Opening night
finally here!

Rivalry, revelry get going for Yanks, Sox


**

*Randy Johnson *

*David Wells *

Every game the Yankees and Red Sox play now, even in April, feels like
the championship of something. It will be that way tonight, when the
Yankees try to end the most famous four-game losing streak in the
history of sports.

There was everything that happened between the two teams before the last
two seasons. Now this. Now these last 52games, and the two best American
League Championship Series in history. One ended with Aaron Boone. The
other ended with the greatest sports comeback of them all.

There was the Yankee-Red Sox rivalry of the past. Now this rivalry.

We can still talk about the past all we want, all the way back to Babe
Ruth. But it is only the recent past that matters now, these two teams,
the 2003-04 Yankees and the 2003-04 Red Sox, playing more games against
each other across two seasons - more hard games of baseball, some of
them unforgettable games - than any two teams have ever played. It has
been like watching Russell go up against Chamberlain 19 times a season.

Oh yes, plus playoffs.

Tonight at Yankee Stadium, where the Red Sox beat the Yankees in the
Game 7 played last October, they get ready to do it again, a little
after 8. For fans of these two teams, wherever they are, this is the
start of the only sports year worth talking about.

"I guess it's time to start finding out," Larry Lucchino, the Red Sox's
president, was saying Friday morning from his office at Fenway Park,
"how things are going to explode this year."

Then Lucchino tells about the first issue of this season's Red Sox
magazine, which is sold as a game program at Fenway. On the front of it,
he says, is a picture of the World Series trophy and all around it is a
montage of photographs, almost all of them of Red Sox fans celebrating
the team's first World Series championship since 1918. And at the bottom
of the cover are these words:

"After the celebration ... it's time to turn the page."

When you do turn the page, there is a two-page photograph of the 2005
Red Sox, defending world champions, who come in to face Randy Johnson
and the 2005 Yankees tonight at the Stadium.

Time to turn the page, for everybody.

Somehow it is five months since Kevin Brown coughed it up against the
Red Sox, five months since Joe Torre - who did not cover himself with
glory in that series - went with Javier Vazquez after Brown. Vazquez's
first pitch became a grand slam for Johnny Damon and meant that the Red
Sox really were going to come back from 0-3 down against the Yankees
and, after everything that had happened over the previous three games,
beat the Yankees in Game 7 at Yankee Stadium.

They did this one year after Aaron Boone made you think the Red Sox
would never beat the Yankees. They did it this way after Mo Rivera had
been three outs away from the World Series. Then Rivera walked Kevin
Millar. Pinch-runner Dave Roberts stole second. Bill Mueller tied Game 4
with a single up the middle and David Ortiz won it later with a home run.

You know it all by now the way you know your Social Security number.
Ortiz won Game 5 with a ball fisted into center. Curt Schilling pitched
the way he did with that bloody ankle in Game 6 and the umps got
together and said that Mark Bellhorn's home run really was a home run,
and then they didn't let A-Rod slap Bronson Arroyo.

Now here we are, Randy Johnson, new Yankee, against David Wells, old
Yankee, tonight. The old-timers will tell you that the Brooklyn Dodgers
against the New York Giants felt like this every time the two teams were
on the field together. It couldn't possibly have been this way. Just
because there has never been anything like this.

"Right now," Lucchino said, "five months ago feels like five years ago,
just because our offseason was so full."

The Red Sox made changes. The Yankees made changes. Now the Yankees try
to win back the American League from the Red Sox and win the World
Series for the first time since 2000. They valiantly try to do this with
the first $200 million sports payroll in world history. It makes them
the Fort Knox of underdogs.

Nobody is talking about A-Rod much anymore, the way everybody was at the
start of spring training. The debate about whether or not the richest
No. 2 hitter in world history is a true Yankee or not is pretty much
gone. The way all those players from last year's teams are gone. Both
teams have made dramatic changes in personnel, even though most of the
big players from those 52 games across 2003 and 2004 are still around.

Here we are.

"You always think that (the Yankees and Red Sox) have reached the height
of extremism," Lucchino said. "But you never know."

Lucchino says that one World Series isn't enough "for people who have
been as hungry for it as we are." He says he can't speak for the
Yankees, but says his team will bring a sense of proportion to these
April games, pointing out that the fact that the Red Sox won six of
seven April games against the Yankees last year became a sidebar by the
middle of summer, when it looked as if the Yankees were going to run
away with everything.

"If you don't panic when you're down three games to none against the
Yankees in the playoffs, I tend to think you'll keep a sense of
perspective about games played in April," Lucchino said.

He laughed then and said, "I'm just speaking for our players here, not
for fans of either team."

Even Yankee fans, the ones who have wondered since the trading deadline
last summer how things would have been different if the Yankees had been
able to get Randy Johnson, understand that tonight is not Game 8 of the
2004 ALCS. But maybe, at a few minutes after 8 tonight, when Johnson is
on the field and there is about to be real baseball again at the
Stadium, it will feel a little bit like that.

We all wait to see how things explode this time. We turn the page with
the best page-turner of them all.

*Originally published on April 3, 2005*



zvika

Zvi Shilon,
Nahal Hayarkon 8/4,
Modiin, 71700,
Israel
972-8- 970-0381
972-54-879387
Fax #: 001-832-213-4057
zvika6@...



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