Roman Empire 1, Evil Empire 0.
That would have been the headline in a different time and place, back when the New York Yankees were good enough to be considered evil and consistent enough to be considered an empire.
But when Roman Anthony, Boston Red Sox rookie phenom, conquered his Yankee Stadium debut with three RBIs, a towering two-run blast in the ninth and a dismissive discarding of his bat in Boston’s 6-3 victory Thursday, nothing was toppled in the Bronx.
The Yankees haven’t won anything in 15 years. They don’t inspire fear in anyone (other than the Minnesota Twins, I suppose), and they certainly don’t inspire fear in the Red Sox, who have beaten them six straight times.
On repeat all night 😌 pic.twitter.com/ER27BW7IKG
— Red Sox (@RedSox) August 22, 2025
This all started on a Friday in June, Friday the 13th, when the Yanks barreled into Fenway Park with a 42-25 record, a 4 1/2-game lead in the division and a 9 1/2-game lead over the fourth-place Red Sox. Boston changed everything by sweeping that series, and here we are Friday morning with the Yanks holding a half-game lead over the Red Sox for the first wild card and the right to host a first-round playoff series.
Right now, it’s hard to believe the Yankees would be confident about surviving that best-of-three in either ballpark. They had a great setting to start changing things against Boston on Thursday night — a late-summer sellout crowd with a bit of an October chill in the air — and they failed to advance their recent surge of inspiring play.
Two things were certain after the home team surrendered nine walks and committed four errors, including one by Paul Goldschmidt that allowed Anthony, the Natural, to launch Yerry De los Santos’ first-pitch slider high into the stadium lights:
1) The Yankees have a Red Sox problem that needs to be fixed over their final six meetings of the regular season.
2) It’s fitting that the Yankees have this problem. If they are to finally win another championship, it makes sense that they would have to go through the Red Sox to do it.
Nothing will ever separate these franchises, not even Rob Manfred’s realignment plans. They will be in the same division, in the same league and on the same collision course for as long as baseball is played.
Their shared history explains why.
Hey, Evil Empire.
Brian Cashman wheeled around in the bowels of Fenway Park to find that Ben Affleck had recognized him as the face of AL East tyranny. This was in the middle of the 2003 American League Championship Series, and the Yankees were about to own the Red Sox one more time.
Cashman responded by telling the actor’s girlfriend, Jennifer Lopez, that she should remain true to her hometown team. An hour later, the wildest Yankees-Red Sox encounter ever unfolded in the form of a Game 3 that included a brawl, a beanball, brushbacks, a nasty takeout at second base, physical threats issued among all-time greats (Pedro Martinez, Roger Clemens and Manny Ramirez) and criminal charges against two visiting players who fought a part-time groundskeeper/full-time special education teacher in the bullpen.
Oh, and the sight of the Yankees’ ghostly pale 72-year-old bench coach, Don Zimmer, being loaded onto a stretcher and into a blue-and-white ambulance — with a folded newspaper in his hand — for a ride to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Martinez had thrown a charging Zimmer to the ground in the middle of the madness.
Why? Because the Yankees and Red Sox hated each other, that’s why. These blood rivals represented proof that sometimes grown men have no choice but to settle their differences with their fists.
Jorge Posada shouts at Pedro Martinez after he hit a batter during Game 3 of the 2003 ALCS at Fenway Park. (Ezra Shaw / Getty Images)
“It brought back good memories,” Yankees coach and former second baseman Willie Randolph, a veteran of the 1970s dustups, said that night. “It’s the way it’s supposed to be.”
Summoning those old Yankees who loved nothing more than destroying Boston’s baseball dreams, Clemens said: “I know Reggie (Jackson) was smiling somewhere. Goose (Gossage) and (Ron) Guidry were probably smiling. Great theater.”
That’s what the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry always delivered: unscripted drama that promised nothing but extreme passion. Of course, Aaron Boone made himself the final act of that 2003 play with a Game 7 homer for the ages, extending Boston’s World Series championship drought to an excruciating 85 years.
The Yankees failed to win it all that year, and the Red Sox rebounded by reversing the Curse of the Bambino with their historic and humiliating upset in the 2004 ALCS and with a World Series title that chased away whatever ghosts were still hovering about.
At the time, a tragic figure from another baseball rivalry, Ralph Branca, called Yanks-Red Sox more intense than Dodgers-Giants. Nothing in baseball could beat it. Nothing in sports could beat it.
But times changed along with the power dynamics in the American League. Ever since the Red Sox overcame their 0-3 deficit in that 2004 ALCS, they have won more championships (four) than any team in baseball and three more than the Yankees. The Red Sox have eliminated the Yanks in their last three postseason meetings, including two in the Boone era.
That doesn’t mean the 2025 Yankees feel the same level of desperation the Red Sox felt around the time Boone hit one deep into pinstriped lore. But Boone’s current Yankees have a ton of pressure on them, even though they’ve made the playoffs in six of his seven previous seasons, whereas Alex Cora’s Red Sox have missed the tournament the last three years.
The Yanks finally reached the World Series last season for the first time since 2009, only to be embarrassed by the Los Angeles Dodgers in more ways than one. They were expected to apply the painful lessons of that experience to this season and to compensate for the loss of Juan Soto with a more balanced and fundamentally sound approach worthy of championship contention.
There’s still time for that to happen. And yet Thursday night, the Yankees threw the ball around and kicked the ball around as if they were trying to notarize the Dodgers’ critiques of them.
“Not a great night for us,” Boone said.
Jazz Chisholm Jr. said the Yankees beat themselves and need to look in the mirror. But what does that reflection show, other than a team with power and speed and athleticism that, after five months, still hasn’t found a consistent identity?
Today’s version of the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry can’t match yesterday’s version, at least not in the Bronx. The old Yankee Stadium was a much more hostile battleground that could go toe-to-toe with Fenway. The not-so-new Yankee Stadium is a helluva place to watch a ballgame, but it makes everyone a bit too comfortable.
The Evil Empire has also become more of a benevolent dictatorship, with George Steinbrenner’s win-or-else mandate replaced by Hal Steinbrenner’s more holistic leadership. The general manager for both, Cashman, used to engage in the kind of gamesmanship duels with Theo Epstein — feigning interest in available players to drive up the price for the other guy, booking up hotel rooms around a prized free agent to box out the opposition, overly praising each other’s team to inflate the pressure — that will likely never develop with Craig Breslow.
On top of all that, the modern-day ballplayer on both sides makes so much money and shares so many experiences with opponents (as past teammates or current clients of the same agency) that it’s hard to conjure up the old-school hate required in a defining rivalry.
Especially when the managers involved, Boone and Cora, are longtime buds.
So there was no chance that Thursday night’s opener of this critical four-game series would end with Yankees president Randy Levine calling Boston’s actions “disgraceful and shameful” like he did on that surreal October night in 2003. There was no chance that Cora was going to say, “We’ve upgraded it from a battle to a war,” the way Grady Little did.
And there was no chance that paramedics would be strapping a member of the Yankees coaching staff to a stretcher and sending him to the hospital because of the actions of a Boston pitcher.
But there was enough at stake for both teams for this to feel like something of a heavyweight prizefight. Before the game, Boone recalled his fateful July 2003 trade from Cincinnati to the Bronx and a conversation he had that night with Reds executive Tim Naehring, a former Boston infielder, who told him of the rivalry, “You have no idea what you’re about to walk into.”
He walked into Billy Martin vs. Jimmy Piersall, Thurman Munson vs. Carlton Fisk, Graig Nettles vs. Bill “Spaceman” Lee and, eventually, Pedro vs. Zim and all the surreal happenings of the fall of 2003.
Punctuated by Boone sending the Red Sox home.
All these years later, the stakes are the same, even if the intensity is not. And if the Yankees can’t figure something out about their rivals ASAP, this time the Red Sox will be the team sending Boone home.
(Top photo of Roman Anthony: Jim McIsaac / Getty Images)
