he New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox have baseball’s most heated and longest-running rivalry — perhaps one of the most intense rivalries in any sport. When it began, exactly, is not quite certain.
Was it May 7, 1903, when New York — then called the Highlanders — traveled to Boston’s Huntington Avenue Baseball Grounds to face a team called the Americans, in a game won by the hosts 6-2?
Or was it Dec. 26, 1919, when Harry Frazee, who owned the Boston team now known as the Red Sox, sold a 24-year old star player who both pitched and hit to the New York club that six years earlier had adopted the name Yankees?
The player’s name was George Ruth, better known as “Babe.” Not only had Ruth won nine games while losing five with a 2.97 ERA in the 1919 season, at the plate he set a new major league home run record, belting a previously unheard of 29 out of the park.
That meant Ruth would demand a pricey new contract for the princely sum of $15,000 per season. That would be a little less than $279,000 in today’s cash. No way Frazee was paying that.
Instead, he sold Ruth to the Yankees for $100,000 (about $1.86 million today). From that point, the Yankees went on to win 20 World Series in next 32 years. The team has won a record 27 to date.
The Red Sox, who had won their fifth the year before selling Ruth, would not win another until 2004.
But the Boston versus New York baseball rivalry has run hot and cold in recent years, with both teams often failing to field pennant-contending squads at the same time.
Sadly, that will be the case in 2025 as well — at least if the Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm, better known as PECOTA, proves accurate.
PECOTA, as the full name implies, uses an algorithm to turn empirical data on player and team performance into highly precise projections for upcoming seasons. The home of PECOTA, the analytical publication Baseball Prospectus, published the latest PECOTA projections for the 2025 season on Monday.
What does PECOTA say about the Red Sox vs. Yankees rivalry? For Yankees fans, it’s mostly good news. Though the team will fall short of last year’s win total, coming in at 90 wins — or 89.7 to use PECOTA’s precise figure — the Yankees will still win the American League East division with the highest number of wins in the AL.
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But they will find themselves in a dogfight with not the Red Sox, but the Baltimore Orioles, who will finish just a game off the Yankees’ pace, PECOTA projects.
The news for the Red Sox is not nearly as cheerful, however, Despite the acquisitions of starting pitchers Garrett Crochet and Walker Buehler, Boston will finish dead last in the AL East, winning only 78 games (77.6 is the exact projection). That’s three fewer than in 2024, when the Red Sox finished in third place.
But fans should not get too excited or too depressed just yet. While PECOTA is known as one of the more accurate algorithmic projection systems in use, it’s still only that — a computer program. The actual results of the season are far from being determined. As the old baseball adage goes, “That’s why they play the games.”
