The time of the superpowers, when the Yankees and Red Sox were the greatest show in baseball, is over, and at Yankee Stadium this week the final pieces will fade into history. Roger Clemens and Mike Mussina are gone. Pedro and Gary Sheffield are in the broadcast booth, retired. Joe Torre is in the commissioner’s office, and Terry Francona in the Cleveland dugout.
Chapters are closing. In the last two years alone, Mariano Rivera, Derek Jeter and Andy Pettitte have retired. Rodriguez didn’t last the season, and now Mark Teixeira and David Ortiz will exit. Ortiz and Rodriguez were the last active links on each team to the last border war, in 2004, the last time the Red Sox and Yankees met in the postseason.
In between has been clubhouse beer and fried chicken, the boom-and-bust of last place or championship on one side, yearlong drug suspensions and yearlong goodbyes on the other, and with the Blue Jays, Rays and the Orioles in the playoffs reviving themselves in between. Baseball’s 50-year assault on the Yankee brand, the inability to get younger and a heavy caboose of big contracts have finally taken a toll in the Bronx.
“There was a time when we were the sun and all the planets revolved around us,” Yankees general manager Brian Cashman told me. “Today, we’re Pluto.”
September, however, suggested an awakening of the force, and maybe, just maybe, Red Sox-Yankees is ready to resume hostilities atop the AL East, and maybe once more atop baseball.
The rest of the country might blanch at the thought of Boston and New York reloading for another takeover, but baseball desperately needs this revival. Individually, the league’s players do not rank on the same level of national mega-stardom as Tom Brady or Aaron Rodgers, LeBron James or Steph Curry, even though Mike Trout is just as good at his job as they are at theirs. Trout is the best player in the game and on a national scale barely anyone knows who he is. Baseball has chosen regional money over national prominence, and while it might not seem to be paying much of a financial price, it is paying a heavy one in the imagination.
The Red Sox have already arrived. They have David Price, and they’ll enter this last game at Yankee Stadium having clinched the division after losing 84 games last year. The Red Sox entered Tuesday’s final series with the Yankees having beaten New York 11 of 16 times. They have three MVP candidates in Ortiz, Mookie Betts and Xander Bogaerts, and an outside fourth in Dustin Pedroia.
For now, the Red Sox have the advantage. Jackie Bradley Jr., who at one point looked like the center-field version of Rey Ordonez, proved that the wizard with the glove could also swing the bat. Betts is a star, and Bogaerts doesn’t even look as if he has yet hit full throttle. Their young nucleus will get its first taste of October. This team could very well win the World Series.
Unless the Cubs and Red Sox are on a collision course, a Boston World Series run isn’t nearly as attractive as a Boston run with New York standing in the way. Even a one-time dream matchup between Theo Epstein’s past and present isn’t as good for the sport as a sustained return of Sox-Yankees. The San Francisco Giants, after being a version of the Red Sox in terms of success, heartbreaks and living in the shadow of a bigger, more successful rival in the Dodgers, won three World Series in six years but with one gigantic hole — the Dodgers and Giants still have never met in the postseason.
If baseball cannot generate a LeBron James/Reggie Jackson/Ken Griffey-style box-office hit, then it is up to the historical rivalries to give the sport games worth circling on the calendar. The Yankees folded in September, but the sudden star Gary Sanchez didn’t. During a four-game sweep by the Red Sox at Fenway, Sanchez hit .368 (7-for-19) with two home runs. In the opener against the Red Sox at Yankee Stadium on Tuesday, Sanchez took David Price deep. The Yankees, old for so long, finally looked fresh. The day after Rodriguez was released, Tyler Austin and Aaron Judge hit consecutive home runs in their first at-bats as Yankees, then hit .197 and .179, respectively. Austin, on the bench much of this month, also took Price deep Tuesday.
After dropping the enormous ballast that was Alex Rodriguez in mid-August, and now with no players on the roster who made their big league debut in the 1990s, the Yankees — on the strength of their young players and the recognition that, yes, finally, the team was ready to move on from the old days — have begun embracing the future.
The month of September was brutal for the Yankees. They started off 0-2, won seven in a row, and started thinking big, in reach not only of the arsenic-laced wild-card game that is baseball’s nonsensical one-game postseason, but also of the division. But the consecutive stretch of playing Boston and the NL West-winning Dodgers three times finished them — at least for 2016.
Baseball might have succeeded in neutering its most valuable asset in order for that dreaded word “parity” to have some sort of meaning, but the game loses power when there are no villains, no mountains to overcome, no wars worth fighting. Unless September will be remembered as nothing more than an empty tease, 2017 will begin with the Red Sox and Yankees as the favorites in the division: youth versus youth, the game’s greatest street fight renewed with new names finally unsaddled by the old ones.
