At some point – I can’t recall for sure when it was, but I am gonna say 1999, at that point, the hype over the Boston/New York American League rivalry heated up. The media coverage accelerated each season. Now, that is a long, bitter and emotional rivalry, no doubt, but the acceleration has done a few things to skew coverage away from baseball as a whole – and this is bad enough to demand a moratorium on the Boston-NY AL rivalry – but the 24/7 hype around that mutual civic antipathy has diminished other divisional rivalries to the point of trivial asterisks, oddities, surprising microcosms ignored by the media in favor of replaying seven angles of Pedro skullfucking Don Zimmer, or Jason Varitek rubbing his fist and erection against his mancrush enemy A-Rod.
Dodgers-Giants: Ignored ... Cubs/Cardinals: Ignored ... Angels/Athletics: Ignored.
Since the 2002 season, the Angels/Athletics rivalry has easily been the best in baseball. These teams have had more great games between them in the past 6.5 seasons than any 2 in baseball. The BOSNY affair gets the coverage, but tell all the snowbelt inbreds that the most incredible baseball passion is found on the left coast, in the American League, between the Haloed red and the green-and-gold.
Every one of these games has an exciting tension and batter-per-batter gamesmanship. I am always up to see these games because they bring out the best in both squads – most of the games are actually a battle for something and the thoroughness of each contest is as complete a baseball experience as a fan could ever get, save for the spoonfed Bosnyan bandwagoneers in their pink nation pinstripes.
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