LORAN SMITH: Rivalry between Red Sox, Yankees just as good as big football clashes

BOSTON — Last weekend, the Boston Red Sox, as you likely have heard, swept the New York Yankees in four games at Fenway Park.

If you know anything about this rivalry, you are acutely aware that doesn’t happen very often, either side, but when you peruse the history of the series, you find that, more often than not, the baseball gods have smiled on the Yankees.

The fifties, with all that last game of the season and one-game playoff stuff with the Red Sox coming out on the short end of the stick; the Bucky Dent pop fly that drifted over the Green Monster in 1978, Aaron Boone’s 11th-inning shot off Tim Wakefield in 2003 that broke all Red Sox hearts, are becoming distant memories for the Red Sox fans who are filling Fenway to salute the Landsdowne Street bullies these days.

The home of the Red Sox is the oldest big league park in America. Completed in 1912, it didn’t fit back them and has been gerrymandered and jerry-rigged over the years to where there is nothing like it. “The two toughest places to manage,” Don Zimmer once said one day before a spring training game in Florida, “are Fenway Park and Wrigley Field. The Green Monster in Boston and the wind coming in at Wrigley Field. The wind at Wrigley is brutal.”

Good news confirms that the old park in Boston should last another 100 years. There was plenty of emotional updraft for the fans who, in favorable weather, crowded into Fenway, which brings in a tidy $4 million-plus on tours alone during the year — enough to pay the individual salary of all but nine players on the Red Sox roster.

There are Red Sox aficionados who can’t get enough of Fenway, aging right along with the iconic ball park itself. Symmetrical, multi-purpose parks have come and gone over the years, giving way to upscale luxury box arenas, which bring rave review. Fenway only gets a new paint job every now and then.

When John Henry and his group bought the team and Fenway Park, they made only one significant change that is artfully visible. During the time of former owner Tom Yawkey, he only allowed one sign in the ball park — the one recognizing the Red Sox charity, the Jimmy Fund. Boston businesses now compete for the opportunity to put up signage.

Most games are sold out, and Red Sox games on the New England Sports Network (NESN) enjoy the highest of ratings.

New England, historically, could not get enough of the Red Sox, even when the Curse held sway. The Curse has now turned into swagger. Since the coming of John Henry and the boys, there have been three World Series championships flags waving over Fenway.

The Citgo sign out beyond left field is always there with Sox ownership never collecting a nickel for its location, but from home plate it takes on the appearance of a backdrop for the Green Monster.

It won’t be long before the World Series moves into the forefront, trying to elbow its way onto the crowded national stage with football, a reminder that October is the greatest month of the year.

You begin with the weather. Fall brings all that wondrous color — nowhere better than here in New England — and an escape from the heat in so many sections of the country which reminds the rest that there are but a few more weeks to enjoy good weather before getting nature’s back-of-the-hand.

Fall tailgating will become the main feature of pre-game socials all across the country; the action on the gridiron will bring network cameras to the campuses of the country with Sunday reserved for the play-for-pay advocates.

We all, however, pause in some way to monitor the World Series. The recent Red Sox-Yankees series was a reminder that the rivalry between these two clubs is baseball’s version of some of the more storied football rivalries of college football. Of course, right down the road in Foxborough, there is a team which has brought football fever to New England to rival that of the Red Sox Nation.

If there is anything to get you in the mood for football season, it is a four-game series between the Red Sox and the Yankees, two of the best teams in baseball fighting it out, which goes beyond winning and losing — it, too, is life and death.

Loran Smith is co-host of “The Tailgate Show” and sideline announcer for Georgia football. He is also a freelance writer and columnist.