There is one thing we know as the big and really bad Yankees head into Fenway Park for the first series of the season between them and the Red Sox: Yankee fans like their owner better than Sox fans like theirs these days. Like, a whole lot better.
Maybe Yankees vs. Red Sox will look like a real rivalry this weekend at old Fenway, and the Red Sox will find a way for the Yankees not to roll them all the way out on Jersey St. But the way the Yankees are playing in June and the way the Red Sox have looked all season, that doesn’t appear to be the way to bet.
As the Yankees very much look like The Yankees again, and look like they will absolutely be the best team in baseball once Gerrit Cole is back in the starting rotation, the Red Sox are just treading water at .500 in the American League East. It was another of their owners, Tom Werner, who promised during the off-season that the Sox team would go “full throttle” when it came to improving on last season’s last-place finish, which was Boston’s second in a row. But the reality is that a more accurate description of the ’24 Red Sox is this:
Full Neutral.
At a time when the Yankees, so much because of the addition of Juan Soto, when Hal Steinbrenner and Brian Cashman did go Full Throttle after an 82-80 season that was the Yankees worst since the 90s, the Red Sox did nothing dramatic to improve the team, spent no significant money between the end of last season and the beginning of this one, and are starting to make 2018 – when the Red Sox won their fourth World Series in this century and their second since the Yankees last won one in 2009 – seem as far away as 1918, the old marker for the Curse of the Bambino days.
The Yankees, just off the way they mostly just made the Royals – a pretty good team – look like the junior varsity in Kansas City, are heading in the right direction, gangbusters style. The Full Neutral Red Sox, on the other hand, seem to have no direction in the moment, and Sox fans believe, and passionately, that the principal owner, Henry, is far more interested in expanding his Fenway Sports Group than building another championship baseball team at Fenway Park, which is supposed to be Henry’s day job. Or was.
What both Yankee fans and Sox fans will see at Fenway this weekend, however the series plays out — and you know there will probably be surprises between now and Sunday night — is a divide between the two teams that seems far greater than the 14 games already between them in the standings, in both payroll and philosophy.
Incidentally, here is how Henry addressed Werner’s “full throttle” comment in a recent and lengthy and wildly defensive interview with the Financial Times:
“(Werner’s comments) overshadowed every other word, paragraph and interview of the winter because it reaches so deeply into the false belief that many fans and media have that you should mortgage the future each year for the present. You have to base acquisitions and dispositions on the future, not the past. That is unpopular generally.”
Yeah…..no.
Listen, John Henry is a very smart guy. Along with Werner and the late, great Larry Lucchino, they completely changed the Yankees vs. Red Sox narrative when they all got the Sox at the beginning at the beginning of this century after the Yankees had effectively stepped on the Sox after Ruth was sold to the Yankees. Lucchino famously said that he knew nobody could win the past from the Yankees, they owned the past, but that the Sox were about to start a brand new fight. Which they did with Luccino at the point, starting with four October nights in 2004, when everything between the two teams really did change.
The Sox won four World Series in 20 years since then. The Yankees have only won one and played in one. And it was just three years that the two teams played a Wild Card game at Fenway, one in which Cole didn’t make it out of the third inning. After that, the Red Sox ended up in the ALCS against the Astros, and were two games away from going back to the World Series before they stopped hitting. And have stopped doing anything of consequence since.
The Yankees? They didn’t finish in last place in 2023. It just felt that way in New York, and to their fans. And if Henry appears to be totally tone deaf these days to the issues his fan base has with the current management of the team and the current direction of the team, Steinbrenner was clearly listening to his own fans. We heard in the runup to the Soto trade that the Padres were asking for too much young pitching to get a deal done on Soto, even if he might turn out to be a one-year rental at Yankee Stadium. Reportedly, then, it was Steinbrenner who told Cashman he would back his play, and to do whatever it took to get the deal done.
This is the way Henry allowed Dave Dombrowski to run the Red Sox on their way to the title in 2018, with probably the greatest team in Red Sox history. Then Henry fired Dombrowski for spending too much to get that done. You see how that’s worked out in Boston, and in Philadelphia. Dombrowski is now running baseball operations with the Phillies, who basically have the same record right now as Steinbrenner and Cashman do.
That’s where we are with these two teams right now. The Yankees are back. The Red Sox? They might be backing toward last place again. Maybe the real rivalry right now isn’t between the Yankees and Red Sox. Maybe it’s between the Red Sox owner and his own fans.
