"The Red Sox-Yankees rivalry is dead and baseball has helped kill it: Eighteen meetings a year at four hours each has watered down the product to the point of overkill and taken the starch out of things," Berthiaume wrote on ESPN.com. "These games have become overdone and overblown, almost meaningless."
The declaration came just hours after the Red Sox and Yankees wrote another classic in their long history, a 10-inning affair that saw Boston battle back against the greatest closer in history and win on a walk-off hit from a kid who's putting together a rookie season for the ages. That happened after Josh Beckett, who's second in the AL in ERA, pitched another beauty, after Brett Gardner hit a towering blast to give the Yankees a lead, and after both pitching staffs did their best tightrope acts all night long.
It was a marvelous game, and to say the rivalry is dead while we're still rubbing our eyes after just a few hours of sleep? That's madness, Berthiaume. Madness.
For starters, the "four hours" argument needs to go. The average time for the 12 Red Sox-Yankees games this year has been 3 hours, 26 minutes. Not the fastest games, sure, but only one Boston-New York game this year has lasted 4 hours, and that was the extra-innings contest on Sunday night/Monday morning (maybe if ESPN aired its games an hour earlier on Sunday evenings, it wouldn't be so much of a problem, eh, Berthiaume?). Plus, if you had a front-row ticket to watch Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel, would you whine about how long it was taking? No! You'd sit back and watch the master of his craft do what he does for as long as it takes.
OK, so maybe your first thought when you see Nick Swisher hamming it up for the camera isn't Michelangelo, but you get the point. If you love baseball, and you love watching baseball, what's an extra half-hour between you and a rival?
Berthiaume's other claim is that the animosity that used to define the Boston-New York rivalry has essentially evaporated from the field. There's no more Thurman Munson–Carlton Fisk moments, no more Don Zimmer–Pedro Martinez frenzies, no more Jason Varitek–Alex Rodriguez fights (though if those two were to repeat their bout seven years later, it might be difficult to watch).
All that's true. We know that A-Rod and David Ortiz hang out. We know that Dustin Pedroia became buddies with Derek Jeter at the World Baseball Classic. We saw Adrian Gonzalez tap Robinson Cano on the behind after attempting a clean but hard takeout slide on Sunday night, as if to say, "Gee, golly, great play, opponent!"
The rivalry is no doubt different, but dead? To borrow a line from Berthiaume's colleagues … Come on, man!
People lined Lansdowne Street on Friday, Saturday and Sunday for the opportunity to pay $20 solely for the right to enter baseball's oldest ballpark. They don't even get a seat, just a place to stand under a metal roof, behind about 40 rows of seats, where they can sip on an $8 beer and not see where fly balls are. People want to be at Fenway just to be a part of the rivalry. That's why the cheapest tickets you could find for Saturday's afternoon game were $168. It's why, as you can see from the ESPN replay, hardly a soul had left Fenway Park before Josh Reddick's game-winning hit in the 10th, despite the fact that the clock had struck midnight long before that pitch from Phil Hughes.
Berthiaume's grander point is that baseball needs to change a couple of things. First, the Red Sox and Yankees should no longer play each other 18 times. That's a good suggestion. Eighteen is too many times for anyone to play anyone.
The other necessary change: Add a second wild-card team, with a one-game playoff between the two teams determining a spot in the ALDS. That's fine, too. Anything to add more drama and more importance to games in August and September leads to better baseball and more entertainment, and isn't that what it's all about?
Both ideas are just dandy, but their significance is not reliant upon the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry being "dead." You can look at the current structure of the playoffs, or of MLB's scheduling, and you could say the meetings between the two teams are "meaningless." But if you watch the kind of baseball we all witnessed over the weekend at Fenway, and if you see the celebrations — both in the dugouts and in the crowd — and you listen to the roar of Fenway Park on early Monday morning, you can't tell the 40,000 people in the building and the millions watching at home that what they witnessed wasn't special.
It was exceptional, and it has all those folks looking on the calendar for the next meeting between the Red Sox and Yankees. You can call that a lot of things, but you can't call it meaningless, and you most certainly can't call it dead.
