Remember when we thought that sweeping the New York Yankees would be the most surprising thing the Boston Red Sox could have possibly done this past weekend?
Sigh. If only.
By now, we all know that FanSided's Robert Murray broke the internet on Sunday evening when he was the first to report that the Red Sox had traded three-time All-Star Rafael Devers to the San Francisco Giants. Suddenly, the sweep of their so-called sworn enemies felt like a distant memory – almost as distant as the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry itself.
John Henry and Craig Breslow have supplanted the Yankees as the Red Sox's worst enemies
Two decades ago, the rivalry between the Red Sox and the Yankees was the greatest in baseball – one of the greatest in all of sports, even. Every meeting between the teams felt like a playoff matchup. Now, that rivalry is a shell of what it once was – almost laughably so – and the Red Sox are almost entirely to blame.
Sure, the Yankees have taken some of the juice out of the rivalry as well – for example, their star player, Aaron Judge, has the personality of drywall and is far less polarizing than, say, Derek Jeter or Alex Rodriguez. But Boston's real villains aren't wearing pinstripes and playing in the Bronx; they're wearing suits and sitting in the Red Sox's front office.
The last time the Red Sox and Yankees met in the postseason was in the 2021 American League Wild Card game, which was a 6-2 victory for the home team at Fenway Park. The Red Sox haven't had a winning record since then, and nothing kills a rivalry faster than one of the teams being bad.
Add in the Devers trade, which is essentially the equivalent of Craig Breslow and John Henry giving the middle finger to the entire Red Sox fanbase, and Boston fans don't even have a reason to be passionate about their own team anymore, much less about their rivalry with the Yankees (which, at this point, is on life support anyway). The Red Sox already did this once with Mookie Betts, which was the first iteration of harming this rivalry and knocking Boston down a peg in the contention discussion. Fans were assured something like that wouldn't happen again. Five years later, they arguably executed a much, much worse Part II.
Breslow and Henry have made a mockery of one of baseball's most storied franchises, dismantling one of the sport's greatest rivalries in the process. The regular-season matchups do have some flair, but nothing like they once did. The only way the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry will even get close to what it was at its peak 20 years ago is if the teams meet in the postseason again.
Thanks to the Red Sox's leadership running the franchise into the ground, it doesn't look like that will be happening for a very long time.
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