So it turns out the Yankees and Red Sox have some sizzle.
Right after this space bemoaned the more muted nature of the best rivalry in sports, Wednesday night happened. In the third inning, Tyler Austin slid hard into second base, his spikes jamming into the leg of Sox shortstop Brock Holt. There may be much debate among WFAN's Boomer & Gio about whether Austin's feet-first lunge was dirty or determined, but the Red Sox clearly feel the former.
In the seventh inning, Red Sox reliever Joe Kelly drilled a 98-mph fastball into Austin's back, which sparked a melee. Austin slammed his bat into the dirt, rumbled red-faced toward the mound, with both benches pouring into the infield. All the requisite, sloppy punches, pawing and grabbing ensued.
Most fights in team sports are sloppy. Almost all punches sail wider than a pitch over the catcher's head. Half the players run to the field with no desire to fight; the other half doesn't know how to fight. But all do it out of an ancient baseball oath to have your comrade's back. Who threw which hooks, however, or which shots landed are rarely the point of these brawls.
In a baseball sense, the Yankees needed this. The Bombers were hardly living up to their sobriquet, sleepwalking to a 5-6 start, already 4 1/2 games behind Boston (9-2) in the AL East. Odd things wake up good teams, but this is hardly a new dynamic to this baseball feud.
You may recall a fight, not a sock, broke the Bambino's curse. The media romanticizes the blood-soaked ankle of Curt Schilling as the talisman that ended 86 years of World Series futility. But long before the Red Sox charged back from a 3-0 ALCS hole, it was a scuffle between Jason Varitek and Alex Rodriguez on July 24 that fired up the Sox and led them on that "Cowboy Up" ride to immortality.
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During this young century, Yankees fans have lamented the new world order, not only in the stands but also on the field. Fans felt that the Red Sox pitchers were beaning Yankees batters with impunity for years, with the more genteel Joe Torre not prone to payback. We can't know if this signals a new cold war between the two teams or if this was just an aberration, a hostile night among more friendly foes.
Those who aren't old enough to recall the A-Rod brawl or any number of scuffles between the clubs since the 1970s may say we are savages for painting a fight in glorious hues. Hockey seems to be the only acceptable domain of fisticuffs in team sports. But if you don't believe this sportswriter that a little rebellion is good for the baseball soul, browse Wednesday night's article from the Daily News, which listed the five best brawls in Yanks-Sox history. The montage spans the more epic fights, starting with Billy Martin (of course) in 1952, takes two snapshots from the 1970s and ends with a fight in 2003 -- lest we forget Pedro Martinez hurling Don Zimmer to the ground -- and the aforementioned fight in '04.
There's no aesthetic beauty in a fight between two men who aren't fighters. Between their gushing adrenaline and lack of punching acumen, we almost always see a gruesome mutation of a cage fight. We see it in the NBA, where the feigned "hold me back!' move has been perfected. In the NFL, some fool always finds it prudent to punch a man while he's still wearing his helmet. And in baseball, we have much the same, with a few exceptions, from Nolan Ryan's flawless headlock on Robin Ventura to the perfect right-hand lead by Rougned Odor, who smoked Toronto's Jose Bautista during a Rangers-Blue Jays game in 2016.
But mostly, baseball brawls are about anything but the actual fight. It's about long memories and payback and self-policing, an implicit policy going back decades, if not a century. It may not be pretty or encouraged or even acceptable to some. But there has long been a place for them in our pastime, even if you think it's long past time for baseball and brawls to share the same sentence.
And maybe this is the baseball elixir the Yankees need to remind themselves they're not a third-place ballclub.
Follow Jason on Twitter at @JasonKeidel
