The Yankees beat the Red Sox 9-2 on Saturday in New York, and if you have watched enough of these you know what a seven-run gap in this rivalry actually means: somebody's bullpen got emptied out, and somebody spent the last two innings just trying to get to tomorrow. That is the Yankees Red Sox recap in one line. The rest of it gets settled Sunday.
I do not have the full box score in front of me yet, so I am not going to pretend I know which arm cracked or which inning turned it. What I do know is the shape of the thing. Nine to two in late August between these two is not a competitive game that got away, it is a game that stopped being a game somewhere in the middle innings, and the manager in the losing dugout spends the back half making cold arithmetic decisions about who he can afford to use with a series finale on the calendar.
That is the part that actually matters here. These two play again Sunday at 1:36 PM ET in New York, and the team that gets blown out on Saturday almost always shows up to the finale with a thinner set of options than it wants. Blowouts do not stay in their own box score. They leak.
And the calendar is the other character in this story. This is the last weekend of August. Everything from here is September baseball, where every game against a division rival counts twice in the standings and about four times in the stomach.
checked the almanac: these two have been doing this since 1901, and the only rivalry i know that has produced both the 1978 Bucky Dent playoff game and the 2004 comeback from 0-3 has earned the right to a lopsided Saturday every now and then. it never stays lopsided long.
What I am watching Sunday: how Boston handles the middle innings. If the finale gets away early too, that tells you more about the state of that pitching staff heading into September than any single Saturday night ever could.
