With the Yankees having won the last two nights and trying to get back into it, we're not far from hearing the usual routine from NY fans about how they always somehow manage to prevail in every tight race about the BoSox. They are enabled in this arrogrance by the mainstream media, which dutifully intones this storyline with every NY hot streak. But is it true?

The myth that the Yankees have some almost magical power to prevail over the Red Sox in tight races has been repeated so often its hard to contradict, but it's simply not true. I can only find FOUR cases where this happened--1949, 1977, 1978 and 2003.

And the myth crumbles even more when you look inside those years. 1949 is remembered for being the year the BoSox lost a one-game lead by losing two straight in the Bronx to close the season. What's NOT remembered is that the Sox were twelve games back in August. Before arrogant Yankee fans (pardon the redundancy) try and gloat about this one, they might ask what the hell they were doing fighting for their lives to begin with.

2003 might be remembered as the year Grady Little stuck with Pedro too long. But it's also the year in which Boston went back to the Bronx trailing the series 3-2, and had to send John Burkett to the mound to face Andy Pettite. Then they trailed in the seventh inning. And somehow they won and forced Game 7. The real story of this series was how the Yankees managed to get five outs from being eliminated by a wild-card team that had problems in the bullpen and the back end of the rotation throughout the year. Before starting their next gloat about Aaron Boone, Yankee fans might want to see if they have enough brain cells to remember how they got in such a precarious position to begin with.

Fair enough on 1978. The Yanks made a big-time rally and earned their gloating rights that year. Although it's certainly canceled out by 2004, so again we're back to even.

So in surveying the entire course of Red Sox-Yankees history, from the advent of the World Series and the days of Tris Speaker, on through the Yankee dynasty of the 50s, through Yaz and Reggie, through Fisk and Munson and on to the present day, this ENTIRE mythology rests on the fact that twenty years ago, the Yankees edged out both the BoSox and the Birds by 2 1/2 games in a hard-fought division race, and went on to win the 1977 World Series. I mean, really, it was a tough loss, but is it worth this level of Yankee arrogance, Boston angst and mainstream media attention?

This whole myth has taken on the proportions that it has for two reasons. One, is that, as we all know, the Sox managed to suffer other tough losses along the way to other teams, from the 1972 & 1974 AL East races (won by Detroit and Baltimore), to the horrors of 1986. And they lost the World Series twice to the Cardinals. But when you come to think of it, the Cards had a stronger case for being a Boston nemesis in the clutch then the Yankees did.

The other reason is that after the sale of Ruth, the Red Sox just went through a long stretch where they were losing to everybody, not just the Yanks. And New York was beating everybody, not just the Sox. It wasn't any special magical formula that NY had at crunch time. There was no crunch time to speak of. As longtime Sox fans are painfully aware, there have just been large swaths of history where this team was not well run. And the Yankees, with the exception of the CBS era have been. No magic necessary.

What it all boils down is that there is absolutely no reason for New York fans to get full of themselves and think they own the BoSox down the stretch. When we have a front office that's committed to winning and gets good pitching, our record in the clutch matches that of the Yanks. We've got both this year. Yankee fans might want to deflate their own egos a little bit. They couldn't uncork their magic in 1986 or 1988 when the teams were more evenly matched. Which should tell them all they need to know about their own mythology.