The rivalry between the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox, especially in its 2003-2004 incarnation, hasn’t exactly been under covered in the past.
ESPN already made a 30 for 30 called Four Days in October, back in 2010, which covered the Red Sox’s historic comeback in the 2004 ALCS, and the 2005 rom-com Fever Pitch also unfolded against the backdrop of that same series. And of course, the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry got the bulk of the media attention, not to mention the national TV time slots, in the several years to come.
Now, just in time for the 20th anniversary of the Red Sox’s comeback and their first World Series championship in 86 years, two new streaming documentaries look back on that era: Netflix’s The Comeback: 2004 Boston Red Sox, and the first episode of Game 7, a new sports anthology series that just debuted on Prime Video.
Both are very entertaining, and there’s some overlap in what they cover, although there aren’t a lot of new revelations in either one.
Call It The Comeback
The Netflix version is a three-part docuseries that follows the usual format of such series. The first third fills in the historical context, including the Sox’s 86 years in the wilderness, all the famous near-misses, the team’s purchase by the John Henry group in 2002, and their near-hiring of Billy Beane, which you may remember from the conclusion of Moneyball. The doc even filches a snippet of that movie’s score.
Part 2 is about the team’s loss to the Yankees in the 2003 ALCS, when Grady Little left Pedro Martinez in for too many batters in Game 7, leading into Aaron Boone’s homer, followed by Boston’s failed pursuit of Alex Rodriguez that offseason, leading into the Yankees acquiring him instead. And Part 3 is about the 2004 season and especially the ALCS. That was when the Yankees went up 3-0, and the Red Sox became the first and only team in baseball history to come back from such a deficit to win 4-3. The next week, they swept St. Louis to win the World Series.
It was a historical and eventful run, for sure, and the film has some colorful people to talk about it, including both Pedro Martinez and Roger Clemens. Even Curt Schilling is a participant.
There’s a bit of an overreliance on cliches, starting with “The Curse of the Bambino,” a completely fake concept that was essentially invented out of thin air in 1990 by columnist Dan Shaughnessy, who also appears. And there’s not much discussion of any of the various controversies a lot of these individuals fell into in the subsequent years, whether Curt Schilling’s alt-right flirtations or the various misadventures with performance-enhancing drugs that several of these players got into.
Still, this series will likely appeal greatly to Red Sox partisans, baseball history buffs, and even those too young to remember these events. Yankee fans, however, won’t like it so much.
Game 7
Prime Video’s new Game 7 is such a great idea for a sports docuseries that I’m surprised it hasn’t happened before: It’s an anthology docuseries in which each episode is about a different important Game 7 from history, whether from baseball, basketball or hockey. There have been so many great Game 7s that this series could go on for years and years without them ever running out of material, and a spinoff about great Game 6s couldn’t possibly be far behind.
The first episode of the five-episode series is about, yes, the Yankees and Red Sox, and Game 7 of their 2003 matchup at Yankee Stadium (Game 7 the following year was a blowout, so don’t expect that to ever appear in the series.) The ’03 version was the one where Pedro Martinez was left in for way too long by manager Grady Little, leading up to Aaron Boone’s series-winning 11th inning homer.
These events are all covered in the second episode of the Netflix series, and can best be treated as a prequel to Part 3- after all, Little was fired as manager and replaced by Terry Francona, while Boone’s basketball-related injury that offseason opened up third base for A-Rod. And of course, that heartbreak by Boston made the ultimate win a year later that much sweeter.
The Game 7 episode, lasting about an hour, goes into greater depth and provides more play-by-play of the game itself. We hear from Joe Buck, who called the game, although he leaves out the part, from his memoir about Bret Boone (Aaron’s brother) being unprepared and uninterested for his guest broadcasting appearance.
Are that many people going to watch Game 7, when there’s the Netflix version also available, not to mention the actual, real-life World Series? Possibly. But there’s plenty to enjoy about both.
