With big-spending Boston in town, "Green Monster" has a new meaning

If you talk to a Boston fan this weekend, chances are they'll wax about how fulfilling it is to be watching another great Yankee-Redsock rivalry, just like the old days, way back when - you know, the way it used to be...

Phuk. Dat. Sheet. 

This is no throwback to a bygone era. Yeah, tonight begins a three-game set between Boston and New York - a war of clam chowders - but these blubbering, self-righteous fans of the big-spending Bosocks want it both ways: 

They're happy to root for a team that buys its way to the top, while they seek to relive some fantasy underdog status, rolling back to the daze when they were (in their minds, anyway) fighting the Evil Empire for the soul of baseball.

Fact is, the big-spending Redsocks have become everything their fans once detested. You can look it up. Boston sits atop the MLB shitpile with a staggering roster payroll of $242 million - that's $20 million more than the second highest franchise, the San Francisco Giants, and $50 million higher than the Cubs, who are third.

The Yankee team tonight will cost about $75 million less than its opponents. And that won't even include the $11 million-per-season Boston pays Rusney Castillo to patrol right field for Pawtucket. The guy is hitting .310 in Triple A - (last year, he hit .314) - but they will never let him see the lights of Boston, because they would have to pay luxury tax on his contract, which runs out in 2021. I wonder what he thinks of those heartwarming, underdog Redsocks?

Of course, they're still paying off the contracts of Pablo Sandoval, Hanley Ramirez and Allan Craig - 27 players in all, who have been released, traded or bought-out with movie money. Boston has pissed away cash at a historically unprecedented level, and yet this weekend, its fans will try to re-imagine themselves rooting for fuzzy-cheeked upstarts against some monstrous corporate machine. 

Last winter, Boston fans screamed like stuck pigs when Giancarlo Stanton - exercising options he'd earned from devoting eight years to the insufferably cheap Miami Marlins - nixed trades to equally Scrooge-like smaller markets and pushed to play on the grand stage of New York City. They yelped especially loudly because their Gammonitic sportswriters had spent most of November speculating on how Stanton would end up at Fenway. As soon as he became a Yankee, the outraged Boston fan base demanded a new toy, so the Redsocks went out and signed the most expensive free agent on the market, J.D. Martinez. And get this: The team and the fan base prided itself on holding the fiscal line with Martinez, paying him only $24 million per year. What a joke. 

Yesterday, the Green Monsters signed veterans Steve Pearce and Brandon Phillips, simply because, well, at a certain point, as the poet Bukowski once wrote, money is piss and the sparrow is immortal. 

So, this weekend, when some big-spending Boston fan starts pontificating romantically about how much this series reminds him or her of 2004, don't get caught in their slobbering delirium. This isn't then. Don't let them get away with ignoring the truth about what they have become.