As the Hall of Fame pitcher Stanley Coveleski once said, “Lord, baseball is a worrying thing.” Part of it is that dark New England souls seem captive to doomy and irrational premonitions. Part of it is that every time the two teams meet the national networks once more detail Babe Ruth’s long-ago transfer from Boston to New York, and screen, again, replays of Bucky Dent and Aaron Boone hitting season-ending home runs, in 19, respectively.
All winter afterward, the joy was shadowed with concern that Sox fans had lost what defined us.īut, fourteen years later, as this season’s playoff rematch with the Yankees began, the dismaying revelation for many of us was that we remain trapped in the fanly persona we felt sure we had repudiated. They went on to defeat the Cardinals in the World Series. (I’m a Red Sox fan.) And then Boston won that 2004 series, as dramatically as they’d always been defeated, losing three consecutive games to the Yankees before suddenly winning four in a row. The Yankees, meanwhile, were gilded metronomes of grandiose success, so regularly victorious that it made them smug, chesty, insatiable, and entitled. The last time that the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees met for an October playoff series, in 2004, the Red Sox were a tortured outfit, the fouled-up team that not only hadn’t won a World Series since 1918 but that lost in such tragic yet inventive ways that it seemed like they were staging a Chekhov play in baseball costume.
