Staff Gets It Wrong on Sox-Yankees Rivalry

To the editors:

Like the many new Red Sox fans that have sprung up around Cambridge in the last week, your editorial on the Yankees is high in passion and vitriol, but wrong on many counts (Editorial, “Yankees Suck,” Oct. 10).

For example, The Staff fails to mention when they say the “Red Sox outstripped the Yankees in almost every category during the regular season” that the Yankees won in the category that counts—wins. Also, this is one arrogant Yankees fan who will not admit that Boston fans are the best in baseball. Yeah, you are by far the most annoying, chanting “Yankees suck” at every opportunity, but that doesn’t make you the best fans, simply the loudest. Boston fans are not even the best fans of a team that hasn’t won in a while—Cubs fans are much more passionate and don’t boo their own players at every game.

And the assertion that the Red Sox are heart while the Yankees are “hype and money” is just ludicrous. For one, the Red Sox just beat up on the Oakland A’s (who, in reality, beat themselves far more than the Red Sox could beat them) whose payroll is less than half that of the Sox. The Sox have the second highest payroll in the American League. And unlike the Yankees, whose core is made up of players developed through their own system (Williams, Jeter, Posada, Rivera, and Pettitte) or acquired in shrewd trades (like the pitcher in the “twilight of his career”), the Red Sox are made up almost entirely of free agents, like Manny, Ortiz, Millar, and Walker, or players picked up in fire sales, like Pedro Martinez.

Furthermore, the Yankees have shown tremendous heart in their great 1996-200? dynasty. From Torre, Mel Stottlemyre and Daryl Strawberry’s bouts with cancer, to being down in many of the series they have been in and coming back to win, Torre’s Yankees have shown great heart in far more instances than Boston ever has.

You can recycle idiotic canards about the Yankees buying their way into contention, and ignore that Boston is more guilty of that than the Yankees, and you can attack the Yankees heart and pride. when the Yankees win the American League Conference Series to take their 39th Pennant since Harry Frazee sold us the Babe, and go on to win our 27th World Championship since 1918, that’ll more than make up for all the “Yankees suck” chants and Crimson editorials Yankee fans have had to endure.

Long live the curse.

Eli Sprecher ’05

Oct. 10, 2003