HATE IT GRAND?
LLackk off animosity i it hurts Yanks-Bosox
I’M NOT at Fenway Park this weekend. There was a time when saying those words would have been sacrilege, impossible to believe given the way the emotions (and occasionally blood) flowed in the early- and mid-2000s.
I was on a radio show in Boston the other day, and the host took note of that, and asked a reasonable question: Why?
And here’s the thing: We may be getting back there. We may be returning, soon, to a time when the Yankees and the Red Sox are the exposed nerve of professional sports, when you have to be there, every game, because the thought of missing out on something is too much to bear. We’re just not there right now.
Right now, with apologies to Jerry Seinfeld, the laundry isn’t enough. Now, make no mistake, in their hearts of hearts, Red Sox fans haven’t grown soft in their feelings toward the Yankees, and no self-respecting Yankees fans ever will be spotted wearing a Red Sox cap anywhere, even as a joke.
Really, it is as simple as this:
As a Yankees fan, you haven’t learned how to hate Mookie Betts, Chris Sale and Andrew Benintendi yet.
As a Red Sox fan, you haven’t learned how to loathe Aaron Judge, Gary Sanchez and Luis Severino yet.
And as much as the nuns and brothers and priests who tried to teach me better in parochial school will lament me saying this: The hate is what matters. The hate is what drives this. The hate is everything.
The hate is what made YankeesSox of the ’70s every bit as much a spectacle as it was in 2003 and 2004, the mutual contempt of Thurman
Munson and Carlton Fisk, the Bronx war in 1976 that ended with Bill Lee’s ruined money maker — his left arm — hanging limp, one of many things that would inspire Lee many years later to name an especially resilient rat in his New England home “Billy Martin.”
Sox fans tried Friday night. They booed and hooted Judge, and it got loud enough to notice through the television, and the YES network crew duly noted it. But we’re going to have to go a long way before we compare the booing of the Yankees’ best player with the kind of treatment Derek Jeter used to get at the Fens, and Alex Rodriguez, two players who were forever memorialized by a set of T-shirts whose message can’t get within six city blocks of a family newspaper. Sale is as good a pitcher as there is in the sport. He has had some terrific games against the Yankees as a member of the White Sox, took part (on the short end) of an epic pitcher’s duel with Masahiro Tanaka earlier in the year. But it is going to take a while — a long while — and maybe a couple dozen incidents before Sale is able to fill Yankee Stadium with the kind of ferocity that our old friend Pedro Martinez used to.
(Goodness, do you remember “WHO’S YOUR DADDY?!?!?!?!?” There are times, I swear, I still hear it ringing in my ears.) I asked a Yankees fan friend of mine if this was real or a product of my imagination. He shook his head ruefully. “It’s true,” he said. Part of why this hits so hard this year, probably, is this is the first year when every significant player of 2003 and ’ 04 officially is gone. The retirement of David Ortiz didn’t only leave a gaping hole in the middle of the Red Sox batting order, but also in the heart of this rivalry as we’ve known it. “What about Dustin Pedroia?” I asked my friend. “He’s been a part of a lot of this.” He shook his head. “If you ever repeat this, I’ll deny it,” he said. “But how do you hate a guy who plays the game the way Dustin Pedroia does?” I told him I understood. There were plenty of Red Sox fans through the years who, under cover of anonymity, would come clean that they secretly loved everything about Jeter, the notable exception being the uniform he wore. He agreed. And then sighed. “Gentlemen and sportsmen have their place in baseball,” he said. “But hate is better.”