The greatest rivalries in sport - Yankees v Red Sox and the Curse of the Bambino

Red Sox fans yell at Alex Rodriguez as he throws his bat after striking out in at 2012 clash at Fenway Park. Photo /The Boston Globe via Getty Images

The Alternative Commentary Collective’s Agenda podcast is launching four special episodes under the “Versus” banner in which they examine some of the greatest ever sporting rivalries. This week we travel to the eastern seaboard of the USA and dig into the most-storied feud in America’s pastime. The ACC’s series is powered by Bonds Chaffe Off Undies.

Week one: Auckland v Canterbury and the rugby rivalry that defined the 1980s

Week two: India v Pakistan and the most intense cricket rivalry on the planet

There are some sporting rivalries that seem to exist in a box all of their own. The enmity shared between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, consummated with a punch-up in May, 1903, is one.

By any competitive metric, it isn’t really a rivalry at all. It is a Big Brother beatdown. The numbers are hopelessly lopsided. The team from the Bronx has 27 World Series titles and 41 American League pennants; the team from Beantown has nine titles and 14 pennants.

So if it’s not especially competitive, what is it about the dog-eared and hapless Sox and the uber-slick and successful Yankees that makes it so special?

Well, it’s a kind of Field of Dreams-like mysticism; a mysticism that has led fans of both franchises to believe their success (Yankees) and failure (Red Sox) is preordained.

This is a rivalry dominated by a curse that reads like a Shakespearean play, but to understand that, you first have to understand the stage it was set on.

Both Boston and New York have rich traditions across the US’ ‘Big Four’ sports, but at heart they’re baseball towns. The summer pastime is a religion in the Bronx as it is in Boston and the two most holy cathedrals are Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park. But the rivalry predates the diamond — the Boston-New York civic rivalry is as old as European settlement in the New World itself.

Bostonians and New Yorkers have always had a healthy disdain for each other, right from the time the puritans, escaping religious persecution in Britain, laid down anchor in what became New England with Boston at its centre.

For a long time Bostonians saw themselves as the cultural elite of the USA, with its rich education institutions, literary traditions and its place at the epicentre of the American Revolutionary War. The key year in the civic rivalry, however, was 1825 when the Erie Canal was opened. It connected New York to the midwest via the Great Lakes and almost overnight turned the city into a manufacturing and trading powerhouse. Any dispute over which city ‘owned’ the eastern seaboard was over.

Except when it came to sports, that is.

The Yankees needed the Sox. They were the third major league team in the city after the Brooklyn Dodgers and the dominant New York Giants and while those two were natural rivals in the National League, the Yankees, who shared the Polo Grounds with the Giants, had no local American League rival.

When they met in 1903 for the first time, as the New York Highlanders and Boston Americans (teams changed nicknames all the time back then), the game ended in a fight. The rivalry was set.

The Red Sox were immediately successful, winning five World Series — 1903, 1912, 1915, 1916 and 1918. One of their first superstars was pitcher Cy Young, who gave his name to the annual award for the best pitcher in each league. Of more importance to the history of the two franchises, however, was another Boston pitcher who was hiding his greatest talent.

George ‘Babe’ Ruth had established himself in Boston as a dominating southpaw pitcher but, when he wasn’t drinking and womanising, what he really wanted to do was hit home runs. In 1918, his fifth year in Boston, he was used as a position player on days he wasn’t pitching. The following year he broke the single-season home run record with 29. He was a bona fide superstar, having won 89 games as a pitcher for the Sox in their most dominant period, while also becoming known as the most feared hitter in the game. Nicknamed the Bambino, he was Shohei long before Shohei Ohtani.

So Boston sold him.

To New York.

Wait, what?

Babe Ruth was a pioneer of the sport and will always eclipse any other player.

Yep, Boston owner Harry Frazee, a theatre impresario who was in constant need of cash to finance projects, sold Ruth to the Yankees on December 26, 1919, the bleakest day in Red Sox history. It didn’t just change the on-field fortunes, but the financial calculus of the rivalry forever. These were the days before broadcast deals and seven-figure corporate sponsorships. The way owners made money was by selling tickets, and nothing sold tickets like the prospect of a home run and nobody hit home runs like Ruth.

If you believe Bostonians, the transaction came with a hex, the Curse of the Bambino, which condemned the Red Sox to decades of misery. You might say the curse is just mystical hocus pocus, but the misery part was cold, hard facts.

Within a few years of the sale, the Yankees had enough money to move out of Manhattan’s Polo Grounds they shared with the Giants and into a new building in the Bronx — Yankee Stadium, the House that Ruth Built, the biggest, grandest and most profitable arena in all of baseball. It was literally built for Ruth, with a shorter distance to the fence in right field to suit his left-handed swing and when fielding — he had given up pitching by now — it was designed so he never had to look into the afternoon sun.

The Yankees won their first World Series in 1923 and for the next 40 years they never really stopped. Ruth left the Yankees after the 1934 season, having added four titles to the three he won in Boston. His curse long outlived his death from throat cancer in 1948.

The Yankees paraded a phalanx of stars, from Ruth and Lou Gehrig to Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford and Mickey Mantle. The Red Sox, even in the years when they had arguably the greatest hitter of all time, Ted ‘The Splendid Splinter’ Williams, kept finding new ways of losing. On the rare occasions they won the American League pennant, they’d lose the World Series.

By the time 1978 rolled around it was less of a rivalry than a Boston-sized chip on the game’s shoulder, and that wasn’t improved when the Red Sox threw away a 14-game lead in the standings to precipitate a one-game playoff at home to the Yankees to earn the right to play Kansas City Royals for the American League pennant. Boston was leading 2-0 in the seventh innings when Bucky Dent hit a three-run homer over Fenway’s famous Green Monster. The improbability of it was shocking. Dent was a light-hitting shortstop who hit a total of 40 home runs across 12 major league seasons. The curse was alive and Dent was immortalised in Boston as Bucky F***ing Dent.

The Yankees, of course, went on to win the World Series that year.

So powerful was the curse it even crossed boroughs in New York to Queens. In 1986, with the Red Sox leading the New York Mets 3 games to 2 in the World Series and winning 5-3 in the sixth game with just one out needed and nobody on base, The Bambino spun in his grave and the Red Sox melted down in such brutal fashion that it’s been parodied everywhere from The Simpsons to Curb Your Enthusiasm.

More pain, more misery. Worse was to follow.

In 1995 the wild card system was introduced that made it possible for the Red Sox and Yankees to meet in the postseason. In 2003 both teams advanced to the American League Championship Series. The Red Sox forced a game seven at Yankee Stadium where the best pitcher in baseball, Pedro Martinez, had them up 5-2 in the eighth innings. Manager Grady Little left him in too long, Martinez started to wilt and in extra innings the Yankees won on a walk-off home run. Little never managed again as The Bambino’s ghost cackled his way around the outfield.

It seemed nothing could kill off the curse, but there was a circuit breaker sitting in Texas.

In the offseason, Alex Rodriguez, A-Rod, was the best player in baseball, was traded to the Red Sox but the Players’ Association nixed the deal and the Yankees stole in to grab him. Instead of condemning the Sox again, something shifted.

For years, Boston had tried to become a facsimile of the Yankees but it never worked. In 2002, team president Larry Lucchino threw his hands in the air and called the Yankees the “Evil Empire”. With their pinstripes, gelled hair and no facial hair rule, the Yankees were the corporate behemoth and A-Rod was their latest, shiniest toy. The Sox instead grew beards, wore their uniforms untucked, got mud on their knees, did shots of Jack Daniels before key games and called themselves the Idiots.

The Idiots found themselves back in the ALCS and down 0-3 after being embarrassed 19-8 at Fenway Park in game three. What followed was three crazy, off-script games that Boston had no right to win but somehow did.

All the stars turned out for game seven, including a future megalomaniac called Donald Trump who, when interviewed, said: “The Yankees will win because (owner) George Steinbrenner (owner) is a winner.” Not so much. Boston blew it out 10-3, becoming the first team to win a seven-game series from 0-3 down. The crowd was stunned. The world was stunned. Movies were made.

Two feature-length or episodic documentaries have been made on the series — Four Days in October and The Comeback — while Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch was reimagined for a baseball audience with the action coalescing around the series.

The Red Sox went on to beat St Louis 4-0 in the World Series and the Curse of the Bambino was finally laid to rest.

The Sox have won four World Series this century (2004, ’08, ’13 and ’18). The Yankees, meanwhile, have remained the most consistently excellent team and the sport’s most valuable franchise, yet have added just one more title.

Is it still the rivalry to end all baseball rivalries?

Boston’s 21st-century successes have reduced the mystique. The dichotomy between perennial winners and losers has gone. The Yankees are still better. Historically they win 55 of every 100 games the two teams play. They still have all the titles and most of the money, but the Red Sox can no longer wallow in misery. They’ve got a bunch of titles and plenty of cash themselves.

The Curse of the Bambino might be dormant, but the Boston-New York thing will never die.

– Words by Dylan Cleaver