This is all you could ask for and all you could want from October, even though the whole thing starts before we even get to the October. This is the Yankees vs. the Red Sox, in the playoffs, at Yankee Stadium. Knockout baseball again between them, for the first time since the wild card game four years ago when the Red Sox chased Gerrit Cole at Fenway Park and really finished a Yankee season before everybody got to the third inning that night.
This is the chance for the Yankees to get payback on that one, and maybe even payback for a rock fight of a Division Series between the two teams in 2018, when the Yankees had a chance to knock off a Red Sox team that would not only win it all that year, but also go down as the greatest Boston baseball team of them all. The teams split the first two games at Fenway that year, but it felt as if the Yankees somehow came back to the Stadium ahead at 1-game-all. Then the Red Sox won Game 3, 16-1, and the Sox somehow escaped the bottom of the 9th in Game 4. They kept on going, and the Yankees went home.
Those were the only two times they have played each other in the postseason since October of 2004, when the Red Sox made history coming back from 0-3 down; when they turned around more than 80 years of bad history between them and the Yankees that started with Babe Ruth leaving Boston and coming here. The Red Sox would go on to win four World Series in the next 15 years.
The Yankees? They’ve only won one World Series since October of ’04. That was in 2009; you’re probably aware of that by now, it’s been pretty widely covered around here.
Now we get this one. Best two falls of three. All three games at the Stadium. We get Garrett Crochet, the Red Sox ace, against Max Fried, the Yankees ace. Just that. When the Yankees signed Fried during the off-season, and for very big change, he wasn’t supposed to be their Game 1 guy. That was still supposed to be Gerrit Cole’s job. Then Cole was lost to Tommy John surgery in the spring. Fried became the ace. Maybe he would have turned out to be the Yankees’ ace even if Cole had remained healthy. No matter. He now is asked to win the kind of game, at this time of year – and against this particular opponent – he was hired to win. Fried got $218 million to sign with the Yankees. A lot of that money gets thrown on the table a little after six o’clock on Tuesday night when the Yankees and Red Sox meet for the 14th time this season, the Sox having gotten nine of those games across the regular season.
The stakes always feel tremendous when it is the Yankees and the Sox in the regular season. They just go through the roof when it is the postseason and all the money is on the table.
The Red Sox haven’t taken as much from the Yankees as the Astros have across the last 10 years. The Astros beat the Yankees first sin a wild card game and then three different times in the American League Championship Series. One, in 2017, went the distance. The other two times the Astros took them out in six, once in 2019 when Jose Altuve walked everything off with a home run against Aroldis Chapman in the bottom of the 9th of Game 6.
But these are the Red Sox. This is the biggest and latest October rendering of this rivalry. Chapman is with the Red Sox now, having become as dominant a closer as there has been in the sport this season. And wouldn’t it be something this week if he has to pitch a bottom of the 9th against his old team, maybe more than once? For now, we just know about the starters: Fried and Crochet (3-0 against the Yankees this season, 3.29 earned run average, 39 strikeouts in 27.1 innings). Game 2 will see Carlos Rodon against Brayan Bello, Boston’s talented young righthander who has had success of his own against the Yankees.
“We have [handled lefties] throughout the year, and we’re going to keep doing it,” Alex Cora said the other day. “Obviously, we struggled for a little bit of it, but we put [up] good at-bats against Fried, good at-bats against Rodón throughout the season, and we expect to do the same thing.”
The Yankees have one winning season after another, of course. And since winning their fourth World Series in this century seven years ago, the Red Sox have finished in last place three times. The Yankees never do that. But you tell me what Yankee fan you know who wouldn’t trade three last-place finishes for the four World Series the Sox have won since ’04.
The Yankees are playing their best baseball since the early season, even if most of it has been against bad teams down the stretch. The Red Sox? They somehow saw their season turn around even after trading away their best hitter, Rafael Devers. That was when they brought up a gifted, exciting kid named Roman Anthony, whom they eventually lost to an oblique injury.
The sides still look even for this one. They weren’t even for most of 86 years after Ruth got to New York. Then everything changed in ’04. One more time, the Yankees get a chance to change things back to the way they used to be, few minutes after 6, Tuesday night. All you could ask for, all you could want. Yankees and the Sox. Game No. 163 on 161st.
