So on the morning of the much-hyped (OK, I'll call a spade a spade) --overhyped -- five game series between the Yanks and the Sox, here's a fun article from today's NY Times (reg. req.) -- about where Yankee Country ends and Red Sox Nation begins. Much attention is payed to Connecticut -- New Britain is halfway between Fenway and Yankee Stadium. The local minor league team gave away equal numbers of NY and Boston caps one evening -- Sox caps were all gone first.

Old Saybrook on the west side of the Connecticut River: Yankees. Old Lyme on the other side: Sox. I can attest to that -- having spent many summers as a kid visiting cousins on the CT Shore near Old Lyme -- many more Sox fans there. The local dry goods store always sold more Boston Globes than NY Times (although the Courant outsold both)

Here's map of the region with the line in between.

[funny -- little mention of the Mets ...]

[ August 18, 2006, 07:53 AM: Message edited by: DCBucky ]

What do you mean, overhyped? Just because ESPN had an HOUR-LONG pre-game show devoted to "this HISTORIC series" doesn't make it overhyped, does it? Just because it was labeled "Sportscenter" but they weren't talking about anything else but "this HISTORIC series" doesn't make it overhyped, does it?

Then I hope you missed Friday's late night SportsCenter, which followed the first two games in this weekend's Yankees/Rod Sox series, opening with a montage of the history of "the most storied rivalry in all of sports" leading to a grand total of four separate reports(including a special Baseball Tonight segment and live coverage of Joe Torre's postgame press conference) on the two games, including informing us that no other 9 inning game has ever been longer than the night game "and this could only happen between these two teams" (really?? No other teams could possibly ever play a longer 9 inning game....)

In all, the hour broadcast devoted at least 1/4 of the time to the Yankees/Red Sox games; it got so bad I even looked forward to hearing Tiger tell us he put himself into contention and "there's a lot of golf left to play this weekend." My favorite anchor voiceover about the two games came from Cindy something who offered: "We know one game doesn't make a season but a five-game series is literally akin to an entire season" and later "We can only imagine which team Babe Ruth--with his strong ties to both the Yankees and Red Sox--would be rooting for tonight." Weird, weird, weird, weird, weird.

~Adam

Fortunately I missed that, although on the earlier pre-game spewing they dug out some video of a Curt Schilling-Mike Mussina matchup.

From the year 2000, when Schilling was a Phil and Mussina was an Oriole.

I agree that is overhyped, but for me watching the Red Sox complete collapse being covered wall to wall isn't pretty for this Sox fan. The Red Sox have always been in the national spotlight, but it somehow seems bigger this weekend, I guess because there's so many games in one bunch. At any rate, if you couldn't see the flaws with this team before, they're certainly visible now. Not doing anything during the trade season looks to be a particularly poor choice at this point. The Yankees are showing they made the right choices and are the better team.

Anthony