(Photo: Mark Goldman/Icon Sports Media)

Has the Times gone Red Sox crazy? Since coverage of the Yankees’ off-season began on October 12, five days after their archrivals hung up their hats, there have been 105 articles mentioning the Sox—two more than the Bombers, and 26 more than the Mets, who play in Queens, and not, say, Massachusetts. The paper’s Boston coverage can be absurd: Witness its infamous October 2003 pro-Sox editorial or the December 1 photo of Red Sox slugger Manny Ramirez’s Boston apartment, complete with the $6.9 million asking price. What’s going on? Too many Harvard grads on 43rd Street? Or can the paper be reminding New Yorkers that it owns a minority stake in the Sox? Nothing of the sort, insists sports editor Tom Jolly, who says the count is skewed because of the movement of Red Sox free agents and the upheaval in their front office. “Anything [the Red Sox] do will be of great interest to Yankee fans.” Still, a search reveals that no other local paper comes close to this kind of parity.

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Related:

• Archive: “Intelligencer”
• Articles by Eric Wolff
• Table of Contents: January 9, 2006 issue of New York | Subscribe!