I'm Enjoying the Yankees/Red Sox Rivalry

PHUTATORIUS
Let's be clear: I absolutely detest these two baseball teams. I hate hate hate them both — I like to think equally, although the Yankees' free-agent cannonball splash this offseason makes them more recently offensive. And theoretically, if you hate both teams, you should hate the rivalry, too, which is all anyone wants to talk about on any of the NINETEEN nights during the season when Boston and New York are playing baseball against one another.

It gets tiresome. It's tiresome that the 8 p.m. Sunday game on ESPN is always Yankees/Red Sox, if they have a weekend series. It's aggravating to show up at the Depot on Thursday for Trivia Night, only to find that they've suspended Trivia Night because New York and Boston are playing an "important" regular-season game. It's sad that Major League Baseball has compromised the integrity of its competition by introducing the unbalanced schedule — basically so that this rivalry can be joined as often as possible between April and October.

And now that Boston has grown into an American League powerhouse franchise with a standing and fan following at least equal to the Yankees' — and as these teams have fought tooth and nail, more often than not, for the AL East division title, if not for the pennant, in recent years — the rivalry has become overhyped, overblown, and overplayed.

In short, I hate hate hate everything about the Yankees and Red Sox, and so anything like this rivalry, which features them both and exalts them both, should absolutely get on my last nerve and shred it with a cheese grater.

Except now — right now and for now — I'm really enjoying it.
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Why's that, Phutatorius.?

I'm so glad you asked, Brother/Sister. Here's exactly why. Because I hate hate hate both of these teams with a white-hot, burning-acid hate, the only pleasure I can derive from having the media shove them in my face is in seeing them fail. Fail, Yankees! Fail, Red Sox! Fail miserably, and dramatically. Fail graphically and violently. Die! Die great, Shakespearean baseball deaths. Let the diamond dirt soak up great gobs of blood and sweat spilled in defeat. Let your wretched, unwashed, barbarian fan bases gnash their teeth and rend their knock-off jerseys in anguish and despair!

But of course that's not going to happen. These teams aren't going to fail: certainly not both of them, anyway. The Yankees spend too much money, and the Red Sox are too well-run. It would be too much to expect them both to crash and burn. No — the smart Yankee- and Red Sox-hater has to hedge his bets. He has to be content if just one of these teams fails in dramatic fashion. And although, in the bigger picture, both teams are doing well this year — they're running 1-2 in the division right now, with the Sox 12 games over .500 and the Yanks playing 8 games over even — I am pleased to report that the Yankees have lost eight straight games against the Red Sox this year.

AWESOME!

Let's develop the narrative a little more. The Yankees had dominated this rivalry, and the rest of baseball, for much of the last century. But since their last World Series title, the Red Sox — the RED SOX — have won two championships, while the Yankees' organization has floundered. New York actually failed to make the playoffs last year, with a payroll of over $200 million. This is the baseball equivalent of falling out of bed and failing to hit the ground. It was glorious. And now, after throwing $420 million at the problem last year, the Yankees still can't beat Boston.

Oh, yeah, fine: they can beat everybody else: they're 16 games better than .500 against the other teams. But they've lost eight in a row to Boston. Ha! Ha ha!

This is where the rivalry becomes useful for the Yankee- and Red Sox-hater. These teams have transcended the rest of the competition. It's not exactly Celtic-Rangers, but it's as close as the game of baseball allows. If we accept that both teams cannot simultaneously be ground down (or at least that this outcome is statistically improbable), let's run with the idea that one can absolutely dominate the other, and if we are able to ignore the winning team's success and focus specifically on the losing team's frustration and disappointment, some measure of Schadenfreude is available to us. There is great pleasure to be had here.

Going forward, until such time as the Yankees reestablish themselves in this rivalry, I will be rooting strongly for Boston to win its games against New York. Not because I like Boston at all, but because I am able to see Boston as a blunt instrument with which another team I hate hate hate in equal measure might be clubbed senseless and battered into the ground.

And, of course, if New York should turn this train around and win nine in a row against Boston, then go, Yanks!

Jackie's 62nd Anniversary? Really?

PHUTATORIUS
Major League Baseball plans to have all its players wear the number 42 tomorrow, to celebrate the 62nd anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the leagues' color barrier. I'm going to court controversy here and argue that this anniversary isn't worth celebrating.
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[First, a disclaimer for the folks who will surely say, "You don't want to celebrate Jackie? You racist!": I'm a great admirer of Jackie Robinson and what he did for baseball. I like to think that if I were living in 1947, I'd have been in the pro-Jackie camp, just as I'm in this country's minority of same-sex marriage supporters today. So don't read this as coming from some curmudgeonly white guy who snorts his nose at Black History Month and complains that we're too preoccupied, as a nation, with our racist past (or present, for that matter). Folks who know me get that I'm not that guy.]

I've often complained about the arbitrariness of "milestones" and "anniversaries." It's only our base-10 numbering system, after all, that makes a baseball player's every 100th home run "special" and a cause for a curtain call or commemoration in the papers. The constant celebration of these milestone events gets tiresome. (Paul Konerko and Jermaine Dye hit each hit his 300th home run yesterday. Whoop-de-frickin'-doo.) As for anniversaries, it seems we can't be satisfied postponing our moments of wistful nostalgia until the nice, round number of ten years have passed. No, it's every five years the newspapers invite us to remember "where we were when Kennedy was shot," as if there's something about 1826 or 1827 days (it's possible to straddle two leap years in a five-year span) that triggers our common cultural compulsion to reflect on an important event from the past.

We're even susceptible to a bit of this arbitrariness here at FO, with our 200 years of Lincoln and Poe and 100 years of The Futurist Manifesto. It is, after all, nice to think about our forebears, and anniversaries give us an occasion to single out great events and great people. So while these numbers 10, 15, 20, 25, 50, 100, 200 don't really mean anything, we make good use of them to ensure that we look regularly to the past, but not so regularly that these great people and events are no longer "special."

Which brings me to Jackie, an unquestionably great man whose moment was unquestionably great and important — not just to baseball, but to society writ large. He should be celebrated; he should be remembered. But is it not enough to celebrate him within the standard cultural parameters of Base 10 and the Five-Year Corollary? Do we have to celebrate his 62nd anniversary? Really? Because where does it stop? 62.5 is actually a more meaningful number. Maybe the ballplayers should save their 42s until October, when they can celebrate 1/16 of a millennium of integrated baseball under the bright lights of playoff baseball.

62? Really? You get the impression that the folks running MLB's maketing department are behind this, that they see Jackie Robinson as a way to tie baseball to society, to continue to impress us with the sport's cultural relevance — when this much should be apparent just from the natural ebb and flow of the game. Or maybe they just want to remind us about something good that the sport did once — but of course the events of April 15, 1947 had nothing to do with the National League and everything to do with just two men: Branch Rickey and Jackie. I'm not averse to the notion that 30 baseball teams, their owners, and league officials can celebrate what none of their predecessors really wanted back in the day. It just gets a little awkward — and starts to seem a little exploitative — now that they're reaching for the number 62 to have their feel-good moment.

62? Really?

Leave My Dog Alone

MITHRIDATES
From the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" department. Apparently Fenway Franks are being remade and the new supplier "is hoping to wow Fenway's Faithful with a frank that it says is meatier with more distinct flavors of garlic and smoke than anything previously served in the shadow of the Green Monster."
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I don't want meatier. I don't want garlic and smoke. I want the same lightly-steamed, no-protein, bland, mystery-animal-by-product wiener served in a wonder-bread style bun with mustard and relish that I've had since I can remember. I'm paying for gastronomical nostalgia here. If I want fine dining I'll go to L'Espalier.

Apparently they're using "leaner cuts of meat than in the old Fenway Frank!" Come on people! I'm not on a diet! I'm at the ballgame, making myself fatter and loving it.

As the first hot dogs rolled off the production line last week at the Chelsea factory, [Kayem Foods Inc., VP Matt] Monkiewicz took a deep breath and smiled: "It smells like Fenway Park."

Great, they're replacing one of the few perfect foods in the world with a wienerwurst that smells like stale urine and sweaty fat guy.

Look, I know everyone prefers their own ballpark cylindrical meat sausage and that's fine. I'm OK with that. Let them have their Dodger Dog if they can be bothered to show up to the game on time. Let them ruin their second-rate Yankee Dog with ketchup. It's not my concern. Really.

But for the love of god, don't mess with my perfect weenie!

A Baseball Fan's Thoughts on the WBC

PHUTATORIUS
I was mousing around the World Baseball Classic website last night, looking for reasons to be interested. Here's the best I could do:

*Yulieski, Yunesky, Yadier, Yolexis, Yosbany, Yuliesky, Yoennis. Y-names were hip in Cuba in the 1980s.
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*Cuba has a 6'-0", 260-pound catcher (named Yosbany). I'd pay money to watch a guy that size work behind the plate. God bless him — there are multiple knee surgeries in his future.

*On paper, it looks like Venezuela has blown by Puerto Rico in terms of baseball talent.

That's really about it. The reasons not to care about this tournament are abundant. It starts with the composition of the teams. Another "Ys Guy," Yuniesky Betancourt, is the Mariners' starting shortstop and should be on the Cuban team. But he and any other major league defectors weren't invited. Politics, politics, politics. Contrast the Italian roster, which, per the tournament's quirky eligibility rules, features guys like Lenny DiNardo (Place of Birth: Miami, Florida), Mark DiFelice (POB: Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania), Frank Catalanotto (POB: Smithtown, New York) and Chris Cooper (really? Chris Cooper? POB: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania). Under WBC rules, if you're eligible to be issued a passport from that country (a factor that is keyed entirely to the laxity of that nation's laws), you're eligible to play on that country's baseball team. I know that a fair amount of "carpetbagging" persists in FIFA's international tournaments, too, but this seems especially out of order, and I don't doubt the purpose of it is to populate rosters to fill out the tournament's sixteen-team field.

Still more problematic is the watered-down nature of the competition. The best of the best don't necessarily play in the tournament; major league teams will do what they can to keep their players out of it; the games are played early on in spring training, when the players are hardly at the peak of their conditioning. The tournament has a rule that imposes pitch counts on national team managers: 70 pitches max in the first round, 85 in the second, 100 in the semifinals and finals — with mandated days of rest between appearances. Some kinks in the format have been worked out: advancement from the first round won't be decided by bizarre tiebreakers, as in the last tournament. The bracket is altogether decipherable, though, so I call it a wash.

The FIFA World Cup works because even though it's club play that finances the sport — and the club owners have millions invested in the fragile knees and ankles of the players on their payrolls — every one of the players would sacrifice life and limb to play for his national team and win the Cup Final. The players are all-in, and the club owners aren't politically in a position to keep their players out of the tournament. Simply put, the World Cup is more important than the club leagues, whereas the WBC is a creature of Major League Baseball, and its subordination to MLB is written into its charter, all the way down to the last, detail-heavy regulation about how often and how long the national teams can play their pitchers.

It's possible that someday the WBC will grow into a World Cup-quality competition. It would need to step out from under MLB's thumb, and the players — not some of them, all of them — will have to care enough to put their bodies, and their million-dollar paydays, on the line, to vie for the honor of lifting the championship trophy for their country. I won't hold my breath. In the meantime, I'll tune in not for the drama of the competition, but for the novelty: say, of watching an all "Ys-Guys" battery — Yulieski pitching to Yosbany, and the massive Yosbany using his gravitational field to block a splitter in the dirt.

Is Curt Schilling Retired or Not?

PHUTATORIUS
. . . because if he's not, he probably shouldn't be blogging about trades he wants the Red Sox to make.

Awkward Spring Training Moment #1: Clay Buchholz (he of the rare consecutive letters h) waves hello to Schilling. "Hey, Curt, I'm still here!"

Updike at Rest

MITHRIDATES
John Updike died today. Google the name for more details than I care to provide here. I haven't read all or most of his stuff. OK, the only novel I've read is Rabbit Run, his brilliant story — cutting-edge risqué at the time — about the horror of being stuck in an unhappy marriage when your true passion lies elsewhere.

But if you haven't read his 1960 article about Ted Williams' last at-bat, then don't call yourself a baseball fan. If you don't understand why people love baseball, then read the article. Updike writes better than anyone ever has about the atmosphere at Fenway, how baseball is different, and why Ted Williams was one of a kind.
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At age 14 I was waiting for a plane to Nova Scotia when I saw the Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived sitting by himself. He was on his way up to Canada to go fishing (of course), and I chatted with him for a few minutes. I've relocated 13 times since college and almost nothing has survived from before the first move. But this autograph and crappy picture taken from my Kodak Disc camera are in it for the long-haul.
David Halberstam wins the prize for best Williams quote ever, about Ted's envy of the first African-American player in the American League, expressed loudly in the main dining hall of the Ritz-Carlton in Boston: "I wish I could have had Larry Doby's cock!" But there's no better explanation of why the above documents are priceless than Updike's article.

One day Phutatorius may write a similar article of equal caliber. That is, if any player of distinction ever finishes his career with the Cleveland Indians.

Married Hispanic Male?

MITHRIDATES
This Post article is just good clean fun. Is it baseball season yet?

In an explosive new book called "The Yankee Years," Torre gets most personal in his attacks against Alex Rodriguez, who he says was called "A-Fraud" by his teammates after he developed a "Single White Female"-like obsession with team captain Derek Jeter . . .

Might have to buy a copy.