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19 Games: That's how many the Red Sox and the Yankees play against each other this season. In Boston it's a war. In New York it's a party

The fans and the players also diverge in their attitude toward the rivalry. Thanks to the unbalanced schedule adopted by major league baseball, the 19 meetings between Boston and New York represent the most between the two clubs in a regular season since 1960, when they played 22 times. (Expansion in 1961 reduced that figure to 18, but as recently as 1999 the teams met only 12 times.) To the dismay of old-timers like [Red Sox hitting coach Dwight] Evans and [Yankees' third base Willie] Randolph, this quickens the pulses of current players only slightly more than Playboy presents...Star Jones. Truth be told, members of both teams would prefer to spend the early part of the season beating up on AL East bottom feeders Baltimore, Tampa Bay and Toronto, and then focusing on each other come September. (Oddly, with more than two thirds of the season remaining, the rivals have already met 11 times and won't square off after a three-game series wraps up on Sept. 4.) "Right now, Boston is just another series," says New York reliever Steve Karsay, a Queens, N.Y., native who grew up a Yankees fan. "It doesn't mean that much."

The fans disagree. After Clemens surrendered seven runs in 3 2/3 innings on May 24, in a game Boston would win 9-8, the boos and chants of "Clemens sucks!" that accompanied his departure nearly equaled the decibel level at a DMX concert. Unlike the masses at Yankee Stadium last weekend, who jovially mocked the Red Sox with chants of "Nine-teen-eight-teen!" (the year the club last won a World Series), there is a palpable bitterness to the Boston crowds. Hanging in Fenway's concourse is a banner celebrating Clemens's two 20-strikeout games with the Red Sox; by the completion of the series, it was splattered with ketchup and mustard and spittle.

-- Jeff Pearlman

Issue date: June 10, 2002

Photograph by John Iacono