Anti-Bostonian: How to end the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry

As the Northeast descends from the crescendo of winter, a seemingly annual period of thaw emerges to leave a jaded sense of optimism. With renewal ringing as the zeitgeist of the times, the light of hope emerges from the end of the tunnel, the coats come off and are incrementally replaced with fleeced Patagonia zip-ups. For large swathes of Tufts students, this entails putting away the Canada Geese and beginning to whip out the Vineyard Vines. Oh boy.

Spring also leaves room for overzealous writers to overwrite as they get spellbound in the wash of cliches that inevitability percolate from the most romantic of the four seasons. The start of the baseball season seems to follow this same, cookie-cutter, hackneyed narrative: a fresh start, a clean slate, new expectations. You know the jargon.

More importantly, however, is that this triteness is never specific to any particular fan base. Every cellar dweller can broadcast their expectations fraught with winning, and the only question for them is how quickly that narrative changes. Ultimately, this seems to be the case for all 30 MLB teams, and only one of them is allowed to maintain a myopic vision for the whole year and be universally rewarded for it. This team last year resided in Boston, plays in a pastel-green stadium and wears blood-red, or, in some cases, blood-soaked, socks.

Most franchises aren’t stricken with the burden of expectations of the same magnitude as this Boston bunch, but one who might be is a certain cadre of still-young sluggers from our nation’s original capital. Without the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry, Major League Baseball wouldn’t have much to boast about, let alone quote the tired quip of the game remaining as the nation’s pastime. These days, you could get more folks to show up to a Warriors charity softball game than an actual Oakland A’s game, and that’s only slightly hyperbolic.

Of course, this is a rivalry that continues to manifest itself in, well, a number of ways too long for an embroiled college writer to dive into on a Sunday afternoon when he has a slew of other affairs to be taking care of (if I needed to sum it up in a microcosm, call it fans willing to literally throw pizza at each other). Instead, I wish to quickly tackle an underrated element: traveling to the ballpark.

In what I anticipated in being a taxing commute, the T wonderfully surprised me in its accountability. Not that this is a remarkable achievement; after all, surpassing the MTA in New York is a relatively low bar to clear. Of course, the Red Line right now is encumbered with closed stops and track construction, an unfortunate fate that is all too familiar for New York subway riders. Is this, somehow, the unifying factor Yankees and Red Sox fans can all agree upon? Imagine them throwing beers, but instead of at each other, they're "sticking it to the man" and complaining about the same principle. 

Unity emerges in weird ways.