In New York and Boston, this is what pennant-race baseball is all about: the Yankees and the Red Sox, beginning today in Fenway Park, battling for first place on the final weekend of the season, if not the final day.
Something memorable is sure to happen. Maybe a decisive home run by a relatively little-known player. Maybe an error by a usually sure-handed infielder. Maybe a strategic decision by a manager to remove or leave in a pitcher. Maybe something else that never quite happened before in a pennant race on the final weekend of the season, if not the final day.
To me, a pennant race has always been baseball at its best, especially when it comes down to the final weekend, if not the final day.
The essence of a pennant race is the tension that multiplies during the last few days of the season, if not the final weekend, maybe the final day. In the World Series or in the league championship and division series, the outcome takes three to seven games. But a pennant race is a season-long ordeal: game after game, week after week, month after month. The longer and tighter it is, the better it is.
And few pennant races have been as long and as tight as this Yankee-Red Sox ordeal, which, for these longtime rivals, has been a ticket to ride a roller coaster.
What makes this Yankee-Red Sox final-weekend scenario even more compelling is that it happened in three other seasons over more than a century.
Tied at the end of the 1978 season, the Yankees won their one-game American League East playoff at Fenway Park on home runs by Bucky Dent and Reggie Jackson before Goose Gossage got Carl Yastrzemski to pop up for the final out. In the 1949 finale at the Stadium, the Yankees, on the right-hander Vic Raschi's 21st victory, edged the Red Sox for the American League pennant by one game.
More than a century ago, in 1904, with the Highlanders needing a sweep of a last-day doubleheader at old Hilltop Park in Upper Manhattan, Boston clinched the pennant in the opener with a ninth-inning run that scored on a wild pitch by the right-hander Jack Chesbro, who had a 41-12 record that year.
Of all the Yankees' 41first-place finishes in the AL or in the AL East, their first-place margin was as little as one game only four times -- the two when the Red Sox were second, as well as the two that went to the final weekend with the 1964 Chicago White Sox and the 1922 St. Louis Browns.
In 1964, with Yogi Berra as a rookie manager, the Yankees clinched their fifth straight pennant in the next-to-last game of a three-team race, one game ahead of the White Sox, two ahead of the Baltimore Orioles. Mickey Mantle hit 35 homers, Jim Bouton was 18-13 and Whitey Ford was 17-6. Mel Stottlemyre, now the Yankees' pitching coach but at the time a late-season call-up, had a 9-3 record.
But when the Yankees lost a seven-game World Series to the St. Louis Cardinals, they inexplicably fired Berra and hired Johnny Keane, who had been the Cardinals' manager.
In 1922, the Browns, whose first baseman, George Sisler, batted .420 with 246 hits, were in first place as late as Sept. 7 before the Yankees arrived in St. Louis for a three-game series.
In the opener, Yankees center fielder Whitey Witt was felled by a bottle thrown from the Sportsman's Park bleachers. But in the third game, Witt knocked in the winning run and the Yankees had a one-and-a-half-game lead, never to lose it.
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