Watching the Yankees clinch the AL East last night, I was happy, sure, but I also recalled a “Mercy Rule” column I had written — at my long-defunct perch in the New York pages of The Onion’s A.V. Club — the week the Yanks clinched in 2009. It was about the new-found paranoia of the 21st-century Yankees fan, living in a post-2004 world in which, like the killer in a slasher flick, the Red Sox are never truly dead until the credits roll and the lights come back on.

I’d link to it, but when the A.V. Club closed their New York shop they pulled down all the archived stuff too (which come to think of it is probably a good thing — my sports columns were often full of adult language and crappy predictions!). So I’ll just reprint it here in its entirety because, hell, they probably won’t sue me:

Dead Red
On Sunday, Yankee Stadium’s P.A. system treated fans once more to the welcome, if odd, one-two mixtape punch of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman”, which always heralds the entrance of closer Mariano Rivera into a game; and Sinatra’s “New York, New York,” which always plays after the last out.
As Rivera fielded a weak comebacker to put the cap on a 4-2 victory over the Boston Red Sox, the Yanks had in one fell swoop completed a sweep of their biggest rival and clinched the American League East title over same. They had assured themselves of home field advantage throughout the playoffs and cemented the best record in baseball with their 100th win. And they did it at home in their brand new ballpark. Exit lights. Start spreadin’ the news.
The moment no doubt had some Yankee players and fans feeling entitled to a bit of smug self-satisfaction at the expense of Boston, who had taken eight straight games from the Yanks to start the season, and who led in the standings through late July.
But others of us are wise enough not to gloat until the Sox—who themselves are postseason-bound via the wildcard, and who seem fated in an almost Greek sense of the word to meet the Yanks for the American League pennant in a couple of weeks—are watching helplessly from their living rooms as tickertape rains down in the Canyon of Heroes.
This is because we have come to learn the hard way that, like a feral dog or the Republican Congressional caucus, the Red Sox are at their most dangerous when they are wounded and backed into a corner.
Consider the last time the two teams met in the postseason—the 2004 American League Championship Series—the very mention of which is, in some quarters of the Bronx, grounds for a shanking. After embarrassing the Sox over the first three games, a Boston team with an 86-year championship drought and the Curse of the Bambino weighing heavily upon them did something that no major league team had ever done before: win a playoff series after being down three games to nil.
In the process they transformed themselves from the Yankees’ perennial whipping boys to their relentless bogeymen, and created a subset of Yankees fans who for the last five years have harbored a fear of highly improbable but seemingly inevitable Red Sox comebacks that hovers somewhere between neurosis and psychosis. For these fans, no two strike count, no three run lead, no healthy cushion in the AL east standings is safe from the Red Sox’ slasher-like ability to rise up from the dead for one last scream.
Perhaps there is an element of guilt in this paranoia, of the chickens coming home to roost. For decades the Sox were palookas, reliable losers whose presence in a pennant race served as a mere speed bump on the road to the Yankees’ manifest destiny. But since their collapse in 2004, when an infuriated George Steinbrenner responded to the setback by making the Yankees the first $200 million dollar team in major league history, the Sox have become the biggest obstacle between New York and October. And perhaps there is a sense—however misplaced, since the Sox have the second biggest payroll in the league—that their emergence as Yankee-killers is punishment for decadence and hubris. The Sox, a wildly barbered band of misfits who in some seasons could pass as an outlaw biker gang, are after all everything the shaved and sober Yankees are not. And Boston’s bafflingly enduring reputation as underdogs (most of whom wear two world series rings) against the Yankees’ culture of victory seems to stand as a cosmic rebuke of a New York team the Sox’ principal owner once dubbed “The Evil Empire.”
Bostonians will talk your ear off about the Red Sox Nation’s exquisite suffering during their Curse years, when finding new ways to come up short became a kind of masochistic religion. But to be a Yankees fan in the 21st century is to know the terror of being on top with the Red Sox playing dead at your feet.