Red Sox 11 Yankees 6: A nice way to end the evening

When it comes to baseball I am a complete newbie. I really don't know why I started watching the matches. Maybe it's because of Matsuzaka Daisuke who transferred to Boston at the end of last year. At that point I was re-watching the japanese dorama series "H2" which mainly deals with the lives of a high school baseball team and their quest to enter the finals of the japanese high school baseball tournament which takes place at Koshien stadium in Osaka each year. Matsuzaka played there as well and left his mark on the scene playing a legendary semifinal over, I think, 17 innings.

So I started to check out games by the Boston Red Sox and somehow I was hooked. I researched a bit and found out that there is a real passion by the fans. Something I never thought to find in any american sport. American sports such as baseball, basketball, hockey or american football appeared only as events before my eyes. The people who went there were customers not fans. Different story with Boston, I guess. Although it's nothing compared with the constant noise a japanese baseball audience makes over the whole game, but I like the atmosphere that comes across when you watch games at Fenway Park on TV.



So last night there was a match against the New York Yankees and the american media hypes that up as "the biggest and fiercest rivalry in world sport". Hm, ever heard of the Old Firm or the Fla-Flu? Ever been to Milano during a derby? Ever been in Dortmund or Schalke? Ever witnessed a handball match between Flensburg and Kiel? Ever seen Real Madrid and FC Barcelona play against each other? Biggest rivalry on earth? Give me a break. Those two teams play more that 15 times against each other during regular season, that's way too much to have a decent rivalry. But then againt that's just my limited european mindset, I guess.

Anyway, so last night the Yankees took on the Red Sox with Boston leading their league by a huge margin. I always thought that baseball was a boring sport but that match yesterday had a lot of entertainment. One player was knocked unconcious, another one was run over, the lead was changing from one team to another and back again and both staring pitchers had to struggle. Boston's ace Curt Schilling is a very interesting figure as he writes his own blog "38 pitches" where he comments on his view of the game. Nice to read.
So, yeah, there were homeruns, injuries, errors. What was lacking was a nice brawl, but you can't have everything, now can ya?



In the end Boston won the whole thing. I like this because I like to compare the Yankees to Bayern Munich, the team I hate most in German football. So I always like to see big teams lose it. Both teams will play again tonight but that's way too late for me. That's the one problem. That I can only watch day games. But then again on weekends there are enough of them. So I will keept track of what Boston and Matsuzaka will be doing in the future and maybe, just maybe, I will get a little bit of the rules of this very complicated game.