fultz barreled into Boston’s George Winter at first base. The vicious collision knocked Winter senseless, and it was only after Fultz began barking at him to pitch or quit that the Boston pitcher resumed throwing, ultimately taking the loss in a 6-1 New York victory.
In those heartier times, there was little chance of a bench-clearing brawl leaking onto the field, but the first blood of this rivalry had officially been spilled.
AND THEN …
Years later, an old friend and teammate named Jumpin’ Joe Dugan would have this to say about George Herman (Babe) Ruth:
“That big SOB could never have played his whole career in Boston. He was born to play in New York. That swing, that ambition, that appetite? There was just no way a small town like Boston could contain him. What town could? Maybe Chicago. Maybe. No, the Babe was built for Broadway, for the big time. There was only one place for him.”
By 1919, Ruth had started to rankle his boss, Harry Frazee, squawking about his salary. Frazee, an oldschool theater impresario, didn’t take him seriously, even after Ruth threatened to retire. How many prima donna actors had pulled similar empty threats on him through the years? The play is always bigger than the player.
“If Ruth doesn’t want to work for the Red Sox,” Frazee vowed, “we can make an advantageous trade.”
Soon, though, as he looked at his books, he noticed something else: for all of Ruth’s mass appeal, Boston’s attendance lagged and in 1919 the defending champs went a flat 66-71. “The Red Sox,” Frazee said flatly, “are not, and never will be, a one-man team.”
On January 5, 1920, the Red Sox and Yankees made a joint announcement. “We offered $100,000 for Ruth some time ago and were turned down,” Ruppert admitted. “The purchase is in line with our policy of giving New York a pennant-winning team in the American League.”
Said Frazee: “It would have been an injustice to keep him with the Red Sox. We would have become a one-man team.”
ONE OLD YANKEE REJOICES ...
He’d been asleep for only a second or two. Clocks up and down the East Coast had just clicked to 12:15 a.m. on this morning of Oct. 17, 2003, including the digital Armitron chronometer that dominated the centerfield scoreboard at Yankee Stadium, right above where the most important numbers were posted: Red Sox 5, Yankees 5, bottom of the 11th inning, seventh and deciding game of the ALCS.
It was quiet inside the 80-yearold stadium. This was why so many people in so many parts of the country were trying to blink away their exhaustion as Thursday night bled i nto Friday morning, as Yankees third baseman Aaron Boone stepped to the plate to face a Boston knuckleball specialist named Tim Wakefield, as all those timepieces ticked over to 12:16.
The exact minute, as it happens, that Bucky Dent fell asleep.
It was the shouting that jarred him back to life.
“What happened?” Marianne Dent yelped. “Huh?” her husband yammered. “Look at the TV! They’re mobbing somebody! The Yankees just won the game! They won the pen- nant! I think someone hit a home run!”
They were showing replays, and Dent, wide awake now inside his Boynton Beach, Fla., home, watched Wakefield deliver a flat, fat knuckleball, watched Boone all but jump out of his spikes as he dove into the pitch, watched the camera follow the baseball as it sketched a beautiful white path against the black Bronx sky, watched it settle into the lower leftfield stands, watched Wakefield march solemnly off the mound, watched Boone jump onto home plate with both feet, watched as the crowd, suddenly liberated from nearly four hours of unbearable tension, exploded in a giddy rush of joy.
“Look at you,” Marianne Dent said. “You’re beaming.”
It was more than that, of course. Dent’s eyes remained locked on
the TV, but his soul had immediately drifted, the moment he saw it all unfold …
Suddenly, he was rounding first base on another October day, exactly twenty-five years and fifteen days before, middle of a glorious afternoon, in another grand old ball field called Fenway Park. Dent had greeted Mike Torrez’ fastball with the sweet spot of his borrowed Max 44 bat, and now his eyes were trained on the left fielder, Carl Yastrzemski, who was drifting back toward the left-field wall, only 310 feet from home plate. Nobody ever played that thirtyseven-foot-high wall at Fenway like Old Man Yaz, so Dent waited for a sign as he started chugging into second.
When Yastrzemski’s knees buckled, Dent had it.
It was October 2, 1978, and Bucky Dent was 26 years old, and if you’d told him he would ever feel the same rush that bubbled his bloodstream that day, when he staggered Yaz’ legs and broke New England’s spirit and fueled the Yankees on to their twenty-second World Championship, he would never have believed you …
Except that’s exactly how he felt, all these years later, inside his bedroom, watching mayhem tumble out of his television. “You called it,” Marianne said. He had. “As the game is building up,” Dent said, “I’m going, ‘OK, who’s going to do something? Who’s got a ‘B’ in their name — Bernie (Williams) or (Aaron) Boone — to keep the Bs going? Who’s got a ‘B’ in their name that’s going to keep Babe, Bucky, Buckner alive?’ It was Boone.”
Is any further explanation needed why this man, who entered the world as Russell Earl Dent on November 25, 1951, had, at least once, on every New England day that passed from October 2, 1978, through that early morning hour of October 17, 2003, in every precinct of Red Sox Nation, been referred to by his more common name? Bucky Bleeping Dent …
… AND ONE OLD RED SOCK DOES, TOO
Bill Lee, who’d spent a large chunk of the 1970s right in the middle of it all, was 15 minutes from his house when Wakefield delivered his knuckler. Fourteen years as a big-leaguer had trained Lee’s ears precisely; he could tell when he heard Boone make contact on the radio that he’d gotten all of it. He clicked off the dial before the announcers could confirm his suspicions. A surprise was waiting for him in his house.
“I’d been trying to catch this Norwegian rat all summer,” he said. “He’d been dirtying my fridge, he ate a hole through my kitchen wall, and I gave him the only appropriate name I could think of: Billy Martin. Well, I’d put a live trap out that morning, cheese with peanut butter on it. And damned if that wasn’t the day I finally caught the little SOB.” Lee chuckled. “Killing Billy Martin,” he said, “made me feel a little better.”
A CONCESSION SPEECH
Not even the remarkable decision by Terry Francona to bring Pedro Martinez into Game 7 of the 2004 ALCS — with the Red Sox up 8-1 in the seventh — could change the momentum of history. In jogged Martinez, and suddenly the old Stadium was transformed. Here came the most feared, most intimidating pitcher of the previous 10 years, and his arrival signaled an infusion of hope! “WHO’S YOUR DADDY?” came the chant.
And the thing was, they were right. The Yankees sprung back to life, nine outs from elimination, scored a few runs, offered a glimpse of hope. Pedro recovered though, and even the most cynical Red Sox fan had a hard time justifying concern with the Sox six outs from the World Series and five runs ahead.
Not even the Red Sox were going to blow this.
Soon, it was over. At 12:01 a.m., one minute after October 20th had become October 21st, the Red Sox were officially declared champions of the American League. Three months shy of eighty-five years after dealing Babe Ruth to the Yankees, fiftyfive years after that awful lost weekend in 1949, twenty-six years after Bucky Dent, f ifty- three weeks after Aaron Boone … they had made it.
The Red Sox fans in attendance, so overwhelmed all night, now engineered something of a palace coup, commandeering the
lower bowl of the Stadium. For a time, they tried in vain to drown out the final few replays of “New York, New York” — the Liza version this time, the “Yankees lose” rendition — and when they finally pulled the plug on that, you could hear them lift their voices to the sky. “THANK YOU, RED SOX!”
And as they watched with horror from their perch high above home plate, a few of George Steinbrenner’s underlings started to fume. These people weren’t going home! They looked like they might stay all night, waiting for every one of the Red Sox to come out of the dugout, salute them, spray them with champagne. This was unseemly! This was outrageous! And surely the Boss wouldn’t approve of this.
So they went to see him, in his office, and they lodged their formal complaints, and George Steinbrenner listened very carefully to every last one of them, and then he shook his head and leaned back in his chair.
“Keep the lights on for them as long as they want to stay,” Steinbrenner said quietly. “They’ve earned it.”