Red Sox–Yankees rivalry
Major League Baseball rivalry
The Red Sox–Yankees rivalry is a Major League Baseball (MLB) rivalry between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. Both teams have competed in MLB's American League (AL) for over 120 seasons, and have developed what is considered by many to be the fiercest rivalry in American sports. Nicknamed "The Rivalry" by some, the 1919 sale of star Red Sox player Babe Ruth to the Yankees popularized one of the most well-known aspects of the rivalry: a superstition known as the "Curse of the Bambino", attributed to Boston’s 86-year World Series drought which began upon Ruth’s sale to New York. Coincidentally,
when the Red Sox broke the curse by winning the 2004 World Series, they defeated the Yankees in the ALCS after overcoming a 3–0 deficit.
The rivalry is often a heated subject of conversation, especially in the home region of both teams, the Northeastern United States.
Until 2014, every MLB postseason featured one or both teams beginning with the inception of the wild card format and resultant additional Division Series in 1995, when both teams were assigned to the American League’s East Division. The Red Sox and the Yankees have faced each other three times in the ALCS, with the Yankees winning twice, in 1999 and 2003, and the Red Sox winning in 2004. The two teams have also met once in the American League Division Series (ALDS), in 2018, with Boston winning 3–1, a series which included a 16–1 Red Sox win in Game 3 at Yankee Stadium, the largest margin of defeat in a postseason game in the Yankees' history. The Red Sox beat the Yankees in the 2021 American League Wild Card Game, while most recently the Yankees beat the Red Sox in the 2025 American League Wild Card Series.
In addition, the teams have twice met in the last regular-season series to decide the AL pennant, in 1904 (when the Red Sox, then known as the Americans, won) and 1949 (when the Yankees won).
“Red Sox–Yankees rivalry” enters the record as major League Baseball rivalry. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Yankees, rivalry and Major can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8048808. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1919, 2004, 2014 and 1995.
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This entry incorporates text from “Red Sox–Yankees rivalry” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.