Chill On Red Sox-Yankees For Now

You know sportswriters have been in spring training too long when they start making a big deal about exhibition games. This happened with the first spring meeting between the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees Tuesday. Like it matters what happens in March. These are exhibition games, practice games, games that don’t count. This is gym class with umpires.

No matter what I will never put any stock in a Major League Baseball exhibition game. This is where I draw the line. Anything can happen between the lines and except for the cases where someone gets injured, it has nothing to do with what will occur during the regular season. Spring training is about lesiure-time baseball, going out to the ballpark and hanging while eating hot dogs and soaking up the sun, seeing if you like any of the young newcomers on the roster. It is definitely not about winning and losing.

By dinner time I bet the players who played in the game can’t remember if they won or lost. Red Sox-Yankees is a hate-them-now-and-forever, Hatfield-and-McCoys rivalry where players might rip the uniforms off the other guys with their teeth in a brawl at home plate if they had the chance. But that’s only after the starting gong in April. In March, Red Sox-Yankees doesn’t matter. In April, Red Sox-Yankees is life and death. In October, fuhgeddaboutit, Red Sox-Yankees is even more serious than that.

The exhibition season is not about the games, not about the wins and losses. The exhibition season is about rounding into form for the real thing. The exhibition season is about determining who is ready for the Show and who needs another season in the minors. The exhibition season is about evaluating the old guy, the 40-year-old, to see if his last legs will carry him through another 162-game go-around or it’s time to say goodbye for good.

Boston-New York is the best, most intense rivalry in baseball. Tuesday was billed as new Red Sox manager Bobby Valentine getting a taste of it. If so, it was Rivalry Lite, with the Tobasco sauce left off. Valentine is 61 years old. He played in the majors. He managed in the majors. He managed in Japan. I’m thinking Bobby was amused that anyone would think he might be cowed, overly impressed by, or in any other way intimidated by an exhibition game.

You have to chuckle over Valentine saying that he has heard the toughest thing about managing in the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry is not being able to get enough tickets for relatives who want to see the 18 meetings during the regular season. That doesn’t sound like a guy who will be overwhelmed by the task. More likely he is saying to himself, Wake me when it starts. That’s always been my philosophy, too. Exhibition games, snore. Regular season games, I’m all in.

By the way, the Red Sox won the exhibition game, 1-0. Hey, Red Sox Nation, can we count this one?

You can follow Call to the Pen on Twitter at @FSCalltothePen or like us here on Facebook.