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Article from 1967 on the Angels-Red Sox Rivalry

A few weeks ago I ran across this piece of Angels-Red Sox history--from 45 years ago this month.

As the Angels were getting ready to play the Red Sox last week, I started thinking about the meetings of the two teams over the years. I certainly consider them to be "rivals," but I went to my first Angels game in 1984. So from my perspective the rivalry began during the playoffs in 1986. There are many of you on HH that have been around a lot longer than I have, so of course you know better than this. But I bet most of you didn't know that the rivalry actually goes back many, many years, all the way to the birth of our MLB franchise.

Things are pretty bad for us right now, but at least we still have a chance. It could be worse. We could be the Red Sox, a team whose last memory of the playoffs is seeing the Angels standing above them in the ring as the ref counted "7... 8... 9...," just before everything went black. And since we put them out of their 2012 misery in Boston last week, I submit for your enjoyment this LA Times article from August 13, 1967. I had to purchase the article and then request permission to post it here, but it was worth it. There are some interesting parallels and similarities between then and now. (See, for example, the part about the Red Sox being nothing but a bunch of "party boys.")

[Sorry about the quality of the article, but I know you are a tech-savvy bunch. Click on the image to increase the size, and then you'll probably have to zoom in to about 300% or so to read it. If it is too hard to read, let me know, and I can type up the text and include it after the image.]

By the way, just a few days after this article was written, the teams were playing in Fenway again, and the Angels' Jack Hamilton beaned the Sox' young all-star outfielder Tony Conigliaro. The pitch crushed the kid's cheek and knocked him out for the rest of the season. The Angels faded from the pennant race in September (first of many times) and the Red Sox lost that year in the World Series (ditto). Conigliaro never reached his potential, and eyesight problems caused him to retire in 1971 (after playing for the Angels).

Enjoy.

Angels-redsox67-1_medium

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