Yankees/ Red Sox I: Pitching, Power, And The Coming Pun-Pocalypse

Yankees versus Red Sox is an ancient rivalry. Names of those who played in this competition read like a highlight tour of the Hall of Fame: Babe Ruth, Cy Young, Lou Gehrig, Carl Yastrzemski, Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Derek Jeter, and Pedro Martinez. Now a new generation of Yankees has entered their names in the Red Sox Rivalry Record Book. And one of them did something to the Fenway Faithful that even few HoFers rarely ever do.

Yankees fans: did you feel it? How different the two games versus the Red Sox felt? That is the feeling of the 2017 Yankees season starting for real. Jeter used to say the regular season was the warm-up for the actual season. That’s the kind of attitude that gets you to that real season on a real regular basis. And the same is true in the regular season.

All the other games are warm-ups; the Yankees season begins with the first game against the Red Sox.

Results speak for themselves. The Yankees went into the den of a struggling opponent, one with hopes of a World Series victory, and took two straight. That can only help a young team just learning what it can be.

It’s Still just April

But it is not just that they won those games. It is how they did it and how their performances will resonate throughout this season and, in one case, to the end of a career. The one negative is that the Yankees, and Yankees fans, now must live in fear of the pending Pun-Pocalypse.

But before we take a look at some of the fascinating aspects of this truncated, mid-week series, we first need, what Anton Ego once called, a little perspective. A few years ago, it was the Yankees who felt they had a World Series-worthy team. They stumbled out of the gate but were three games over by the time they played the Red Sox for the first time, on April 24^th. The Sox were also a team with October dreams.

Well, the Sox took all three. CC continued his early season struggle, and AJ Burnett continued his career-long struggles. The second game, in particular, was especially demoralizing. Anyone watching those three games walked away knowing the Red Sox was the better team.

The year was 2009, and it ended in the Canyon of Heroes. That’s what victories in April amount to. With that in mind, here is the short series that was and the indicators of both success and disaster.