Fear, Loathing and Northeast Elites: The Yankee/Red Sox Saga

Welcome back to the Bill Bradley Collective, where it is rivalry week, and with baseball back in action what better athletic struggle of epic proportion to profile than that between the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees. Likely the most visible rivalry professional sports has to offer and one with it’s geographic profile at the center of the BBCollective Universe, Sox/Yanks is more than a century old with hostilities perhaps hitting their peak within the last twenty years. The sale of a guy named Ruth from Boston to New York altered the baseball narrative for the next 100 years plus. Four Boston early 20th-century championships gave way to 85 years of subsequent Yankee dominance. But along came 2004, where the Sox staged the greatest comeback in the history of postseason sport and set the stage for a run that made them MLB’s most successful to now 21st century franchise. You know the players. Williams/DiMaggio. Fisk/Munson. Yaz/Reggie. Jeter/Ortiz. You know the fights. Spaceman/Nettles. Zimmer/Pedro. A-Rod/Varitek. You know the personalities. Clemens and Schilling. Rivera and Buckner. Martin and Francona. This week, you get a Collective cross-examination of the Boston Red Sox/New York Yankees rivalry through estimations of their greatest players, greatest games, and their vast economic advantages over much of baseball in the modern era. “Yankees Suck, “Boston Sucks,” this week, on the Bill Bradley Collective.