Is Yankees-Red Sox back to being the best rivalry in baseball?

Sep 14, 2013; Boston, MA, USA; New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez (13) returns to the dugout during the ninth inning against the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park. The Boston Red Sox won 5-1. Mandatory Credit: Greg M. Cooper-USA TODAY Sports
Sep 14, 2013; Boston, MA, USA; New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez (13) returns to the dugout during the ninth inning against the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park. The Boston Red Sox won 5-1. Mandatory Credit: Greg M. Cooper-USA TODAY Sports /
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With the Yankees and Red Sox back on top of the AL East, are they back to being the best rivalry in baseball?

Headed into Friday night’s action, on the first day of May, the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox are first and third in the AL East, separated by just a game and sandwiching the surprising Tampa Bay Rays.

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The Yankees are doing Yankees things and the Red Sox, Red Sox things. In other words, both are annoyingly patient at the plate, taking pitches and swinging for the fences. And in both cases, it’s working.

Hanley Ramirez leads baseball (tied with Seattle’s Nelson Cruz) with 10 big flies through the first month of the season. Mark Teixeira is next with eight bombs.

Alex Rodriguez has five in what has been a somewhat surprising resurgence when he was considered by most to be done, partially because he’d been mostly terrible the last few years he’d played, and because he hadn’t played since 2013.

As a team the Yankees are third in home runs with 29, while Boston is seventh with 26.

So if nothing else, the Yankees and Red Sox have reacquired the identity that has made them so annoying to most baseball fans (unless you are part of Red Sox Nation or Yankee fandom).

And that partially helps us answer the question at hand. If everyone but their fans hates each team, that is in some sense good for the entire game of baseball. It’s harder to hate teams who are terrible (see the Oakland Raiders the past decade-plus). We end up just feeling sorry for them.

And if both teams are hated by the entire baseball world, there tends to be a weird brotherhood that develops between the Yankees and Red Sox–weird, though, because it causes them to pit more hatred toward the other franchise to a greater degree than they might otherwise.

It’s as if they are battling each other for more hatred. It’s like when the teams get together, it’s a battle for which team can make the other 28 teams and their fans hate them more.

Then again, it should be noted that last year’s darlings, the Kansas City Royals, have added a chip to their shoulder this season, and are trying to steal some of that hatred, starting a fight with every team who dares look at them funny. The Chicago White Sox though have been the primary perpetrator of their wrath.

But in seeing the Royals and their antics this season, we are introduced to an interesting dynamic, one we thought we may never see in Major League Baseball without a true revenue-sharing system: a small-market team rising to the popularity level across baseball equal with the Yankees and Sox.

Here’s the thing: no matter how annoying the Royals’ antics become (and it’s the opinion of this writer that it only makes them more awesome), we can’t really hate the Royals. They will always be the underdog, even if they one day rattle off 10 consecutive AL pennants, or something ridiculous like that.

But the big bad Yankees and Red Sox, with their oodles of cash, brashness and northeastern smugness, will always be the most hated teams in baseball. Or at least that’s the narrative we are supposed to believe–that they will always be battling each other on the national scene for “most hated team”.

That’s what makes their rivalry what it is. It’s not only a battle for best team in the American League East. It’s a battle for supremacy in baseball and to gain all the hatred baseball fans can throw against them in a voodoo spiritual sort of way.

But the real battle, because the two are inevitably linked to one another becomes them as the big monster high-budget teams against the lower-budget franchises like the Royals. And for once in baseball, it seems the low budget team is completely unafraid.

They have all the swagger and “F-you” character usually reserved for the big bad guys in baseball. They care little that the Yankees and Red Sox are supposed to own baseball. They’ll take all comers and play their similarly annoying small ball of swinging at every pitch, stealing 100 bases, bunting and playing great defense.

And they’ll beat these bashing squads made perfectly in the image of the 21st century game of baseball.

So no, the Yankees-Red Sox is not again the best rivalry in baseball. It’s been supplanted by a more all-inclusive rivalry: big market versus small market–most perfectly illustrated and illumined by the Royals.

Yankees-Red Sox is merely a subset within the grander picture, but an important one to be sure.

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