Yankees vs. Red Sox: The Rivalry

“Best of” Baseball Books on the Yankees / Red Sox rivalry.

As we count down to Sunday night’s opening game of the season, baseball’s biggest rivalry begins anew.  Will the Yankees defend their championship?  Did the Red Sox reload in the offseason to make a run at the World Series?

There are a number of excellent books written about the rivalry.  Some of the most popular ones are listed below.  Did you see your favorite on this list?

Summer of 49 by David Halberstam – With the airwaves saturated with so much sporting choice, it’s hard to imagine how, not that long ago, baseball so completely dominated the landscape and captured imaginations. Given the 1949 season that veteran journalist David Halberstam meticulously recreates, maybe it’s not so hard after all. It was a season of great public and personal drama for the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees, with the conflict finally resolving itself in a Yankee pennant following a head-to-head showdown on the final day of the season. Each team was led by a star of the highest magnitude: Joe DiMaggio spurred the Yankees despite missing half the season with a foot injury; Ted Williams virtually carried the Sox on his back, missing an unprecedented third Triple Crown by mere decimal points on his batting average. Halberstam focuses much of his narrative on the trials of these two individual sporting giants, adding fine supporting performances by Yogi Berra, Ellis Kinder, Dom DiMaggio, even restaurateur Toots Shoor. Both on and off the field, Halberstam beautifully captures the ethos of a more innocent game that no longer exists, played by heroes far more driven by their pride than by their salaries

Red Sox vs. Yankees: The Great Rivalry by Harvey and Frederic Frommer - Red Sox vs. Yankees: The Great Rivalry covers nearly a century’s worth of epic battles on and off the baseball field between these age-old rivals. Featuring exclusive interviews with former governors Mario Cuomo of New York and Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, former press secretary Ari Fleischer, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, congressmen, reporters, broadcasters, and especially players, coaches, managers and front-office execs from the Red Sox and Yankees including Don Zimmer, Nomar Garciaparra, Derek Lowe, Jason and Jeremy Giambi, Lou Meroni, Dwight Evans, and Theo Epstein. Two unique features of the book are a Rivalry Timeline and a “Talkin’ Rivalry” section, a free-for-all in print among fans, journalists, and players who all have something to say. Other chapters include “Marker Moments,” in-depth profiles of Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams, Fenway Park and Yankee Stadium. More than two years in the making, this coffee-table book will have nearly 256 pages of text and more than 125 photos, some in color, some archival. A perfect book for Yankee fans, Red Sox fans, and all baseball fans.

A Tale of Two Cities by Tony Massarotti & John Harper – When the Boston Red Sox faced the New York Yankees in the historic 2003 American League Championship Series, the meeting seemed to serve as the climax to perhaps the greatest rivalry in professional sports. Yet, following New York’s comeback victory in scintillating Game 7, both the Red Sox and Yankees entered the off-season without a world title–and with renewed conviction to finish the job in 2004.  In A Tale of Two Cities, respected baseball writers John Harper (New York Daily News) and Tony Massarotti (Boston Herald) chronicle the Yankees and Red Sox in parallel story lines through the summer of 2004. The authors take you behind the scenes with the teams, cities, and media during one of the most intense baseball seasons in history.

The Greatest Game: The Yankees, the Red Sox, and the Playoff of ‘78 by Richard Bradley – Major league baseball was vastly different 30 years ago when free agency and the designated hitter were relatively new concepts, and most games were not televised. But one thing was the same: the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox were fierce rivals. In the 1978 season, it all came down to a roller-coaster ride of a pennant race that culminated in one Monday afternoon playoff game to decide the winner of the American League East. Bradley (American Son: Portrait of John F. Kennedy, Jr.) scores a solid hit with his first baseball book, recounting the sudden-death game and the season leading up to it. He deftly staggers chapters, alternating a pitch-by-pitch account of the playoff innings with the backstory of the season and most of the players and coaches. Two of the many compelling plot threads include the dramatics of meddling Yankees owner George Steinbrenner and the feisty, hard-drinking manager Billy Martin, and the touching son-finds-lost-father saga of Bucky Dent, the light-hitting infielder who hit a three-run home run that made him a hero. Many other heavyweight names in baseball lore move across these pages, including Lou Piniella, Don Zimmer, Reggie Jackson, Goose Gossage, Catfish Hunter, Mike Torrez, Ron Guidry and Thurman Munson. The latter chapters of the book are filled with vivid description, particularly of Dent’s classic at bat and the slow advance of the evening shadow across the Fenway Park grass.

Blood Feud: The Red Sox, the Yankees, and the Struggle of Good versus Evil by Bill Nowlin and Jim Prime – Veteran baseball authors Bill Nowlin and Jim Prime first envisioned Blood Feud as an unbiased, evenhanded survey of the historical circumstances that have fueled the long-standing Boston Red Sox/New York Yankees rivalry – a rivalry even more contentious now than it was a century ago. While they remained true to the facts, lifelong Sox fans Nowlin and Prime found it difficult not to deviate from their goal of impartiality. When they finished, and regardless of what it says on the back cover of this book, what stood before them was a wickedly skewed, satirically barbed book delivered firmly from the perspective of the underdog Boston Red Sox.

Blood Feud revels in the differences separating the Red Sox and the Yankees, including divergences in culture, geography, attitude, and personal grooming. Yet the authors also recognize the parallels and commonalities between the two ball clubs, which over the years have shared a surprising number of star players and coaches. From the Curse of the Bambino to the Zen of Zimmer, Blood Feud dissects the pivotal personnel trades and transactions, the tangles, and the tirades that continue to add gasoline to the fire.

Drawing on historical research, original interviews with players from both sides, and discussions with partisans of each team among the fans, Blood Feud is leavened with humor, philosophical musings, anecdotes, and innumerable enlightening factoids. Though the Red Sox 2004 World Series triumph has altered the terms of engagement, Nowlin and Prime predict that the rivalry will only intensify as a result of a more level playing field. Now it’s the Yankees who have something to prove.

Emperors and Idiots: The Hundred Year Rivalry by Mike Vaccaro – The C-word. Curse. Spell. Hex. However you say it, from 1918-the infamous year the Boston Red Sox traded Babe Ruth to their southern rivals-until the 2004 playoffs, the curse brought the Red Sox Nation to its knees and supplied New York Yankees fans with an unswerving level of confidence. For 86 years, the Curse of the Bambino fell upon Boston, blocking the plate on their slide into World Series success. Hundreds of heated games packed those decades, but few seasons compare to those of 2003 and 2004, when the Sox came this close to crushing the curse and, against all odds, not only crushed it, but knocked it out of the park. Vaccaro, a senior sports columnist for the New York Post, recounts those two most recent seasons while peppering his storytelling with colorful anecdotes from the ghosts of Red Sox-Yankees past-from Williams-DiMaggio to Jeter-Garciaparra. Few of today’s fans know how truly deep the most heated rivalry in sports cuts (yes, even the most fervid fan can learn something here) or how thick the roster of athletes, coaches and fans involved in it flows. The author gives equal time to the players and their fans, going grassroots and seeking out the most dedicated followers to best illustrate the highlights of those seasons, and the emotions that accompanied each moment. Remembers Sox fan Mike Carey: “I was more nervous for game seven than I was for my wedding or the birth of my daughter.” But by the end of that game, the curse was broken.

*Books descriptions courtesy of amazon.com