I once wrote a book called “Emperors and Idiots,” a history of the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry , and for that I interviewed close to 150 ex-ballplayers and managers and executives. Here’s what struck me most: Almost all of those players had played for teams other than the Yankees and the Red Sox. More than not, they identified with other teams beside the two teams.
Yet all of them, when talking about Sox-Yanks games, spoke with as much fervor — and often anger — as when you get a bunch of old high school football heroes talking at the 40-year reunion about their heated crosstown rivals. “It’s like this tattoo in your soul,” is how the late Tim Wakefield described it. “I know when I pitched for the Pirates, we had intense feelings about the Mets or the Cardinals or the Braves.
But that was different. Red Sox-Yankees was on another level.” Here’s the thing, though: All of those interviews with all of those players, as much vitriol as they’d spill about each other — trust me, ask Bill Lee about Billy Martin, watch a man’s neck veins bulge — “it all paled in comparison to three unforgettable hours I spent on a steamy Kansas City summer night in 1998.
I was sitting in the front row of a luxury box. A few minutes before first pitch I clicked my tape recorder on. I said, “So tell me about the Yankees.
” And for three straight hours, George Brett talked and I never — not once — had to ask another question. He filled up four tapes. Only one of them s.