New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com It's Boston 'E' Party Wednesday, June 30th, 2004 The joke last night, other than the Red Sox, was that it wasn't Vice President Dick Cheney who needed all the Secret Service protection he received at Yankee Stadium, along with an old-fashioned Bronx cheer as old as the Grand Concourse. It was the Red Sox who needed protection from Derek Lowe, their starting pitcher. Or maybe just from themselves. The lead for the Yankees in the loss column is now seven. This is not the way things were supposed to work out in the AL East this time, even if it is the way things have worked out between these two teams just about all the other times. The Red Sox win April, the Yankees win the summer, and in the end. You bet Cheney got booed while Ronan Tynan sang "God Bless America." Cheney - close to the action for a change - had been down in a box seat next to the Yankee dugout with Rudy Giuliani and Gov. George Pataki. Now Cheney was upstairs in George Steinbrenner's box, and when they put his face on the big screen in the outfield, there was plenty of booing. It was about the only thing that stopped the real cheers for the Yankees at Yankee Stadium as they kept pouring it on against the Red Sox. Real game story last night? Cheney got booed. Yankees got even with the Red Sox, for one night, and maybe the rest of the way. "We need to play clean baseball," Red Sox manager Terry Francona said in his office when it was over, talking about the three errors his team made. The Red Sox made a mess of things instead. And made it harder and harder to remember the team that was 15-6 once. A week or so into what is supposed to be a Yankee-Red Sox summer, they looked like every Red Sox team that ever came in here and wasn't nearly good enough. Nomar Garciaparra made an error on the first ball he saw in the field last night. Kevin Millar made an error on a routine ground ball hit by Kenny Lofton and Garciaparra booted one from Derek Jeter in the fourth right before Gary Sheffield, the MVP of the Yankees so far, the MVP by a lot ("A tough, tough man," is the way hitting coach Don Mattingly described Sheffield, with great feeling, after the game) busted the thing wide open with his 13th home run to left field. So far Sheffield is the most dangerous bat in the lineup. It isn't even close. He is the one you want up there when it is on the line. "Give them an inch, they take a mile," Francona said, a few feet away from a Red Sox clubhouse as quiet as a reading room. The Yankees ran on Lowe and Jason Varitek anytime they wanted to. Tony Clark managed to hit the second home run of his life into the black in dead center. Clark's shot made it a seven-run game. The Red Sox hit some big shots off Javier Vazquez. The Yankees had big innings last night with runners on. How many times has that happened in the past, with all the Red Sox teams who couldn't beat the Yankees? It ended up 11-3 for the Yankees. The season series is still 6-2 for the Red Sox. For now, though, their season has gone wrong. They have scored more runs than the Yankees, given up fewer runs, and look where they are: fading back into a wild-card race with two teams in the AL West and one in the AL Central and maybe even the Devil Rays. When you ask Francona about April he gives you a long look and says, "That was two months ago." Making it sound like two Presidential administrations. Now the Red Sox can't allow themselves to think about making up seven games on the Yankees over the next 90 games or so. They just need to get a game tonight and get the ball to Pedro Martinez tomorrow. Or people will wonder all over again if this current rivalry between the Yankees and Red Sox has already been as good as it will ever be, across those 19 regular-season games last season, then the seven playoff games that took us all the way to Aaron Boone. The Red Sox were such a live team last season, especially at the end, when they came within one Grady Little of the World Series. You know they will be declared dead in New York today, because that's the game, be the first to say they are one of those openings for "Six Feet Under." But the Red Sox have brought it on themselves, since an April, against the Yankees and everybody else they played, that is long gone. "I'll tell you this about this rivalry," Curt Schilling was saying before last night's game. "It's a lot more fun playing in it than watching it." Schilling watched last night. No fun from where he was sitting in the visitors' dugout. Lowe couldn't pitch and the fielders couldn't field and the Yankees got runs in every inning from the second through the seventh. Red Sox fans made a lot of noise when these two teams last played here in April. Not much last night, when Boston fans in the place were as quiet as Red Sox players in their clubhouse, moving slowly away from the long food tables in the back of the room. Richard Cheney knows why he got booed last night. But if this was his first Yankee-Red Sox game, he has to wonder what all the shouting is about.
I'm guessing but maybe it's because he is from out west and not from New York...but that's just a guess.
I'm guessing that it might be due to the fact that the Yankee Stadium crowd, in step with a majority of the country, realizes that Dick Cheney and his merry band of cohorts are running our great nation right down the sh*tcan!
What was really funny was the way the Yes network (the network that carries the Yankees and owned by GS) tried to overdub canned "cheers" over the crowd noise. But you could still here the boos coming through!
