More than eight years after they finished the new Yankee Stadium, I still get confused when I climb out of the subway at 161st and River Ave. Whoa—where did it go? The lot that used to hold the ballpark is empty. The stadium, I forget every time I visit the Bronx, is across the street. It’s like a mirror image held up to the past that leads into an alternate universe where everything is different.
In the new world, Yankees fans no longer fight with their Boston counterparts. Baseball’s most famous rivalry is not what it used to be. It feels a little strange. Maybe that’s why it took 45 minutes to get into the stadium when I visited recently for a Yanks-Sox game. I thought it was just for extra security, but perhaps the authorities were swapping out the bodies of human fans for peaceful aliens dressed in Mattingly and Munson and Judge jerseys and Red Sox caps. Inside the ballpark, they sit next to each other. They talk to each other. Sure, they argue sometimes, even scream at each other, but it’s like a pantomime that always ends happily.
“Hey,” some Yankees fan sipping a tall one calls out to a guy wearing a Pedroia jersey—”the Sox are terrible.” “Oh yeah,” says the Beantowner, “the Yankees are awful.”
They throw some salty language around, but not if there are kids in the section. And then they start laughing with each other. Maybe there’s a war on somewhere that has brought Yanks and Sox fans together in a unified front—against Vladimir Putin or the Houston Astros. Or maybe they’ve just come to their senses.
I was there in the Bronx that May evening in 1976 when Mickey Rivers and Graig Nettles ganged up on Boston’s Bill Lee and broke his arm. It was a terrible night for baseball and baseball fans. An athlete’s career was endangered by other ballplayers, and the fans in the Bronx crowed about it for years like it was a passage out of Homer. Someone next to me threw an apple at Red Sox Hall of Fame catcher Carlton Fisk. It wasn’t passion—it was thuggery.
All those great games between the Yankees and Red Sox I saw in the old Yankee Stadium over the years were marred by violence and criminality. I once saw the Yankees come back from an eight-run deficit to beat Sox ace and future Yankees star Roger Clemens. What I remember most is a brawl in the section below me between Yanks and Sox fans fueled by beer and marijuana.
There was fighting even at Dave Righetti’s 1983 no-hitter. I was there—July 4, the late Yankees owner George Steinbrenner’s 53rd birthday, and Righetti struck out soon-to-be Yankees legend Wade Boggs for the final out in the first Yankees no-hitter since Don Larsen’s 1956 perfect game. The Bronx erupted in joy—and a gang of Yankees fans celebrated the left-hander’s performance by exchanging blows with Bostonians.
There was plenty of violence at Fenway, too, like the fight in the 2003 American League Championship Series when Yankees bench coach Don Zimmer charged at Boston’s star pitcher Pedro Martinez. Even one of the Sox groundskeepers wanted in on the action and had to be restrained from taking on the entire Yankees bullpen.
The next year was the Sox annus mirabilis—down three games in the American League Championship Series to the Yankees, they won four straight and went on to win the World Series for the first time since 1918. And I think that’s how the nature of the rivalry changed—winning. The Sox finally won and then won again in 2007 and 2013.
Sure, for all the concern that younger fans are losing interest in baseball, going to a game is more family friendly than ever—even if it costs more than ever to bring a family, or even a date, to the ballpark. But there’s something specific to the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry—historical and geographic and social, involving various patterns of immigration to the Northeast, all factors that made the games so intense.
Crowds, like individuals, have distinct personalities colored by emotions. Those emotions, however, are more raw, more vivid, cruder than an individual’s since they serve as points of connection, common denominators, for a mass of people. What Boston fans call Red Sox Nation really is in some ways a nation, a group of people with common interests, shared loves and hates. Boston’s long dry spell and its rival’s dynastic success created a terrible dynamic—resentment, arrogance, contempt, self-pity, and violence, on the field and off.
Boston’s three World Series victories in ten years changed the dynamic. Winning has balanced out the two clubs and their fans. That’s why the rivalry is now more about baseball than brawling. At least I hope so. In the meantime—Go Yanks. Go Sox.
