Sox pay final visit to the House that Ruth Built

Some of the best games ever have been played at Yankee Stadium. Most of those games were Red Sox Yankees games. For example the game when Aron Boon hit that walk off home run against Tim Wakefield in the ALCS, games like that. From irishtimes.com: FOR THE better part of a century, the bitter rivalry between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees has been the fiercest this side of Glasgow. With Yankee Stadium slated for the wrecking ball at the conclusion of the present season and the home side all but eliminated from the play-off chase, tonight’s meeting between the old foes will almost certainly be the last to take place in the ancient “House that Ruth Built”. The attendant memories will outweigh the absence of dramatic implications to the Boston team’s final visit to the historic venue.

Earlier this month another convocation of Red Sox and Yankees at a minor league ball park in Scranton, Pennsylvania, had produced an abundance of misty-eyed memories. Billed as the “Legends Reunion”, an abbreviated five-inning game between doddering members of the 1978 editions of the Boston and New York clubs drew over 8,000 spectators to PNC Field, and if the erstwhile Boys of Summer had gone a bit grey, the nostalgic aspects of the occasion compensated for the three-decade erosion of athletic skills on the part of the principals.

The shared history of the Red Sox and Yankees is a tale intertwined with that of the 85-year-old venue in the Bronx. Before the 1920 season, when Boston owner Harry Frazier dispatched George Herman “Babe” Ruth to New York for $125,000, the Yankees had been poor second cousins, tenants-at-sufferance of the National League’s Giants at the Polo Grounds in Manhattan.

With the arrival of the man who would become the most accomplished slugger in the history of the game, the Yankees were shortly outdrawing their landlords, resulting in the construction of a palatial home of their own on the mainland.

For partisans of both clubs, the conclusion of the 1978 season represented the Boston-New York rivalry in microcosm. The Red Sox had won 12 of their last 14 games to draw even with the defending world champions at 99-63, and on October 2nd the teams met at Fenway Park in a one-game play-off to decide the American League East. Boston held a 2-0 lead in the seventh inning when, with two runners on base, the light-hitting New York shortstop Bucky Dent hit a Mike Torrez pitch over the left field wall to give the Yankees a lead they would never surrender.

When Yankee Stadium opened on April 18th, 1923, the Red Sox were on hand for the christening, and went down to a 4-1 defeat, largely on the strength of a home run by Ruth. Beginning with their first season in the new stadium, the now-rechristened Bronx Bombers would go on to win 26 World Series titles over the next 77 years. The Red Sox, who behind Ruth had won their fifth world championship in 1918, didn’t win another until 2004.

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