Hardball Hyperbole: Chapter 1

Welcome to the start of what I believe is a project you’ll really enjoy here at Pinstripe People. I’m going to take you back to the incredible period between 2003 and 2004 when the greatest rivalry in baseball - Yankees vs Red Sox - was at its absolute peak in terms of excitement, passion, heatedness, and importance. Each Wednesday, I will post a new chapter in the saga. Think of these like episodes of your favorite television show, before streaming allowed you to binge the whole thing in a few days. To kick things off, here’s a little history about the rivalry to set the stage.

Apple has Microsoft, Coke has Pepsi, writers have copy editors, Trump has the Democrats, and the Yankees and the Red Sox have each other. Always and forever.

There are rivalries, and then there are rivalries and the Yankees and Red Sox are inexorably intertwined in one that stands the test of any time, be it baseball’s past, its present, or its future. It is baseball’s version of a holy war, and it will never matter what the standings say – whether both teams are in contention, both are out of it, or one is up and the other is down – the Yankees want to beat the Red Sox, and the Red Sox want to beat the Yankees.

They are two of the most storied franchises, not only in baseball but in all sports, their collective all-time rosters populated with enough Hall of Famers to fill an entire wing at the shrine in Cooperstown. Theirs is a century-plus-long combined lineage of baseball royalty that, in its totality, is unparalleled in the game. That alone could stand as the primary load-bearing pillar of the rivalry, but it’s deeper than that.

These two teams represent fiercely proud and historic American cities that have always fought to prove that one was better than the other going back to their settlements in the 17th century. And they are teams fueled by two of the most knowledgeable and passionate fan bases in existence which creates a carnival-like atmosphere every time the teams play, be it at Yankee Stadium or Fenway Park.

The shared melodramatic saga of these two ballclubs, separated by 200 miles along what used to be horse and buggy territory but is now the northern section of the I-95 corridor, has been the subject of countless books, documentaries, infinite hours of talk radio babble and video highlights, and has been chronicled to such an extent in both cities’ multiple newspapers that entire forests have been felled to provide the necessary paper to tell the never-ending story.

And what a story it is.

New York and Boston have been trading blows, sometimes literally, on the baseball diamond dating all the way back to 1903.

The American League, the brainchild of its founder and self-appointed president, Ban Johnson, was formed in 1901 with eight charter members, two of which were the Boston Americans and Baltimore Orioles. Johnson desperately wanted a team in New York, but he was rebuffed by the New York Giants, members of the long-established National League who did not want their territory infringed upon by what they deemed as minor league interlopers.

But in 1902, the Orioles became a doomed franchise thanks to an ongoing feud between Johnson and Baltimore’s player-manager John McGraw. One of the reasons why Johnson formed the AL was for it to be an alternative major league that played a cleaner version of baseball as opposed to the rough and often dirty way the NL played. That was never going to work for McGraw.

As a full-time player for the Orioles in the 1890s when they were an NL franchise, McGraw had built a deserved reputation as a bullying, ill-tempered and at times violent man. When he became player-manager of the Orioles at the ripe age of 26 in 1899, his demeanor did not change. So it was probably not a wise move by Johnson when he offered McGraw the chance to be player-manager of the Orioles in their inaugural AL season.

Johnson fined and/or suspended McGraw several times for his brutal treatment of umpires, and midway through 1902, McGraw had had enough. He quit the Orioles, was quickly hired by the floundering Giants, and he brought several of Baltimore’s best players with him. That roster defection essentially crippled the Orioles, but it ultimately played right into Johnson’s hands.

It gave Johnson all the juice he needed to transfer the team to New York in 1903 which is where he wanted it all along, with the dual benefit of pissing off McGraw and the Giants.

With the team in New York, Johnson knew that in order to build a fan base in a city where the Giants were already ingrained, he needed the renamed Highlanders to be competitive. Thus, he used his power as league president to strong-arm other AL teams into making trades that weren’t necessarily even, all of which gave Boston fans one more reason to hate New York.

New York finished fourth in its inaugural season, 17 games behind the champion Americans. That year, Johnson and his counterpart president of the NL, Harry Pulliam, agreed that their respective pennant winners would play each other in a definitive championship series to be known as the World Series and Boston defeated the NL’s Pittsburgh Pirates.

Things would not be so easy for Boston in 1904, though. With Johnson’s shady player dealings beginning to take effect, New York and Boston became embroiled in a hotly-contested chase for the AL pennant which came down to a season-ending five-game series that would be split between the two cities.

The Americans were still the more talented team, led by pitching ace Cy Young, but the upstart Highlanders, led by ace Jack Chesbro, entered the final weekend just a half-game behind. And with Chesbro pitching a five-hitter in the opener at New York’s Hilltop Park, the Highlanders leapfrogged into first place. Had they gone on to win the pennant, it would have been a colossal upset, but alas, Boston won the next three games to wrap up the unexpectedly spirited race and was then proclaimed repeat world champions because there was no World Series in 1904.

That year’s NL champion happened to be the Giants, and not only was McGraw the player-manager, his good friend, John Brush, had taken over ownership of the team. And the two men refused to play Boston because they felt the AL was a rinky-dink operation compared to the NL and that winning the NL pennant made them the true world champion. Oh, they also both hated Johnson.

In any event, the franchise shift from Baltimore to New York and the exciting battle for the 1904 pennant created a new flashpoint to the nearly three-century-old hostilities between Boston and New York, now in the form of baseball, first as Americans vs. Highlanders, later as Red Sox vs. Yankees.

However, as much as Yankees and Red Sox fans romanticized the rivalry between the local nines, the fact is that rarely has the rivalry had much of an impact on the championship fortunes of either team.

For the first two decades of the 20th century, Boston was the dominant team as it won five AL pennants and World Series, while New York won none. And in those five championship seasons - excluding 1904 - not once was New York a threat to Boston.

Everything changed, of course, on Jan. 5, 1920, when the the most famous transaction in baseball history went down as Red Sox owner Harry Frazee sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees. From that moment, the Red Sox did not finish ahead of the Yankees in the standings until 1946 when they won the AL pennant.

Meanwhile, the Yankees won 14 pennants and 10 World Series in that span, and only four times (all between 1938-42) did Boston finish second, though the closest they were to New York was a distant nine games in 1942.

Between 1905 and 1976, the only time the Yankees and Red Sox were involved in a true nip-and-tuck pennant race occurred in 1949 when the Yankees swept a season-ending two-game series to edge the Red Sox by one game.

Of course there had been dozens and dozens of interesting games and events sprinkled across those seven decades as well as individual rivalries that had taken hold such as Joe DiMaggio vs. Ted Williams and others. But the reality is that the true animus between the teams, the seeds of the rivalry that blossomed into what it has become today, didn’t really germinate until the mid-1970s.

That’s when Thurman Munson and Carlton Fisk became mortal enemies and brawled in 1973, and when Lou Piniella and Fisk came to blows in 1976 and during the same bench-clearing melee, Graig Nettles body slammed Bill Lee to the ground and separated his throwing shoulder. At this time, free agency had come to baseball and Yankees owner George Steinbrenner made it his mission to sign as many star players as he could, a philosophy that was not shared by the owners of the Red Sox, the stingy Yawkey family.

All of this served to stoke the fires, not only among the teams, but among the fans, especially during the epic AL East races in 1977 and 1978. The Yankees prevailed in 1977 by a scant 2.5 games over both Boston and Baltimore, and in 1978, New York needed a 163rd game to finally put away the Red Sox to cap a miraculous rally from 14 games behind.

You all remember that, the special one-game playoff at Fenway Park when Bucky Dent earned a new middle name after his stunning three-run homer erased a 2-0 sixth-inning deficit and keyed a 5-4 Yankee victory that gutted the Hub and catapulted the Yankees to a second straight World Series title.

“Second place suits Boston,” Billy Martin once said. “A second-place baseball team for a second-rate town.”

Just as quickly as the rivalry came to a boil, it simmered again and there wasn’t much direct pennant-influencing competition until 1995 when MLB added one wild-card team per league for the postseason. The Red Sox won the division, but the second-place Yankees earned the wild card, making this the first season in which the teams qualified for the postseason together, though they did not meet.

Finally, starting in 1998, the Yankees and Red Sox began to dominate the AL East, though Boston - as was its lot in baseball life - suffered continued frustration as it not only finished runner-up to the Yankees five consecutive years through 2002, it lost the first playoff series between the two clubs, the 1999 AL Championship.

All of which leads me to the point of what you are going to be reading about this season at Pinstripe People: An in-depth exploration of the greatest period of the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry, the two-year battle that encompassed 2003 and 2004.

Nothing before, and nothing since, has ever matched the intensity of the rivalry the way those two seasons did when the vitriol flowed and the baseball the Yankees and Red Sox engaged in lifted it to an unprecedented level.

In those two seasons, the Yankees and Red Sox played baseball the way Alabama and Auburn play football against each other, the way Duke and North Carolina play basketball against each other, the way Ali and Frazier once punched each other. In those two seasons, every game, every inning, every pitch mattered, and even if you weren’t a fan of either team, you were caught up in the theater of it all because it seemed as if every game was on national television.

“I think if you ask any of the players, they’ll say you don’t even have to play these games at either ballpark,” Joe Torre said. “Play them in a big field somewhere in the middle, all 19 games, and they’ll get after it there. And that’s not a joke.”

Derek Jeter, David Ortiz, Mariano Rivera, Jorge Posada, Bernie Williams, Mike Mussina, Hideki Matsui, Jason Giambi, Manny Ramirez, Johnny Damon, Jason Varitek, Pedro Martinez, and Derek Lowe, who were part of the circus both years, would surely agree with Torre. Same for Nomar Garciaparra, Roger Clemens, and Andy Pettitte who were involved in 2003, and Alex Rodriquez, Gary Sheffield, Kevin Brown, Kevin Youkilis, Keith Foulke, and Curt Schilling who joined the fray in 2004.

Red Sox owner John Henry, who before becoming the majority owner of the Red Sox in 2001 had owned a 1 percent stake in the Yankees, said just before the start of the 2003 season, “It’s one of the sports world’s great rivalries. No one understands that better than George and I do. There is nothing better in sports than the great rivalries.”

What a time it was, when baseball in New York and Boston was akin to Armageddon. I hope you enjoy the weekly look back.

NEXT WEDNESDAY: Still feeling the sting of having their streak of four consecutive AL pennants snapped by the Angels in 2002, the Yankees started their roster construction for 2003 by out-bidding the Red Sox for Cuban defector Jose Contreras, leading Boston president Larry Lucchino to call Steinbrenner’s Yankees the “Evil Empire.”