Sequel billing

This 'Star Wars' installment of the rivalry could be a blockbuster

By John Powers, Globe Staff, 10/8/2003

The rebellion began two seasons ago when Pedro Jaime Martinez declared that he wasn't afraid of pinstriped ghosts, particularly one George Herman Ruth. He was sick of the local obsession with Yankees and curses and wanted to "wake up the Bambino" and "drill him in the ass."

Last winter, the century-old rivalry between baseball's Athens and Sparta (or is it Hertz and Avis?) erupted afresh with an exchange of rhetorical vitriol between the front offices. Red Sox chief executive Larry Lucchino described the Yankees as the "Evil Empire"; New York owner George Steinbrenner retorted that Lucchino was the game's "foremost chameleon of all time."

Then the war of words spilled over to the field after Martinez and Roger Clemens engaged in a July plunkfest that produced potshots all around.

"He's not going to put any fear in my heart," Martinez vowed, after Steinbrenner popped his cork when the Boston ace hit both Derek Jeter and Alfonso Soriano on the hand and sent them to the hospital for X-rays. "He doesn't have the money to buy fear and put it in my heart."

That was the clarion call for the Rebel Alliance, which is firing up the galactic fighters for yet another assault on the Empire in tonight's American League Championship Series opener at Yankee Stadium: "Ain't afraid of no ghosts."

The Red Sox may have finished second to New York for a major league-record sixth straight time, yet head-to-head, they've essentially drawn even with their historical tormentors.

The season series may have been 10-9 in New York's favor, but Boston had a 109-94 edge in runs scored, including 10-3, 10-2, and 9-3 bashings in the Stadium and an 11-0 whitewash that was the Yankees' worst home defeat since 1919, when they still played in the Polo Grounds. "They know we are here," Sox manager Grady Little proclaimed, after his club climbed within a game and a half of New York July 27. "And they know we are not going away."

Now, while the pumpkins are being harvested, the Sox are still around, having climbed out of an 0-2 hole to survive a Division Series just as they did in 1999. That year, New York wiped out the Sox in five games, winning the last two in the Fens. Could this be, at long last, "the year"?

"The Force will be with us," Lucchino insisted back in December, when the Yankees outbid Boston yet again for a prime-time player in Cuban defector Jose Contreras.

The "Star Wars" comparison (Lucchino calls the Yankees simply "the Empire" now, since the "Evil" has been assumed for generations hereabouts) has been the new story line for a rivalry that began changing with the millennium.

The old attitude was based on New York entitlement and Boston fatalism. The Yankees would win because they always had. The Red Sox would lose because they always did. History became destiny.

The new Boston attitude, from the front office to the clubhouse, is a mixture of envy (26 world championships to five), resentment (those unlimited Yankee dollars), admiration (those 26 rings again), and a fresh spirit of defiance.

"We don't need to make a statement to the Yankees," first baseman Kevin Millar proclaimed, after his teammates had battered New York, 10-2, in their own yard in July. "They know who we are."

The New York attitude, meanwhile, has evolved from pity (the 1978 Boston Massacre) to condescension (the 1999 ALCS) to annoyance, at least in the owner's suite.

"That's b.s.," Steinbrenner fumed after hearing Lucchino's "Evil Empire" metaphor. "That's how a sick person thinks."

Wrangling over talent

Not that bad blood between the rivals is anything new. Sox pitcher Bill Lee, who had his pitching shoulder dislocated in a bench-clearing brawl between the clubs in 1976, called Steinbrenner and manager Billy Martin "nazis."

What's different this time is the sniping at the top, which was provoked by offseason maneuvering for talent. It began when Boston wanted Gene Michael, one of Steinbrenner's vice presidents, as its general manager. Not without compensation, countered the Yankees.

Then New York outbid Boston for Contreras (a whopping $32 million), whom the Sox wanted so badly that they reserved all the available rooms in Contreras's Nicaragua hotel to keep the Yankee emissaries away from him. When new Sox GM Theo Epstein realized that the Yankees had snatched Contreras, there were reports that he threw chairs and kicked windows in his hotel room. "Sour grapes," sniffed GM Brian Cashman, after Sox owner John Henry complained about New York's unlimited budget.

Finally, the Yankees boxed Boston out of acquiring pitcher Bartolo Colon with a three-way deal involving the White Sox and Expos. "This was a pure baseball deal," insisted Cashman, as the Sox brass ground their molars in frustration. "It had nothing to do with Boston."

In Boston, it always has been about the Yankees, ever since Harry Frazee dealt Ruth and the rest of his stars to them for cash in what was called "the rape of the Red Sox." In New York, it only occasionally has been about the Red Sox, who've won only one divisional crown since 1990 and have finished an aggregate 58 1/2 games behind the Yankees since 1997.

The only thing that has mattered in New York for the last eight decades is winning the World Series. "The Yankees have to finish first," says manager Joe Torre, who's done it four times.

That's what owner Jacob Ruppert told Joe McCarthy when he hired him in 1931. "I warn you, McCardy, I don't like to finish second," Ruppert said during spring training. The Yankee front office was so certain of October victory that it included the winner's cut in player salaries.

"Don't forget you get a World Series share," a club executive reminded pitcher Jim Bouton in 1963 as he handed him a $9,000 contract. "You can always count on that."

The very idea of wearing "Wild Card Champions" T-shirts, as the exuberant Red Sox did last month, strikes the Yankees as bizarre.

"The only time I ever thought about being second was when I was fourth," Torre said in September, as his club seemed to be going into free fall. "In 1997, I said we were going to go for the wild card and I got my ass chewed out."

The only way you can earn a wild card is by losing, which is not countenanced by the Yankee tradition or culture.

"You just can't know what it's like until you play here," pitcher David Wells said last weekend, after he'd beaten Minnesota to wrap up the other Division Series in four games.

In case anyone didn't know (or had forgotten) about the pinstriped priorities, Steinbrenner issued a formal declaration two days ago.

"For us, winning isn't the only thing," he said. "It's second to breathing."

Victory is essential, the Boss declared, quoting General Douglas MacArthur. Which is why his uniformed employees felt a bit sheepish spraying champagne after merely beating the overmatched Twinkies.

"This certainly isn't our goal, just to get here," Torre observed during Sunday's celebration. "They're having fun now. But we like to come in and not be surprised by winning."

The Yankees have earned that luxury. For the Red Sox, who haven't won the Series since 1918 or the pennant since 1986, winning still is such a novelty that the mere possibility stirs profound angst and foreboding among the Fenway faithful.

"First place, I suddenly understood, means responsibility," Roger Angell wrote in the New Yorker, observing the unease with which Sox fans regarded the runaway summer of 1978 even before the playoff nightmare. It was like renters finally owning a house and realizing that it came with a mortgage and upkeep and risk of foreclosure. "It was almost better the other way," Angell mused.

The weight of history

What the Red Sox have experienced, for the last decade and more, is the quixotic rush that comes from tilting at a windmill in the Bronx. "Windmills, remember, if you fight with them, may swing round their huge arms and cast you down into the mire," Cyrano de Bergerac, the fictional 17th-century romantic, is warned. "Or up -- among the stars!," Cyrano counters.

Until now, the town team's experience with the Yankees has been little more than grime-covered gumption, much as Brooklyn's was with their neighbors in the '40s and '50s.

"The Dodgers are the Dodgers," crowed Martin (then the Yankee second baseman) after the 1953 Series, their fifth straight title. "If they had eight Babe Ruths, they couldn't beat us."

When Brooklyn finally did, two years later, an entire borough got drunk and stayed up all night. "There was one guy who kept telling me he'd been waiting for this since 1916," Dodger pitcher Johnny Podres said. "Can you imagine waiting 39 years for something?"

In Boston, it's 84 years and counting . . . counting . . . counting. That's why Johnny Damon (last seen brandishing a defiant fist from atop an ambulance stretcher in Oakland) signed with Boston -- because of the eternal quest for a ring. "The Yankees are expected to win," he said this summer. "It would mean so much more to win here."

Until now, the possibility of victory over New York has been a cruel tease. The lost final weekend in 1949. The excruciating 1978 collapse ("I'm not sorry for the Red Sox, but I pity them," said Yankee reliever Sparky Lyle) and Bucky (Bleeping) Dent's anemic home run. The 1999 playoffs, when the giddy 13-1 pounding of Roger Clemens & Co. was followed by two crushing losses.

Ah, but this year. This year, there is enough confidence on Yawkey Way that Lucchino boldly tugs on Darth Vader's cape and calls out the Empire months in advance. This year, one plunking from Roger draws two from Pedro. "Remember, they ruffled the feathers first," Millar (the Clemens plunkee) reminded Martinez. "They're the ones who talked stupid."

This year, the ledger between the Yankees and Red Sox is all but square and for once, there may be as much anticipation ("IT'S ON!" the Daily News crowed on its back page yesterday) and anxiety Down There as there is Up Here.

There was a time when the thought of pinstripes and the demi-gods inside them caused dread and resignation in this vicinity because history was, indeed, believed to be destiny.

"We are the Evil Empire to them," former Yankee slugger Reggie Jackson acknowledged during spring training. "Anybody who beats your butt is going to be evil."

None of these Red Sox, though, was around when Yaz popped up in 1978 (Martinez was only 6). Only seven of them were here four years ago. Yesterday never happened to them.

"There's no looking back," Damon said when his teammates were trying to rope in the Yankees in late July. "We have to go for the jugular when we have the chance."

Tonight, for the second time in five years, the Hub's hairless horsemen find themselves saddling up for another Gotham adventure. And if Mr. Ruth's spectral shade steps in to pinch hit (and calls his shot), Pedro Jaime Martinez says he'll tattoo the Babe's broad backside.