BOSTON — The fun part has always been the baseball, of course, even in those overheated moments when fists have flown and blood has spilled, when Billy Martin has knocked out Jimmy Piersall cold with a straight right hand under Fenway Park’s grandstand or Pedro Martinez has ushered a 72-year-old coach named Don Zimmer to its turf.
There has always been trash talk. Always.
“We are,” the Boston Globe sniffed in a 1919 editorial, shortly before the hometown team made the worst trade in baseball history, “the capital of many things, baseball chief among them.”
“Second place suits Boston,” Billy Martin huffed in 1977, as the Yankees were extending a hex over the Red Sox to 59 years and counting.