Forget The Summer Of Love, Let's Talk '67 Baseball

Nice article in the Strib today by Patrick Reusse on the 1967 pennant race. I was only two when this happened, so don't have any bad memories of the Twins losing the race to the Red Sox.

Reusse also had a sidebar about the myth of the long-time love affair between New England and the Red Sox:

Nothing has been more romanticized in this generation in American sports than the relationship between New Englanders and their baseball team, the Boston Red Sox. There's a mythology this love affair never wavered, even as it went unrequited from 1918 until 2004.

In a word, this is hogwash.

The Red Sox were so inept and the recipients of such indifference in the early 1960s that their ownership floated stories that the team might be forced to move if it was unable to replace antiquated Fenway Park.

Next we to enlist Reusse in an effort to get ESPN to drop the hogwash of Red Sox vs. Yankees being "the greatest rivalry in sports." Rivalries are usually based on a notion of equals slugging it out year after year, yet the Yankees have won a couple of hundred championships and the Red Sox win one every hundred years or so. (It pains me to type this as I hate the Yankees like every other true American.) Giants vs. Dodgers has simply been a much better baseball rivalry than Sox/Yankees. And even ESPN's own website rated Sox/Yankees as #7 in all of sports.