YFSF

Slow Change

In a stunning coup, the Yankees have traded Phil Franchise and IPK for Cole Hamels, who will bring his devastating change-up to the Bronx.

Nah, that's not true. Just seeing if you were paying attention. There is a slow change going on with the guts of YFSF. We hope some of these features might actually even work.

Technical Note

If you've been having trouble loading YFSF on your browser, our apologies. Due to changes with the Typepad interface beyond our control, Mac users especially have been having problems. Typepad is working on the problem. If you happen to use Safari, try resetting your browser. [The option is in the "Safari" pull-down menu.] If you're using Firefox, try clearing your cookies. [in the Preferences menu, under the Privacy tab. Click on the "show cookies" button and then the "remove all cookies" button.] We hope this will be resolved soon, and that you're finding some way to get to us.—The Eds.

Independence Day Special: Sox-Yanks Gamer VII

First off, our warmest congratulations to Paul-SF, new daddy, as the Missus and he welcomed Jocelyn-SF into the world yesterday morning. Hooray!

Jon Lester's shutout last night gave the Red Sox a four games to two lead in the season series. Today we see Josh Beckett face off against Darrell Rasner. I hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday.

Comment away.

A Quick and Important Note

Please note that we have now enabled Typekey authentication for our site, so go forth and register asap!

Thanks,

all of us at YFSF

YFSF Welcomes: IronHorse (YF)

As always, we here at YFSF continually look to deepen our roster of fabulous writers, the more varied the viewpoints on the national pastime (and the rivalry) the better.  To that end, we are happy to announce that frequent commenter, occasional rabble-rouser, but always thoughtful Yankee fan IronHorse has been made an author at YFSF. 

Quick intro: IronHorse is the father of two young children, hails from Manhattan, and grew up adoring Bucky Dent.  His full profile can be viewed at the bottom of this page.  Welcome aboard, IH!

YFSF.org

Are you tired of mangled fingers from the trainwreck of a URL that was our former home? Thinking of suing attackgerbil for carpal tunnel when banging out the address on a computer where you don't have us bookmarked, or at least poking him in the eye with one of your RSI-crookedized digits? Fret no more. The new home of YFSF is:

yfsf.org

Links coming in from off site pointing to pages at our TypePad address still function, but all internal links point at the new domain. Let us know of any wrinkles you encounter.

One thing that will affect everyone: with the new domain, your "auto-remembered" name/email/url data used when commenting will have to be re-entered and re-remembered to issue a new cookie for your web browser.

Thank you from your yfsf authors.

Sidebar Schedule & Standings Module

I finally got off my lazy backside (figuratively speaking as I remain a practicing assal horizontologogist) and fixed the sidebar module to bring the schedules, results, and other whatnot back to life. Hopefully it will hold up. Please let me know if you see anything looking at you askance.

Changes at the Top: The New YFSF

Opening Day is a time for a new beginnings, and we're proud to announce one of our own. As our handsome new banner indicates, we've made a subtle change to our identity. Henceforth, this site will be known simply as YFSF. This is a lot cleaner than our ungainly our old locution, which was a bear to spell out and a challenge to other sites that link here. Regular readers know it's always been how we refer to ourselves. (Think of Trans World Airlines morphing into TWA.) We also feel a lot more comfortable with the "vs" out of our name. While the site originated as an email exchange and then public airing of debate between a Yankee and Red Sox fan, it has developed into something encompassing more than just baseball's greatest rivalry. We believe in the dialectic process, but the kind of debate we foster here transcends a tawdry "us vs. them" mentality in favor of an objective, open-minded, and thoughtful analysis. YFSF will still be devoted to the rivalry and its protagonists (though not exclusively; the change in title suggests the expansive purview that has always characterized the site), but we all write here and we hope you visit precisely because it is better than the typical zero-sum Yankees-Red Sox material found elsewhere on the web and in the broader media. So YFSF it is from here on. Welcome to the new YFSF, the same as the old YFSF, but not quite.

Incidentally, in order to see our new banner you may have to force your browser to reload this page and/or clear your history/cache.

The Editors

Subtle Change

Based on a request from reader/commenter Vic SF for better visibility of the links in articles, we've introduced a dotted underscore for links in the articles and comments (but not in the sidebars). We've tested it in several browsers but if things don't look right to you or if you have any suggestions or other feedback, please leave a comment or shoot an email to: yanksfansoxfan at gmail.com

Thanks for the spot-on suggestion, Vic! And we thank all of you for your feedback and always appreciate when people take the time to help us improve the reading experience here at YFSF.

The Hot Stove: Set to Broil

In his interview with reporters yesterday, Joe Girardi was asked to comment on the Yanks-Sox rivalry, and the fact that it's been so prominent this off-season: "I think it’s what makes baseball great. Sometimes it’s nice to pull back and just be a fan and say, you know what, this is what makes our game so great. It never really stops. It never takes a break." He's right, and the traffic on this site bears him out. You might be surprised to learn that we've had more visitors here in each of the past few days than we did on any day of the postseason. Are we really more interested in the soap opera of off-season maneuvering than we are in the actual games that matter? I doubt it. My guess: the discussion here acts as something of a substitute or surrogate for the games we're not watching. It's also worth noting that hot stove talk is purely speculative, and this draws at both the strengths and weaknesses of the blog form. In absence of any concrete information, every post and every comment becomes a work of opinion. And we all love to air our own opinions, to find them affirmed and reaffirmed in a public forum. The ironic corollary to this situation is that the less we seem to know, the more entrenched and intense opinions become. We all think we're right, and in the absence of any proof to the contrary, no opinion can be categorically refuted. And so the threads grow and grow and grow as we wait and wait and wait for something to happen. No other sport casts such a shadow on our imaginations; it's why baseball's literary canon far outpaces that of any other game. How long until pitchers and catchers report?