I’m officially excited for baseball season now

I knew the Yankees/Red Sox rivalry would pull me out of my winter doldrums sooner or later. I just didn’t expect it to happen now, and in this fashion. My guess was that I’d hear a “Yankees Suck” chant during our first trip to Fenway on April 11th and I’d be ready for blood. Instead, it’s Theo Epstein and Mike Mussina going toe-to-toe in their own little rendition of “Revenge of the Nerds.”

Here’s Epstein on Boston’s WEEI last Friday, talking about the Sox opening their season in Japan: The research that we’ve done on the Japan trip from the teams that have previously gone is one or two bad apples can spoil the lot. Kevin Brown and Mike Mussina spent the whole time bitching about it … and by the time the Yankees team got back from the trip they were all using it as a crutch.

Mike Mussina’s response? Yeah, we used it as an excuse for winning the division. You need a comment from me about him calling me a bad apple? I don’t have one.

Zing! Now I’m not going to even bother handicapping these two in a fight because they’d just end up slapping each other like two chicks waiting in line outside of Tenjune, but this is great stuff. Ever since ‘04, it’s seemed like these two teams haven’t hated each other enough. Everyone was hoping to see some fireworks every time they got together– a la the 2003 ALCS when Fenway turned into the 4th ring of hell during game 3– but instead all we got was the “We have a lot of respect for those guys” line over and over again from both sides to the point where you started to wonder if these games mattered as much as they used to… at least as the players were concerned. Well hopefully those days are behind us, and now Yankees versus Red Sox can revert back to being the WWE cage matches we all used to know and love.