Major League Baseball
Live through this: Yankees vs. Sox again

By Tim Brown
Los Angeles Times

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BOSTON — On a television in the corner, the New York Yankees advanced to the American League Championship Series, then left the field in Minneapolis as if they'd done it a thousand times before, which, to the people here, sounds like a low estimate.

Leaning on a beer tap in a pub near Copley Square, a young bartender who had introduced himself as Dave and hadn't seen near enough for such weariness, smiled thinly and announced, "That's it, Yankees-Red Sox. Man, I don't know if I can live through another one."

Along the Amtrak route from Boston's South Station to New York's Penn Station the next morning, the very tips of trees had gone crimson and golden and orange, nearing full-blown fall.

Here, they hadn't heard the chants from Fenway Park, where Red Sox fans called out the Yankees, their heroes — Manny Ramirez, Pedro Martinez, David Ortiz — taking laps on the warning track late Friday night, the Anaheim Angels threading through the Ted Williams Tunnel on their way home.

But, even along this bucolic corridor, and for a nation's baseball fans, Yankees haters and Red Sox apologists, there will hardly be any avoiding the coming best-of-seven series, beginning tomorrow night at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx.

If Bud Selig's wild-card design has its benefits, Yankees-Red Sox in mid-October is chief among them, George Steinbrenner's "Evil Empire" resisting Boston's recurrent losers, a fight more often settled long before the sycamores burn.

The game's cornerstone franchises went seven games in this very format a year ago, ending on a manager's misguided faith in his pitching ace and then a fat knuckleball hit into the night, the Yankees superior again.

It is the best baseball theater short of the World Series. Even then, the Yankees, perhaps spent by the ALCS last year, offered little fight against the Florida Marlins and lost in the World Series.

The Red Sox have not won a World Series since 1918, a fact that happens to grip their city and turn its masses cheerless and suspicious.

To call this an obsession is to undersell the passion of it. To detail Yankees domination, and New Yorkers' glee over it, is too long a conversation. They just are, the facts and sensations bundled in a timeless world order, Yankees first, Red Sox somewhere behind, Bucky Dent hallowed, Ted Williams' head iced in some stainless-steel drum.
 
Other than that, it's just another baseball series.

So they arrive again at the doorstep of the World Series, the Yankees with their bats thumping and their pitching momentarily stabilized, the Red Sox confident they've got five more outs in them, the length by which they fell short a year ago.

It was, apparently, unavoidable, the postseason destinies of franchises built to battle one another.

Boston vs. New York Yankees
Best-of-seven American League Championship Series. (All games on Ch. 13.)
#	Day	Site	Time
1	Tuesday	New York	5:15 p.m.
2	Wednesday	New York	5:15 p.m.
3	Friday	Boston	5:15 p.m.
4	Saturday	Boston	5 p.m.
5*	Sunday	Boston	1:35 p.m.
6*	Oct. 19	New York	5:15 p.m.
7*	Oct. 20	New York	5:15 p.m.
* if necessary