IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME:

Let the Hate Begin: There's no greater pleasure than the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry. (RUSS SMITH, March 28, 2003, Wall Street Journal)

One spring day last year I was at Yankee Stadium, sitting in the loge section, when suddenly during the third inning a chant erupted from the upper deck: "Boston sucks, Boston sucks!" This is normal when the Red Sox play in the Bronx, but on this occasion the Yanks were slamming the hapless Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

My two young sons, decked out in Bosox uniforms (we're diehard Boston fans but as Manhattan residents attend about 25 games at the stadium each season) were confused. My nine-year-old said: "Dad, are those guys too drunk to know what teams are on the field?" They'd endured the jibes of Yankee partisans before, but this commotion was just too taxing on their developing minds. It didn't help that it was soon followed by the inevitable "1918!, 1918!"--for some, the year that ended World War I, for others, the year the Boston Red Sox last won the World Series.

My baseball "facts of life" speech to the boys included the "Curse of the Bambino," Boston's astonishing choke against the Mets in the '86 World Series and, most painfully, Bucky Dent's cheap homer in the '78 one-game playoff for the American League East title that again left the Yanks victorious over the Sox.

The durable New York-Boston baseball feud is an anomaly today. Decades ago, before league expansion, before owners spent huge sums on free agents, before theme parks became more important than the game itself, there were legendary rivalries--famously, the Yanks and Dodgers of the 1950s, when they faced off in several World Series. The Giants and Dodgers created a riveting clash of fans, too, which survived even the move of both teams to California. But these rivalries died away, along with others, and attempts to gin up lesser pairings into an admirable viciousness--St. Louis and Kansas City? the Cubs and White Sox?--have always failed.

There is obviously something different about Boston and New York, making the competition bitter from the day Babe Ruth was sold to New York after the 1919 season. Both cities are unusually sports-centric, for one thing, with a rabid collection of journalists eager to stoke the emotions of lifelong fans. Fenway Park and Yankee Stadium were built before the Depression, in urban settings, and many spectators still use mass transit, often reading the tabloids, to reach the games. And the Sox and Yanks were part of the original eight-team American League, back when players traveled by train and fans listened to games on the radio.

All this tradition matters.

Baseball returns at an especially opportune moment this year. Because at a time like this it's reassuring to know that "tradition matters". As Terence Mann says, in Field of Dreams:

The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again. Oh people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come.

And consider that quote in conjunction with this one:

There are those who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American Dream.
-Archibald MacLeish

As we've seen in the bitter divisions over the current war on terror, not everyone in America shares the same dreams, not everyone cares for its traditions and the things it stands for, but enough of us still do and those who do tend to be especially wedded to the continuities in American life. Among those continuities are the belief that we have a special duty to make America a city upon a hill, that if we build it all mankind will come, and also a belief that the Yankees are the focus of evil in the modern world. Go Sox! Posted by Orrin Judd at March 30, 2003 11:09 AM