Arguably, the weirdest part about the prior 17 years of sports’ greatest rivalry isn’t that the Red Sox turned the tables on the Yankees, winning four championships under John Henry to the Steinbrenners’ one. It’s that such a lopsided margin occurred despite the Yankees serving as a model of stability and the Red Sox, well, not that.
Can you imagine the fire, much of it merited, if the Bosox were to rise from the ashes once again to win another title before the Yankees do?
The 2021 Yankees-Red Sox season series kicked off with a Bronx bust, the Yankees’ offense sleepwalking through a 5-2 loss to Alex Cora’s bunch Friday night at Yankee Stadium, deserved boos filling the air often as former Yankee Nathan Eovaldi picked up the win with six strong innings. The Yankees (31-27) now have lost two straight games and eight of 11, and they have totaled 26 runs during that stretch. The offensive drought drops the jaw. The Red Sox, meanwhile, after spending 2020 in the AL East basement in the wake of two sign-stealing scandals, stand at 34-23.
The Yankees qualified for the postseason 13 times from 2004 through 2020 under general manager Brian Cashman and a trio of managers (Joe Torre, Joe Girardi and Aaron Boone). The Red Sox made the playoffs nine times in the same period, while four different people (Theo Epstein, Ben Cherington, Dave Dombrowski and Chaim Bloom) plus two interim groups (in 2005-06 when Epstein temporarily quit and in 2019 after Dombrowski’s firing) ran their baseball operations, and five men (Terry Francona, Bobby Valentine, John Farrell, Alex Cora and Ron Roenicke) managed them, with Cora now on his second tour of duty.
The Yankees posted a winning record every season in that span and since 1993 overall. The Red Sox own four losing records since 2004, each of them landing the franchise in the division cellar.
You get the idea — and judging from my emails, many of you think the Yankees’ stability is precisely their problem.
“We felt [in spring training] like we had a good team,” Cora, who rejoined the Red Sox last offseason, said Friday before the game, “a team that also has to keep working and keep getting better. Defensively, our bullpen, we still have to work with it, but overall, I’ve been saying all along, we have a good baseball team.”
The Red Sox absorbed direct hits, first from the 2017-18 Astros sign-stealing scandal (Cora, the bench coach for the 2017 Astros, and Boston parted ways in January 2020, the day after Major League Baseball released its official findings), and then from the discovery that the 2018 Red Sox, the franchise’s most recent championship club, had engaged in some related hanky-panky, if not to the level of the Astros’ trash-can banging. That ensured Cora’s season-long suspension and cost the team its second-round draft pick last year as well as (yawn) sidelining video replay system operator J.T. Watkins for a year.
Throw in the February 2020 trade of the iconic Mookie Betts to the Dodgers — his fellow ring-winning outfielders Andrew Benintendi and Jackie Bradley Jr. also departed the Bosox this past offseason — and this was a club in serious transition.
Despite all of that upheaval, the Red Sox can boast of a vastly superior offense (4.93 runs per game) to the Yankees’ (3.71) and a pitching staff and defense that, if not as strong as the Yankees’ 3.69 runs allowed per game, put them in the league’s upper half at 4.11.
“When you look at our rotation, before the season, that was something that caught my attention, because a lot of people questioned our pitching,” Cora said. “This is night and day compared to last year. Let’s be honest.”
From night to day and back many times, the Red Sox have weathered many storms since ending The Curse of the Bambino and nevertheless still lead the industry in parades during this stretch. The Yankees lead the majors in playoff appearances over the same span. It would greatly behoove the Yankees, off to such a concerning start in 2021, to convert one of those October invitations into a title before the Sawx do so again.
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June 05, 2021 at 07:57AM
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Yankees can't lose another World Series race to Red Sox - New York Post
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