What are our favorite memories of Yankees -red Sox?
Another chapter is about to write in the most famous baseball rivalry. With the Boston Red Sox visiting the New York Yankees this Thursday at the Yankee Stadium, we review some of our favorite memories of this baseball classic, be it a story behind scenes or simply moments that impressed us as fans and that changed us forever. These are just some stories.
Buster Olney: The crust started from my memories, the scar’s fabric broke, and I suppose we must talk about the ugly and frightening day the Yankees faced and the Red Sox on October 2, 1978. He was 14 years old.
My family’s dairy farm is located in Randolph Center, Vermont, a town of 400 people and 1,000 cows, but to record: it was not a fan of the Red Sox. I had read a book about Sandy Koufax when I was 8 years old, and not long after that, when I played in the minor leagues for the first time, it was for a team called the Dodgers. Naturally, the Dodgers of Steve Garvey, Davey Lopes and Dusty Baker became my team.
The worst discussion I had with my incredible, beloved and deceased mother was about my photo of the Secondary Yearbook in my last year, but I won because I appeared with a Dodgers cap and a Lakers sweater next to one of our cows and she expected something better of her offspring.
The Dodgers lost the World Series in 1974, but when they finally beat the Cincinnati Reds in 1977 and arrived at the World Series, Reggie Jackson destroyed them. Five home runs in the World Series, three in the epic game 6. With the last out, I cried and became one more than those who want to beat the hated Yankees. In 1978, the Red Sox were my choice to fulfill that slogan when they enjoyed a wide advantage in the east of the American League, up to 14 games, before collapsing. The Yankees reached them and passed in September.
The Red Sox recovered just at the end of that regular season, forcing the tiebreaker of a game, which was scheduled for 2:30 in the afternoon on the east coast. Usually, the school bus left me at home at 3:15, so it was possible for me to miss some tickets. I asked my mother if I could miss school to see the game. She agreed, as long as she helped her the first half of the day stacking firewood.
In the lower part of the second entrance, Carl Yastrzemski connected a home run to the right garden, near the Pesky Pole. It was evident that the Yankees starter, Ron Guidry, so dominant that year, was simply not the same, maybe he was a bit tired, but only one or two minutes after Yaz returned to the happy bench of the Red Sox, I heard a frantic cry of Ed, my stepfather.
“Buster!” He shouted from the stable, “the cows left!”
Our cows, about 30, had crossed a fence in the northeast corner of our property, in the direction of a neighbor and a neighbor. We had a cow, Debbie, which had a pointed tail, after his mother confused him with the umbilical cord at birth, with especially thick skin that made it a mutant that broke the fences.
There was no debate, there was no discussion about what was going to happen next: I would have to go looking for the cows, using a grain cube to attract them back to our property, but I did not know if this would take me an entrance, five entries or the rest of the game. With tears of anger, I ran along a cows path towards the top of the hill, enraged by the injustice of life, cursing Debbie, cursing Debbie’s mother for turning Debbie into a monstrous destructive of fences and, of course, cursing the Yankees.
However, bringing back to the cows took me less than an hour, and started watching the game in the sixth entrance, just in time for Boston to add a race and take an advantage of 2-0, but at the top of the seventh inning, Bucky Dent was immortalized with the bat he had borrowed from Mickey Rivers. Dent raised the ball to the left and, looking at Yastzemski he folded his body disbelief when he saw that the ball fell into the network that was placed at the top of the ‘Green Monster’ in those days.
You could hear the screams of joy of the Yankees players about the stunned silence of a fans of six states. And so the famous regret of New England was born, “Bucky F — Ing dent”.
In the eighth entrance, Reggie Jackson, yes, he again connected a home run. The Red Sox lost 5-4 for the lower part of the novena, which would be full of moments that, in those days, seemed to distinguish the two franchises. When Jerry Remy connected a single to the right garden with a corridor in First, the Yankees right gardener, Lou Piniella, briefly blinded by the sun, extended her glove and caught the ball in a bounce. Luck? Intelligence? Both? Rick Burleson, from Boston, stopped suddenly when he passed through the second base, the classic conservatism for a Boston team that was based on the home runs and Burleson would be stranded in third when Yaz hit a elevated to third to finish the game.
I remember doing the tasks of the barn in silence that night, fearing what seemed inevitable. Having survived the playoff match with the Red Sox, the Yankees beat the Kansas City Royals in the American League Championship series, and then faced the Dodgers in the World Series, for the second consecutive year.
The Dodgers won the first two games of the 1978 World Series – the 2 game ended when Bob Welch withdrew with a line Reggie Jackson – and I doubled my bets with Donnie Russell and the other Yankees fans in Randolph Union High School. But the Yankees would return, with Reggie playing a fundamental role: their hip crossed in the trajectory of a launch and had to sentence it by interference, but the umpires failed that decision. The Yankees won games 3, 4 and 5. In game 6, Reggie connected a home run in front of Welch and cried bitterly. Reggie and the Yankees made me cry a lot. In 1998, The New York Times He assigned me to cover Manhattan’s mules. A decade before, the avid fan of the Dodgers in me disappeared when I began to cover professional baseball, a rapid transition that surprised me. After that, I looked for good stories and that good things happen to good people.
In that first spring training in the Yankees camp, I saw Reggie standing next to a batting cage, I approached and filed a conversation, probably about the young Derek Jeter. All very professional. However, while Reggie and I talked, several thoughts went through a corner of my brain. I can’t believe I am talking to Reggie Jackson. I can’t believe how much this man tortured my adolescence. My God, I used to despise him.
Reggie was great, great, speaking about the sport he loved. The sport we love. Even when our hearts breaks us.
“I’m hating you”
Tim Kurkjian: When Aaron Boone and I were working together at Monday Night Baseball for AM850 Many years ago, I did the ICE Bucket Challenge, then I challenged ‘Boonie’. He had 24 hours left to throw a bucket of ice water on his head. We were on tour in Boston. He went to the hotel bar at noon and asked the young Cantinero if he would be willing to throw an icy water bucket on his head.
“Of course,” said the young singer. “I am a fan of the Red Sox. You are Aaron Boone. I hate you.”
The premonition
Howard Bryant: My favorite memory of Red Sox and Yankees: game 7 of the American League Championship series in 2003. Willie Randolph is preparing for the game. He was the second base holder of the Bronx in 1978 when they erased a deficit of 14 games and beat Massachusetts in a classic playoff game that took place in Fenway Park. “What do you think?” I asked him. “This Red Sox team is really.”
“Yes, they are,” Willie replied. “Do you know what? They are even a little better than us … but I have been enough time here to know that, every time we must overcome them, we do it. Today it will not be different.”
Red Sox attack Roger Clemens and get him early from the game. They are winning 4-0, then 5-2. They have Pedro Martínez in the mound. Finally it is happening, but the Yankees win in 11 innings thanks to the home run of Aaron Boone.
Already very night, when the truck of the visitors is gone, George Steinbrenner, with dark lens, celebrates and says “We win again!”.
A little earlier, with tears in his eyes, Theo Epstein said “they won. Well for them. Next year we have to win us.” The reaction of all who were there was the same: yes, sure.
The breakdown of the heart and joy
Joon Lee: I had to grow in Boston in the 2000s and of course I remember the mixture of sadness and emptiness left by Aaron Boone in 2003, but I couldn’t wait to see what happened the following year with the Red Sox. They beat the Yankees in 2004 and I had to watch their triumph in the World Series on a small television in family cuisine. On the day of the parade, the classes were canceled throughout the city so that we could see the team celebrate in the traditional Boston boats.
Without the breakdown of the heart that I suffered in 2003 and then the Jublio of 2004, I am sure that today I would not be sitting on my computer writing these words in the face of the coverage of the 2021 commoding game between these two teams that lit the spark of my passion for sports.
The police horse
Matt Marrone: I was born in the Bronx, so being fond of the Yankees was in my blood, but he was not the typical person for many things: he used to wear a glove of the Jim Rice model in the small leagues, he loved to go to Fenway Park and was a great fan of Wade Boggs. When ‘Chickn Man’ left Boston to sign with the Yankees as a free agent, he was ecstatic. Not only my favorite team had just added a star of the Red Sox-a great tradition that began with those who-but we were talking about a player that I had continued despite being in the rival team.
Four years later, I was with my dad in old Yankee Stadium, shouting with all my strength. I was first year at the University and had just seen live for the first time as my team won the World Series. In addition to that, Wade Boggs grabbed a police horse to ride for the stadium! The stadium trembled. Finally, Boggs got off the horse, stopped at home and greeted fans with his Yankees cap. I was very excited about the future Hall of Fame but much more because of the fact that I was no longer in Boston.
