Baseball is better when the Red Sox and Yankees are fighting

I can’t remember the last time I felt the same amount of sports-induced glee that the Red Sox’s first game against the Yankees stirred up in my Boston-fan soul. By the sixth inning on Tuesday night, the Sox were up 5-1 with one out and the bases loaded for Boston’s newest slugger, J.D. Martinez. He sent the ball sailing toward the Green Monster and missed a grand slam by a matter of feet. A few batters later, Mookie Betts finished what he started, giving Boston the grand slam that Martinez had come so close to hitting, as well as a 14-1 lead.

Not only was I actually laughing as I watched this, I was deeply relieved. My baseball-induced anxiety began this fall when Derek Jeter — the new owner of the Marlins and, it turns out, their Supreme Dismantler — let Giancarlo Stanton, the Marlins’ biggest boy, walk up the Eastern Seaboard and into a pair of pinstriped pants. Stanton joined Aaron Judge, the Yankees’ biggest boy, in what I started despondently referring to as the “death lineup from hell.” But then the Sox signed Martinez, a slugger smaller than New York’s giants but just as powerful, and I began to feel a glimmer of hope. With ace pitchers like David Price and Chris Sale, and guys like Betts, who are equally as effective in the field and the batter’s box, it seemed like maybe the team could hold its own.

Still, those Yankees loomed large; I envisioned a scenario in which New York sucked the life out of Boston every time they faced each other. But the first game they played against each other on Tuesday eased some of that fear. The Sox raked Fenway’s dirt with the Yankees.

It was the second game that ignited true excitement. The Yankees ended beating the Sox, and I didn’t love this. However, it certainly ups the stakes heading into the third game of the series. It’s also nice to know that after being taken out behind the woodshed, New York could come back and provide a level of competition this age-old rivalry hasn’t seen in years.

Photo by Maddie Meyer/Getty Images

The real jolt of electricity came with our first Big Baseball Brawl of the season. It all began in the third inning, when Yankees first baseman Tyler Austin slid into second and clipped shortstop Brock Holt in the calf. The slide seemed dirty in light of the rule changes after Chase Utley broke Ruben Tejada’s leg with the same move in 2015, and the bullpens emptied.

The situation cooled off, and the game resumed. But, a few innings later, Sox reliever Joe Kelly beaned Austin, and all hell broke loose. Kelly got Austin with a few decent punches, and Aaron Judge wrapped himself around Kelly like a human straight-jacket. Austin ended up punching Boston’s third-base coach, Stanton was in the middle of the scrum, and Austin, Kelly, as well as New York’s third base coach Phil Nevin and reliever Tommy Kahnle, were ejected from the game.

Listen, fighting is bad. I don’t condone violence, but I do condone high emotions and tension, and sometimes feelings boil over and pressure builds and people snap. I get it. If I were a professional baseball player, I would 100 percent lose my cool if someone beaned me. I would also definitely hold a grudge if the person I beaned had executed a dirty slide against my teammate. I’m glad everyone is okay, but I’m also glad that the stage has been set for some real drama.

Because, THERE’S STILL ONE MORE! Yes, folks, we still have one game left of this glorious, high-scoring, punch-throwing series. During the offseason, I was scared to let myself hope that one of sports’ deepest rivalries could bounce back to the levels of animosity I experienced as a Sox fan in the late 90s and early 2000s, when everyone I went to school with owned a YANKEES SUCK t-shirt. But these two games have inspired optimism.

I’ve written about hating the Yankees before. There’s something deeply comforting about having enemies as a sports fan, because they have nothing to do with your real life. If the Yankees beat the Red Sox on Thursday night, it will not affect my day-to-day other than maybe inspiring me to write another blog. But the act of hating in sports fandom is as important as loving, because it puts the latter into contrast. It also gives you drama you can enjoy without having to face. Having a nemesis in real life is exhausting and requires dealing with; as a sports fan, it’s just a fun, inconsequential figment of your imagination in which your guys get to be the good guys. Sports Enemies are something to rail against without having to actually rail.

Two teams must be evenly matched for a rivalry to catch fire — the teams have to be able to give each other a run for their money. Parity means that the bad guys have earned your begrudging respect. Empty sports hate is boring; sports hate because you know the other team could cause real damage is exciting.

Once you’ve got a rivalry, it doesn’t really ever die. It just goes dormant, as New York and Boston’s did while they traded off being good and being bad, just never at the same time. The ingrained aversion to the Yankees lived inside us Sox fans the whole time, slumbering but not dead, ready to yawn its way back to life at the first signs of spring and renewal. If Tuesday’s game poked it, Wednesday’s game woke the beast.

Who knows what will happen. The Sox could totally flame out. The Yankees may have a total come-apart. The season is long, and these might be the two most exciting games we get.

But this could also be the start of something thrilling, where these teams battle back and forth into the postseason. If anything, the fact that I’m anticipating tonight’s early-season game as though it were the third game of the ALCS bodes well.

May the best team (the Red Sox) win.