Red Sox & Yankees: Can't We Be Enemies? (English Edition) [Kindle-editie] beoordelingen het boek quotes

The Red Sox and the Yankees are, according to some, the greatest rivalry in sports, the baseball equivalent of Cowboys and Indians or Cops and Robbers. While there is reason to doubt this proposition on mathematical grounds—shouldn’t rivals be sort of equal?--I believe the New York-Boston baseball rivalry is the only one in all of sports that has produced its own gear. I saw a guy the other day wearing a hat that bore the strange device “Red Sox-Yankees Rivalry: Best in Sports,” and thought to myself—do you ever see anybody at a political convention wearing a hat that says “Democrats and Republicans: Our Two Greatest Political Parties”? I think not. I wrote a book about the rivalry, as viewed through the lens of the 1978 season, The Year of the Gerbil: How the Yankees Won (and the Red Sox Lost) the Greatest Pennant Race Ever, which I believe was the first work to focus on the two teams as quarrelling couple instead of things-in-themselves. I tried to be objective, even though I became a Red Sox fan late in life and so like a Catholic convert could have turned out to be consumed by the team, more Catholic than the Pope in a baseball sense. Instead, I like to think I keep my enthusiasm under control, the way a Catholic agrees to attend the Protestant church favored by his wife. You listen thoughtfully to the sermon, hum along with the hymns, but you don’t turn into a snake-handler, for Christ’s sake. Baseball is like religion in that our attachments are formed before our rational faculties have fully developed and are maintained on faith in the face of daily reversals. It is nonetheless permissible, if you are raised as a member of a National League denomination, to adopt an American League sect of convenience. See, e.g., Hilary Rodham Clinton, who was a Cubs fan before she was a Yankees fan, a transformation she underwent when she ran for the Senate as a resident of New York. As for the Yankees, growing up a Cardinals fan they were like a European power to me; you didn’t have to worry about them unless you got into an international conflict like the World Series. They were, nonetheless, a force of nature, always stealing the best players from the hapless Kansas City Athletics, always winning the World Series and producing MVPs. But I was oblivious to the animus between fans of the two teams in much the same way that no one on the East Coast cares about USC vs. UCLA except for a few displaced alumni of those schools. I first became aware of the intensity of New York and Boston fans’ passion at a party shortly after I arrived in Boston thirty-five years ago, when a fist fight nearly broke about over the onion dip between a Sox and a Yankees fan. “Guys, guys, please,” I remonstrated, like St. Dominic Savio, the boy who was canonized for, among other slight achievements, breaking up a playground scuffle. “Is the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry really worth fighting about?” The two were silent, embarrassed. “Of course not,” I said. “The Cardinals beat you both, the Sox in ’67, the Yankees in ’64.” I should be out of my cast in a couple of weeks.