The Yankees-Red Sox Arms Race is 🔙 and That’s Great for Baseball

Drew Balis
Jul 20, 2017 · 3 min read

If you’ve read anything I’ve written on Medium in the past, you know that I usually like to go really deep and blow things out.

That’s not the case here. I’m not an expert on the subject matter. I just have an opinion, and having opinions is cool so I wanted to share mine.

I didn’t grow up in the heat of the early 2000s Yankees-Red Sox rivalry as neither was my favorite team, but it served as one of my first introductions to baseball.

My dad’s favorite player growing up was Carl Yastrzemski, so naturally between his influence and wanting to root for the underdog, I leaned toward the Red Sox every October.

Aaron Boone’s home run was really cool though.

At this point, Tom Brady only had one Super Bowl. Kevin Garnett was a young kid in Minnesota, and Patrice Bergeron had just been drafted by the Bruins.

Soon enough, Boston started winning everything, and it was like ‘Cool, I don’t like you either. I’m gonna go hang out with Cleveland now while I wait for the Phillies to win a championship.’

And then it felt like the rivalry suddenly went away. Both teams went through their own rebuilding stages and were no longer October regulars.

You’d have to go back to 2009 to find the last time both teams were in the playoffs and back to the infamous 2004 to find the last time they met.

The former feels like it’s a mere few months away from changing, and the latter might not be far behind, and all of that is great for the sport.

Baseball is in a weird state right now. There’s a lot of home runs, a lot of strikeouts, and a lot of really good and young players at impact positions, but the league hasn’t quite figured out how to market them yet, and you can’t rely on a ‘Team hasn’t won in 108 years’ storyline every October.

It could use some not-so-distant Yankees-Red Sox hatred.

The teams just wrapped up a four-game series that included a walk-off win, multiple shutouts, and a marathon 16-inning game.

Two stud right fielders. Two power-arm closers.

It wasn’t the games that made the rivalry so great though. It was the chess matches within the games, the ‘jump in at the final second’ to mess up the other team’s plans’ type of personnel moves.

Don’t just make your team better, but directly play keep away from the other side and make them worse.

Enter Todd Frazier.

A flawed player who’s never had an OBP above .340 but simultaneously an impact one, averaging 34 home runs over the past three seasons. The type of player who with one swing can change an entire October and alter the course of not one but two franchises.

Corner infield has been a black hole for both clubs this season, particularly third base for the Red Sox and first base for the Yankees. Frazier can coincidentally play both positions.

He is almost a lock to be traded to the Red Sox, who are in theory a bit further along and can go all in this year.

Until he isn’t.

The Yankees fired the first shot. Within the next two weeks, the Red Sox will respond because that’s how this thing works.

The next shot after that?

See you in October.

)
Drew Balis

Written by

Social/Digital advertising. Philly sports fan. I predicted the Super Bowl would go to overtime 3 days before it happened, and my haters are still mad about it.

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