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Comment by mhartl | Hacker News Reader

As someone with deep New England roots, it's truly surreal watching a baseball rivalry trump hundreds of years of history. To anyone outside the North, Bostonians have long been the prototypical Yankees. But go to Southie and say that now and you're likely to get a fist in the face.

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As the old joke goes, the meaning of Yankee depends on your perspective.

>To foreigners, a Yankee is an American.

>To Americans, a Yankee is a Northerner.

>To Northerners, a Yankee is an Easterner.

>To Easterners, a Yankee is a New Englander.

>To New Englanders, a Yankee is a Vermonter.

>And in Vermont, a Yankee is somebody who eats pie for breakfast.

Being born-and-raised in MA now living in Southie, and in spite of Southie being gentrified a great deal as of late, I still would make sure any of my friends from outside of the city don't wear Yankees gear or say anything bad about the Sox. Or Lakers, or Canadiens - it's also fascinating that the biggest sports rivalries in the major sports in the US all seem to stem out from Boston as a whole.

And yet, as crazy as these rivalries seem, it pales in comparison to soccer rivalries like Arsenal/Manchester United, Real Madrid/Barcelona, or AC Milan/Inter Milan. People are dying at these games.

It's not that surprising that the rivalries you think are the biggest sports rivalries in North American sports stem out of Boston.

Sports rivalries are generally a proxy for something else. Not having been to the Northeast myself, can you shed any light on what that might be? Did Boston once seem destined to be the big city in the region?

Boston was the first city in the region and was for a long time considered the most important. Oliver Wendell Holmes called it the Hub of the Universe. Over time, New York grew bigger and more important, leaving Bostonians feeling a little wounded. However, Boston remained the scholarly capital of the world, with two of the world's best universities a mile apart. Over the last half century, the world has celebrated academics less and money more,furthering the New York/Boston divide and intensifying the hurt feelings and envy. The final straw was Boston sports teams lackluster performance in the 1990s which led to the popularity of the Yankees Suck T shirts. With the number of Boston sports championships over the last 15 years,I can't imagine Yankees Suck shirts are still that popular.

Outstanding. I sort-of knew these things from living here, but rarely have I seen such a succinct summary of historical trends. Thanks for taking the time to explain it so well.

To be fair, the rivalry has now existed for over 100 years.

This raises an interesting question: Given that Bostonians (and New Englanders in general) were clearly Yankees as of 1865 (the end of the Civil War), and given that the New York baseball team was renamed the "Yankees" in 1913, at what point did the latter meaning start to predominate? It can't have been right away, but clearly by 2015 the baseball meaning is practically the only association people (at least in the Northeast) have with the term.

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