Photo: Barry Chin/Boston Globe/Getty Images

The first playoff game I ever attended at Yankee Stadium was game six of the 2003 American League Championship Series, when the Yankees came home up 3-2 with a chance to put the Boston Red Sox away. My roommate at my apartment up in Inwood had lucked into tickets via the online lottery — this was a thing back in 2003: You could just catch a break and win the chance to buy face-value Yankees payoff tickets — and we went fully expecting to see the Yanks clinch their fifth World Series appearance in six years. The Yankees had a 6-2 lead, but the Sox scored three in the seventh and two in the ninth to come back for the victory and force a game seven. Walking out to the subway afterward, my roommate and I came across a woman in a Red Sox cap being interviewed by a television station. Without missing a beat, my roommate — an ordinarily sane person who legitimately worked in academic-book publishing — slapped the woman upside the head, mid-interview, and yelled, “Fuck the fucking Red Sox!” A few people around us cheered wanly, and then we all just made our way to the B train heading uptown. The woman didn’t even look that surprised. “She wore a Sox cap to Yankee Stadium,” my roommate said on the ride home. “She knew what was coming.”

The Yankees would end up winning that series the next night on now-manager Aaron Boone’s walk-off homer; the Red Sox would get revenge with their comeback from a 3-0 deficit against the Yankees the next year, then end the Curse of the Bambino in the World Series. Hostilities had existed from the days of Babe Ruth to Bucky Dent to the ’90s, but those were the halcyon days of the Red Sox–Yankees rivalry, when Pedro Martinez was tossing Don Zimmer to the ground, when A-Rod was slapping the ball out of Bronson Arroyo’s glove, and Jason Varitek was punching A-Rod in the face, which led to an iconic image that I assume is still Ben Affleck’s lock screen to this day. It was a time when the Yankees and Red Sox seemed to be having Kaiju battles every night, epic confrontations that shifted the balance of the entire sport with every pitch. It was a rivalry that made you want to punch somebody, and to get punched.

The Red Sox and Yankees commence their best-of-three Wild Card Round Series at Yankee Stadium on Tuesday night, and it’s safe to say that none of the upcoming games will feel remotely like that. There won’t be any brawls, the stands should be relatively kerfuffle-free, and I’m not sure either team even considers the other their biggest rival anymore. (I suspect both the Yankees and Red Sox currently have a more contentious relationship with the Blue Jays, the team this series’ winner will face in the next round.) In the pregame hype videos, you’ll see all sorts of old clips: of A-Rod, of the Dave Roberts steal, of Babe Ruth, of Bucky Fucking Dent. But these two franchises just don’t have that juice anymore, at least not with each other. This is a memory of a rivalry rather than a current, vivid one.

Part of this is the simple history of the matter. The driving animus of the Red Sox–Yankees rivalry of 20 years ago, when my roommate was just out there shoving people, was not just that the Yankees were the dominant team; it was that the Red Sox had not won a World Series in nearly 100 years. There was a reason the Bronx bleachers were always abuzz with “1918!” chants. Once the Red Sox finally vanquished their demons in ’04 — then won three more World Series over the next 14 years — the rivalry lost its primary plotline. The Red Sox were equals, even superiors, to the Yankees, which evaporated the narrative that made the whole thing sing. (Red Sox fans chanting “2009!” just doesn’t have the same ring — maybe wait 50 years or so.) Also, as great as Aaron Judge is, he will never be as hated by Red Sox fans the way Derek Jeter or Alex Rodriguez was: He’s both too cheerful and too otherworldly, a giant who is almost too inhuman to be hateable in a relatable way. Yankees fans wanted to murder Pedro Martinez, and vice versa. I’m not sure the average Yankees fan is even all that certain how to pronounce Red Sox ace Garrett Crochet’s name. No one’s yelling “Who’s your daddy?” at Brayan Bello.

Then there’s the roster volatility. When the Red Sox traded away Rafael Devers this June, they cut the final link to their last World Series–winning team in 2018 (current Sox center fielder Ceddanne Rafaela was just a few years removed from the Little League World Series then). The Sox beat the Yankees that year and again in the 2021 Wild Card Game, the last time these teams played in the postseason. And no Red Sox players from that ’21 team are on the current squad’s active roster, either.

The teams are also going in divergent directions. The Red Sox have gotten younger since that last matchup; this is just the start for them. Meanwhile, the Yankees — well, the Yankees are so desperate to end their 15-year championship drought that every postseason loss feels like the apocalypse, that it’s the last chance they’ll ever have, that if Aaron Judge (one of only two Yankees left from that 2021 Wild Card Game, by the way, along with Giancarlo Stanton) doesn’t win a World Series now, he may never do it. Those mid-aughts Red Sox and Yankees teams were loaded with veterans who competed so often they were sick of each other; these current teams feel like they’re just sort of passing in the night.

And I think the fan bases are different, too, in large part because they’ve taken cues from each franchise. The Yankees, playing in the cavernous, mostly soulless Yankee Stadium 2.0 — where there’s literally a concrete moat to separate the richest fans from the rest of them — do not have the hard-charging, win-at-all-costs, Steinbrennerian swagger they once did; they are a billion-dollar corporation now, and they act (and charge) like one. The Red Sox ownership group, meanwhile, recently has seemed more concerned with developing real estate around Fenway Park and trimming payroll than winning: The team has traded away its two best and most expensive players, Mookie Betts and Rafael Devers, within the last five years. The Sox and Yankees of the mid-aughts and the ’70s acted as if nothing in the world mattered other than winning the World Series — and beating in the brains of their rivals. This is not how either of these teams, or really any MLB team, is run anymore. The rivalry doesn’t mean as much because none of these games feels like the end of the world any longer, for either team. Fans can’t help but internalize that. You’re gonna get in a fight in the stands for a bunch of billionaires who just hiked ticket prices on you again? In this economy?

This week’s series will be exciting, because it’s playoff win-or-go-home baseball, and playoff win-or-go-home baseball is exciting. It will be stirring just to watch these two teams, in those uniforms, battle deep into the Bronx night. But the teams aren’t the same, the players aren’t the same, and we aren’t the same. All told, it’s probably for the best. In retrospect, I doubt my old roommate would shove a woman in a Red Sox hat if she saw one in the Bronx this week. And I’m not sure, 20 years later, either of us could afford tickets to the game anyway.

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