COMMENTARY : A Fight 75 Years in the Making Breaks Out

The green and gray bus carrying the Boston Red Sox, Campus Coach Lines bus No. 251, pulled up to Yankee Stadium about five minutes past five o’clock. The Red Sox brought Jose Canseco with them this time, an opponent made for the Stadium right from the start. But bus No. 251 brought plenty more than Canseco. It brought the Red Sox vs. the Yankees. The bus doors opened one afternoon last week and a fight 75 years in the making got out.

We are moving up on 40 years since the Dodgers and Giants left New York. They try to make the Dodgers vs. the Giants mean something on the West Coast, and maybe it still does. It is a dress rehearsal of a rivalry compared to the Red Sox against the Yankees. This all began with Babe Ruth being sold by the Red Sox to the Yankees and the Yankees winning all the World Series after that, or so it has always seemed in Boston.

There was no need for those getting off bus No.251 to carry much baseball baggage with them. It was all waiting for them inside the most famous ballpark in this world. Built by Babe Ruth.

“It’ll start as soon as I get out to first base tonight,” Mo Vaughn was saying in the Red Sox clubhouse, just a few minutes after he got out off the bus. “They’ll be yelling about 1911 or 1908, whenever it was we won the World Series last.”

Mo Vaughn is 27 years old and one of the great talents in baseball, and great gentlemen. He comes from South Norwalk, Conn., and grew up Yankees all the way. He came to the Stadium when he was 9 and 10 and grew up with the last Yankee teams to win the World Series. He listed the players from the championship teams of 1977 and 1978 in a rush, in the visitors’ clubhouse. He is a first baseman, so he mentioned Chris Chambliss first, then Reggie Jackson, then Nettles and Randolph and Gossage and the rest.

“I know where I am,” Vaughn said. “You come to New York, you feel like you’re on center stage.” He smiled and said, “You know how they used to have the Game of the Week? I’ve always thought of the Red Sox against the Yankees as the Game of the Earth.”

Mike Greenwell has seen 11 seasons of Red Sox-Yankees from the Boston side, Don Mattingly has been around even longer on the New York side. Vaughn, who grew up an hour from the Stadium, is much newer to it all. It was all brand new for Canseco, who thought he knew everything about being an opponent in New York. It turns out he was just a trainee. When Canseco wore the uniform of the A’s, or the Rangers, he was just the colorful black-hat wrestling villain, the way Charles Barkley has always been a black-hat villain at Madison Square Garden. Last week, Canseco put on a Red Sox uniform and became the baseball enemy.

It was just booing for Canseco before. Now the Stadium hates him, the way Fenway Park has always hated the Yankees. There is a Red Sox fan I know who lives and works in New York. His name is kept out of the paper for his own protection. But he is a Red Sox fan and he really knows his baseball. We were talking last fall and I said to him, “Even you have to feel badly that Don Mattingly lost a chance to go to the World Series.”

The Red Sox fan said, “I’m glad.”

“What if something happens and this was his best chance and he never gets to go?”

The Red Sox fan said, “Good.”

The Yankees have always been everything the Red Sox are not. Since Ruth got to New York in 1920, the Yankees have won 22 World Series and 33 pennants. The Red Sox have won some pennants themselves. They made it to the seventh game of the 1967 World Series, the 1975 World Series and the 1986 World Series. They have not won a World Series in since 1918. The only place where Red Sox-Yankees has looked and sounded like a real fight, has felt like one, is in the stands.

“The fans are the ones who make this thing,” Yankee manager Buck Showalter said. “You’ve got the fans, and you’ve got two ballparks that haven’t changed very much.

Down the hall, in the Red Sox clubhouse, Greenwell, a classy old pro with the Red Sox, said the same thing.

“The fans are it,” Greenwell said. “They’re the ones who made it happen before I ever played in these games, and will make it happen after I’m gone. The fans keep it going here, they keep it going in Fenway. We pick it up from them. We feed off them. Jose will find out that things have changed a little bit tonight, because of the uniform. But you know what? He should take it as a compliment. Because it is.”

Canseco was not just made for Fenway Park. He was made for this kind of baseball fight. When he was still with the A’s, there was a night when it seemed as if Canseco would go into the stands after a Yankee fan. Now his fight is with all the Yankee fans.

“I don’t know quite what is is (with the Yankees and Red Sox),” Canseco said in front of his locker, about six lockers down from where Greenwell sat, already in uniform, sipping coffee and ready to go. “But it seems to be quite a competitive grudge.”

It is the best kind of grudge, the only kind, which means forever. It is just bigger at Yankee Stadium, and louder. “Bigger than life,” Jose Canseco said.

Mo Vaughn, out of South Norwalk and the Yankee teams of the late ‘70s, walked by and heard him.

“You always want to have a big day here, or a big night,” Vaughn said. “You always want to have a big day here, or a big night. You come in every time dreaming about putting one in the upper deck. And you want to do it to the Yankees. You want to win here because they’ve won so many times.”

Wade Boggs was the enemy at Yankee Stadium once. Now he is a hero there, an enemy at Fenway Park. Mo Vaughn looks around at the ballpark that was always the dream baseball place for him, looks at it from center stage, and he is the enemy. And does not care. He is a part of something important in baseball. Something that has lasted.

“I don’t care which team you’re playing for,” Vaughn said. “This is the place to do great things, if you have them in you.”

Vaughn tried to hit a big shot up the gap in the second inning. Bernie Williams ran it down the way the young Joe DiMaggio ran down balls out there, when Ted Williams hit them. Canseco tried to hit a home run his second time up, but could only get it to the warning track in left off Jimmy Key. The Yankees finally scored two runs in the bottom of the eighth and won, 5-3. Nothing was special about the game, and everything was special. Red Sox-Yankees, class of ’95.