By Steven V. Roberts,
who teaches at George Washington University and wrote "My Fathers' Houses," a memoir of his childhood in Bayonne, N.J.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008

THE GREATEST GAME

The Yankees, the Red Sox, and the Playoff of '78

By Richard Bradley

Free Press. 286 pp. $25

Russell Earl Dent, better known as Bucky, played shortstop for the New York Yankees in 1978 and hit only four home runs during the regular season. But on Oct. 2, with his team facing the Red Sox in a one-game playoff for the division championship, Dent smacked a three-run homer in the seventh inning to seal a 5-4 Yankee victory.

Almost 30 years later, fans still approach Dent and tell him what they were doing on that day. I've never met the man, so here's my story. Oct. 2 was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and that morning, coming out of services, I met an old friend who knew I was a huge Yankees fan. What, he asked, are you doing here? Today's the big game. What, I replied, do you think I was in there praying for?

I doubt if my feeble plea for divine intervention steered Dent's ball over the Green Monster, the famous left field wall in Boston's Fenway Park. But the mere fact that baseball was in my prayers that day demonstrates how deeply fans on both sides felt about "the greatest game," as author Richard Bradley describes it. "Going back to the turn of the twentieth century," he writes, "the competition between the Red Sox and the Yankees wasn't just about two teams, but also about two cities, two regions, two cultures, two different ways of looking at the world." That's why the Yankees and the Red Sox are the best rivalry in sports. The only contests that come close are on the collegiate level: Michigan and Ohio State in football, say, or Duke and North Carolina in basketball. But those teams play each other only once (football) or twice (basketball) every year. The Yanks and the Sox tussle nearly 20 times a season, not including the playoffs, and that reinforces a pet theory of mine. Fans retain the baseball loyalties of their youth because their teams play almost every day for six months. A baseball game is a common occurrence, not a special occasion, and that very ordinariness breeds a fierce loyalty to the hometown heroes no other sport can match.

Bradley, whose other books include "American Son: A Portrait of John F. Kennedy, Jr.," is at his best when he takes us inside the game, pointing out tiny details that don't show up in box scores but often determine the outcome. For example: With the Sox threatening to tie the game in the ninth inning, shortstop Rick Burleson failed to go from first to third on a hit to right field, and therefore was not in a position to score when the next batter, Jim Rice, lofted a fly to the warning track.

The book is less successful when Bradley strains for larger meanings. He writes that the advent of free agency in the '70s, allowing players to switch teams after their contracts expired, meant that "local fans had no emotional connection" with the changing cast of mercenaries who chose to play for the highest bidder. But that's clearly not true. Baseball is more popular than ever. Fans root for their towns and their teams -- no matter who's wearing their uniforms.

Moreover, this book feels a bit dated. For more than 80 years, the dramatic fulcrum of the Yankee-Red Sox soap opera was Boston's sale of Babe Ruth to New York in 1920. After that, the "curse of the Bambino" condemned the Beantowners to eternal purgatory. No matter how good their team was, somehow, some way, the Bosox would find a way to blow it. And Dent's home run stood as an iconic moment for a generation of New Englanders, a bitter symbol of blasted hopes summed up by Sox Manager Don Zimmer, who immortalized the Yankee shortstop as "Bucky [expletive] Dent."

But in 2004, the Sox pulled off a miracle of their own, coming back from a three-game deficit to trounce the Yankees in the playoffs and then win the World Series. Last year they won again. No longer are they defined by the image of Carl Yastrzemski, their great left fielder, who, as he watched Dent's blow clear the fence, "bent both knees and fell forward for a fraction of a second, as if he'd been punched in the gut." Now they are the Sox of David "Big Papi" Ortiz, joyfully slamming home runs of their own. It's not Bradley's fault, but the Red Sox are no longer lovable losers, tragic victims of the baseball furies. They're the best team of the decade. And we're supposed to feel sorry for these guys? Gimme a break. I say, thank God for Bucky Dent.