By some grace of the baseball gods, the Red Sox and Yankees are facing off in the wild card for a second consecutive year. The Sox got blown out 9–0 by baseball’s most evil franchise on Tuesday night, and by the time you read this, they may already be done. Still, the hate-soaked pressure cooker of October baseball between two of the greatest adversaries may be crucial in maintaining the time-honored concept of a rivalry itself.
Perhaps there is no more important aspect in all of American sports than two teams that truly loathe each other facing off. Look through the most famous moments and tell me what you see: Bird and Magic, Ali and Frazier, the “Kick Six,” Pedro versus 72-year-old Don Zimmer. These are the moments where the intersection of manifest destiny and athletic competition comes together in the clearest light. Your best versus ours, to the victor go the spoils.
But it seems like the rivalry is fading. In 2023, MLB introduced the “balanced schedule” in order to ensure that each club plays the 29 other teams every season, and the consequence was a loss of six matchups against intradivisional squads, the equivalent of two weekend series per opponent. The idea was simple: if you’re a Mets fan living in, say, Toronto, you will now have at least three chances to watch your favorite team play every season. On the flip side, the shift allows for situations to happen, such as when the Red Sox and Yankees did not face off until the 65th game of a 162-game season in 2023.
Even in college football, where fans are at their most territorial and the passion is still very much alive, many venerable matchups have been caught in the crossfire of realignment. Take Notre Dame versus USC, a heavyweight clash that has been played nearly every year since 1926 and made the names of legends such as Joe Montana and Reggie Bush in the process. When USC joined the Big Ten, it inherited a nine-game conference schedule and cross-country travel, and it decided a late-season Notre Dame game would hurt its playoff chances. The two couldn’t agree on a date, leaving the series off the calendar until 2030, when it returns as a lower-stakes season opener. Again, the rivalry is lost because someone decided that it’s more important to play games against a wide range of nearly random opponents than the foes of years past.
But this year’s edition of Yankees-Red Sox proves that the rivalry is alive and well, as long as we allow it to be. Willson Contreras kept it alive by inducing a benches-clearing brawl after some choice words to pitcher Will Warren in late June; Walpole-native Yankees ace Cam Schlittler has posted a .56 ERA in 32.1 career innings against his hometown team en route to becoming Public Enemy No. 1 in Beantown.
Fans have a role to play in all this. As rivalries move to X threads and Instagram comment sections, we can do our part by keeping the human hatred of it all going. So, if you see a Yankees fan on the street in the next couple of days, flip ‘em the bird, give ‘em a good ol’ “f– you,” do it for the good of us all.
