The Only Red Sox-Yankees Article You'll Ever Need (If That's What You Want)

By Grant Brisbee - Editor

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Aug 8, 2011 - Let me tell you about a wondrous fantasyland, a fantastical world beyond the scope of your imagination. In this magical realm, it's easy to care about Yankees/Red Sox games and appreciate them for the excellent match-ups that they are.

Madness, you say? Witchery? No, it's true, all true. There's a place where you can look at a television schedule, see a Yankees/Red Sox game on the docket, and think, "Say, that seems like a splendid game between two evenly matched rivals!" This land is named Dude, If You Think the Red Sox and Yankees Get Too Much Media Coverage, Seek Out Different Sources of Sports News and Opinion Land. Drink from the red vial and follow me. No, I said red vial. Well, hope you weren't planning on sleeping for a while.

People who complain about Red Sox/Yankees games are my new pet peeve:

Oh, great, look: the front page of ESPN.com is all Yankees and Red Sox.

Of course MLB Network is showing Yankees/Red Sox. I wanted to watch [other game].

Yeah, went to read some stories about Craig Counsell's hitless streak, but everything is all Boston this and New York that. Totally annoying.

The people who take the effort to complain this loudly fascinate me. It's like sitting across from someone at a restaurant who keeps sticking his tongue in an open salt shaker and saying, "Gaah, this salt is all salty!" You don't like the feeling of a tongue covered in salt? Keep your damned tongue out of there. That's a useful maxim, regardless of context. And the principle holds true with Yankees/Red Sox games. Feel like they get too much coverage from the sites you frequent? The shows you watch? Frequent different sites. Watch different shows.

At the turn of the millennium, there weren't a lot of options for sports websites. ESPN.com was pretty much the only game in town. They covered the minor leagues excellently (with John Sickels) and had regular columns on the analytical side of baseball (with some jerk who faded into obscurity), so it was one-stop shopping for baseball coverage. And if you wanted highlights on television, SportsCenter was the best bet for national coverage. ESPN dominated, and if they wanted to shove Yankees/Red Sox down your throat -- and if you wanted to keep abreast with sports news -- you had to sit there and take it.

Now? There are too many good sites out there. There's a lot of internet, and they're just giving the stuff away. It's really, really hard to read everything on FanGraphs, Baseball Prospectus, and Hardball Talk every day, and those are just three fantastic sites out of a billion. If I'm particularly sick of a certain topic -- say, oh, the Red Sox and Yankees -- that's almost a relief. Don't click on that article and catch up with the rest of the things you should be reading.

This goes for video coverage,too. There's video on the internet now, and everything. It's no longer necessary to sit through a half-hour of sports highlights to get to the teams you actually care about.

I was excited about the Yankees and Red Sox playing this weekend. They're two well-constructed, impressive teams. Both teams are stacked. Even before you take into account that they're blood rivals, these games are match-ups that baseball fans should look forward to. And they played a couple of great games, too. I could look forward to the games because I spend about 1/30th of my baseball time on the internet reading about the Red Sox or Yankees. This is because I can read and watch whatever in the heck I want to read and watch. The people who complain that they're sick of Yankees/Red Sox aren't trying hard enough.

There's a world of magic out there, a fantastical land of baseball. Come visit. In this land, Red Sox/Yankees games still take for ******* ever. Can't do anything about that. Actually, that's probably more annoying than the complaining. But if you're not watching these games because you're sick of the hype, you're doing the internet wrong.

Read More: New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox

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