yanks sox start tomorrow

[returntoglory]

im in italy and i am still excited about this series. it doesnt get any better in sports than when these two teams come together. so who is your pick for the year. yanks or sox and why?

[returntoglory]

biased reply. the sox. their offense is even better than last year. you bring renterria and trot nixon into the mix and you have a solid stick. starting rotation is a complete makeover aside from schilling who is injured and arroyo who is inexperienced but solid. they got some good pitchers, but losing peavy didnt help their cause in the off season. so they are going to be beat in the regular season but still come out as the wild card and be in the world series again.

[WindyCityHog]

Keep dreaming Bosox-boy....Boston is a solid team, but their starting pitching is not nearly as talented as it was last year.....Matt Clement is no Pedro Martinez, Schilling is hurt, and Wells is to old and fat (his numbers last year should be attributed to PETCO more than anything else)....

Nixon will only bat against righties...Renteria is way overrated.....That offense better carry them....because the starting pitching won't.

Frankly, the Boston-NY thing is just getting OLD.  I'm glad I'm working so that I won't be tempted to listen to the ESPN drooling all over themselves about the greatness of NY and Boston....or hear endless drivel about the end of the curse....blah-blah-blah.  I don't begrudge Yank or Bosox fans for caring about the game......but there is more to baseball than just those two teams, and most of the rest of the country feels the same way I do.....force-fed.

[returntoglory]

i actually do hate the way boston and new york buy their talent. i hate the way the game is being polluted by that. i love the small market teams that do well. i loved the a's when they were that team. but, i was born a bo sox fan and i cant turn my back to that. their offense is what carried them last year. if you wil remember they had a streak where their entire pitching staff just struggled. they were having to put up 8-9 runs a game up to win. and they did. if they do that, and there is no reason they shouldnt, then they will be in the same situation. nixon is going to give them better than kapler, mccarty, and all the fill ins they had. renterria is a lot better than bellhorn, cabrera or an injured nomar who was only riding the pine. if nomar would have been healthy i would have taken him over edgar, but he wasnt and that hurt our offensive production, if you can believe that.

[hawkeyefan17]

Yeah, it is okay when they are playing a big series in the regular season or playing in the playoffs but the constant push of the media putting this rivalry on a pedestal is over the top. We know it is a great rivalry and we don't constantly have to be told that it is.

Putting them on as they opening game of the season is ridiculous and shows the northeast biased to New York and Boston. Colin Cowherd (ESPN radio personality) said one time that baseball is about the Red Sox and Yankees and no one else matters and he used that statement to say the NFL is better than major league baseball. It really mad me mad.

There are a lot of great rivalries in baseball not just Red Sox vs. Yankees. The sad part is, no matter how these two teams do, we will hear about the rivalry and how great it is all year long. I am sick of it.

[El Dog Hog]

THEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE YANKEES WIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A-Rod will go 3-4 with a HR and the big unit will dominate the game. Who is Boston putting on the mond? Wells? Probably Clement though.... Funny though b/c Wells is wearing #3 this year (Ruth). Im sure he did it to piss yankees fan off... but there is a reason why we got rid of him. 

[El Dog Hog]

Just saw on Sportcenter that Wells is going tomorrow, and ARod has 7 lifetimes HR off him... Im calling my shot..

[Pragmatic PiG]

Funny though b/c Wells is wearing #3 this year (Ruth). Im sure he did it to piss yankees fan off... but there is a reason why we got rid of him. 

because there were other way over-priced veterans to sign that will break down

BTW, not a tard fan at all but i really think renteria is good. i'd take him in a heartbeat over Nomaahhhhhhhh

[returntoglory]

i think that the cards cubs should be emphasized more, but other than that in sports the great rivalries are hard to talk about. the lakers and celts arent anything any  more because they both suck. michigan ohio state is a classic but it is hard to talk a lot about teams that only play once a year so that kind of cancels out college football. unc/duke basketball is a close one. they play two to four times a year depending on whether they meet in the acc/ncaa tourney. i think that is probably the most entertaining rivalry. it is the perfect number of games to play in a year and they usually all have some significance. i cant take away from my sox and the yanks, but when you play nineteen times with as much hatred as the two have for eachother it is hard to not talk about a lot.

[Razorback Jedi]

I wish they both could lose.

[razormatt]

This  Yankees/RedSox rivalry won't be there forever.

Schilling is no more than 2 years from retirement.

Unit is the same way.

Nobody expects the Yankees SP to duplicate what they did a year ago.  Unit pitched better than basically any 40 year old ever in the history of the game.  Jaret Wright has like a 5.00 AL ERA, for his career.  Pavano can't strike out folks, meaning sooner or later, he'll get torched.  See Boston there.  They murder non-strikeout pitchers.

Boston will figure out why nobody ever kept Clement.  The man's got a fantastic arm, but the mentality of a wimp squirrel.  PLus he just doesn't know where his stuff is going sometimes, he walks too many.

I'll predict that both the  Yankees and RedSox will have very difficult years in the next 5.  I'd say both will fail to finish at .500 twice in the next 5 years.

You just can't annually mortgage your entire farm system for a year.  Both have done so much of it that they've lost all of their top (and by top I mean even high-A) type ML talent. 

At some point, and maybe we're seeing it in baseball, the owners (and players too) are sick and tired of seeing a team win just cause it has more money.  The Yankee payroll is highly inflated through bogus fat contracts to guys who are very good players but not the type that should be earning 10 million bucks per year.  In that group is Jeter, Giambi, Posada, K Brown, J Wright, B Williams.  AROD, Unit, and Sheffield are 10 million dollar players.  Matsui is a solid 8 million per year value.  I think that baseball is about to reach an era where organization wide discresion, patience, and long term investment will result in more wins, better fan bases (there's something to be said for being familiar with the players), and more playoff appearainces.

Minnesota is a very low market and does such an excellent job of developing talent from within, both pitching prospects and hitters, and then swapping value for value and really filling in holes through good trades (Pierzynski for Joe Nathan, anybody?). 

Florida is in a similar deal.  They really hit the jackpot with Cabrera (who will be 1-2 with Pujols for NL MVP for years).  Beckett just needs to get over his nick-nack injuries to thrive, he's a franchise type pitcher.  Delgado is a nice pickup for them, the man is a raker, and it was a reasonably safe contract.

Milwaukee will always have a tough road to hoe in the NL central with 3 perennial good teams there (HOU, STL, CHI), but they have really done a good job of putting together good picks with all of the early picks they've had in the past 5 years.  They probably have 4 of the top 50 minor leaguers in baseball (Weeks, Hardy, Capellan, and Fielder) and made an EXCELLENT trade for Carlos Lee (giving away fast but no-hit Posednik and a Middle reliever), when combined with Ben Sheets (future multiple time NL Cy young winner) and Doug Davis (can we say "cut" fastball?) really have an excellent thing going.  Geoff Jenkins will be there for years.  They made an equally impressive trade a year earlier to give Sexson for Overbay and Spivey, among others. 

Kolb for Cappelan was brilliant.  Kolb will struggle this year, write that down.  K/9 rate is disturbing for a pitcher.  Hudson had the same problem a year ago.  The Braves WILL NOT win the NL east this year.  They simply have so many things that have to go right for them to get it done (they're a mess offensively, C. Jones and A. Jones are known commodities, but not much over the league average), no production at LF or RF and relying on a 47 year old 1B.  Gotta wonder what happens a year ago if career .260 minor league hitter Estrada doesn't hit .300 in the bigs.  Watch for him to go back to the .260 range with more AB's.  Add in a "retooled" Mike "paymemoremoneyandI'masonofabitch" Hampton and now 37 John Smoltz to the rotation, and lots of things for ATL could go very wrong.  3 teams in the East are ready to do something about it.

Oakland will contend for years after their major trades in the offseason.  They pretty much took the Cards #1 position prospect and #2 organizational pitcher, in addition to their most effective reliever from a year ago.  That was after they took Atlanta's top organization pitcher.  Billy Beane is the best GM in baseball without exception.  If he was the GM for the Yankees or RedSox, those teams would win 100 games per year with a payroll 100 million less than what it is.  Billy Beane is wonderful for baseball, and I would say has had more to do with this possible "parity movement" than any other single person. 

[returntoglory]

i dont think that you can say the sox yanks rivalry wont be there forever. they will always hate eachother. they will always fight. it is inevitalbe in my mind. i dont think that they will be gone in five years either. with cashman and epstien always looking to get the best prospects on the market, which they do, these teams will be far from done. sox have a pretty good hitting team that isnt that old at all. i think the oldest is like 34. the yanks on the other hand are very old, but with steinbrenner willing to hand out as much cash as it takes, then i dont see them going away either. both carry huge fan bases just because of the rivalry and the money they spend to win. i do love the small market teams. i think billy bean is a genius and that he would be amazing if he could work with a little more cash, but that is what makes him so special. he gets so much talent for so little. not to take anything away from the twins, but they dont have a whole lot to compete against in there conference. the al central is probably one of the weakest division in baseball. they do play well, but they dont have to compete very hard to get that spot. bottom line, yanks and sox will still be around for a long time whether we like it or not, and i like it

[razormatt]

Red Sox / Yankees is self perpetuated by folks that live it.

Cards / Cubs is more about baseball and just hating each other and the teams.  New England folks are convinced there was something out to "get" them, which is stupid, but predictable from a bunch of frickin' Yankees.


Trust me, when the teams start to suck, the "rivalry" will go down and nobody will care, certainly not like they do now.

And within 5 years, both the Yanks and Red Sox will have 2 losing seasons.

At some point, the organizational wide impatience and "win now or else" attitudes will come back to haunt them.  They do have inherent advantages with their own TV deals, lack of revenue sharing to the poorer teams, huge markets to insure full stadiums regardless of ticket prices, etc.

No talent in the AL Central?  The Indians may lead the AL in runs scored and NOBODY would want to play them in a short series with that offense.

Not to mention they do have some serious arms in the AAA and AA minors as well as some solid arms at the ML level.


Face it, you love the rivalry because you're a Sox fan.  Don't try to tell me I love it because I'm a baseball fan OR that it will be here forever.

Last time I checked, the 1980s and early 1990's were all that hot in New York.  And did you hear any rivalry business?  no.  Why not?  Because both teams sucked or had sporadic success.

As far as I'm concerned:  screw 'em both.

[returntoglory]

thats ridiculous. two losing seasons within five years? thats absurd. first they have so much money that they are willing to spend they will just buy talent, which i am opposed to. i hate the way they dont bring up their own studs. but they are both very good teams right now. they are probably both in the top five in the mlb at least. and then they will just buy the best free agents and give teams that need money trades that offer big bucks.

the al central. how have the indians been the last few years? everybody wants to play the team from the al central in the post season because they are weaker than all the teams. youre probably right though. if i was looking at the al i would want to play the yankees, bo sox, or angels in front of the twins or indians.

i love the rivalry because i am a sox fan. you are right but i also love the rivalry because i am a baseball fan. i love the michigan osu rivalry and i hate them both. i love the oklahoma texas rivalry and i hate them both. i love the florida, florida state, miami rivalry and i hate them all. does this theme sound familiar yet? i love great rivalries because teams show up to play against eachother and it means so much more than just a game. it is out for blood. when the cubs were struggling so badly last year i still loved to watch them play the cards because there is a ton of bad blood between them. its about the greatness of the game not necessarily the greatness of the teams. i think america will always love the boston new york rivalry because it has so much history.