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October 11, 2005
Going, going, gone
There will no doubt be some great baseball played over the next three weeks, but I won’t watch much of it. I’m somewhat relieved, as another Yankees-Red Sox series would have been a gut-wrencher for this fan. The last month of the season was already a grind. It seemed to be a grind for the players, too. By September, they had stopped looking like the boys of summer.
Frankly, neither team had the arms or the chemistry of champions in 2005. All summer long, conversations with both my Red Sox and Yankee fan friends never went far without someone saying how flawed the teams were.
Still, you hope against hope. For Red Sox fans, it was pleasant to bask in the glory of 2004 and to believe the old magic might reappear in the playoffs. Our Tim O’Sullivan took this view when Boston lost the opener to Chicago 14-2. The headline on his column read: “Relax fans, they’re looking ahead.” Even after the Red Sox lost the second game, our Dave D’Onofrio’s front-page column was headlined: “A bad spot, but it’s familiar.”
That second game was my first look at the Chicago reliever Bobby Jenks. With my East Coast bias, I had been saying that neither the Angels nor the White Sox scared me. Jenks scared me. Champions have lights-out closers. Jenks is one.
As for the Yankees, my gosh, what a strange ride. I’ve liked the Yankees since I was a boy. I grew up liking the Red Sox, too, but if you live in New England, you have to choose. You can’t root for both. The rivalry is too personal. But I find it hard to believe George Steinbrenner and his front office abandoned the formula that combined bought and homegrown stars with solid journeyman – Paul O’Neill, Scott Brosius, Tino Martinez in his first tour. It is beyond me why the Yankee brass has to keep proving to itself that money isn’t everything.
The poster boy for this philosophy is Alex Rodriquez. For all the beauty of his game at times, how hard it is to like him. What an irony it will be if he wins the MVP. At crunch time, it is as though his $252 million contract is an anvil on his back. When he came up in the ninth inning last night, I muttered under my breath that Joe Torre ought to give him the bunt sign. Even though the Yankees were two runs down, and even though A-Rod had led the league in homers, I knew he was going to hit into a double play.
So now we fans – of the Red Sox and Yankees alike – face a long winter with nothing to taunt each other about. When spring returns and we emerge from baseball hibernation, we’ll be as eager as ever for the next chapter in the greatest rivalry in sport. Even so, there is so much wrong with these teams that it is hard to imagine either can make enough moves to hide or fix all the flaws.
Posted by Mike Pride at October 11, 2005 03:29 PM