In Slate, Emma Span has an interesting piece on why so many Yankees fans and some Red Sox fans are delighted that their teams didn’t sign Johan Santana, to whom the Mets just gave 700 kajillion dollars.

Five years ago, the Red Sox probably would have been all in. The Yankees certainly would have. But the war between Boston and New York has entered a new phase.

That phase has to do with greater cultivation of minor league talent and savvier statistical analysis.

Meanwhile, Red Sox fans have undergone an identity crisis after the team’s two World Series wins. The Sox spent $51 million last year on Daisuke Matsuzaka’s negotiating rights alone and $70 million on desultory outfielder J.D. Drew. During the 2007 World Series, just after Alex Rodriguez opted out of his New York deal, Boston fans—who would have welcomed the third baseman before the 2004 season, when a trade with the Rangers fell apart at the last minute—desperately chanted, “Don’t sign A-Rod!” In other words: We don’t want to be any more like the Yankees than we already are.

No offense, Sox fans, but in some ways your team already is the new Yankees. Dubious signings like J.D. Drew, sky-high ticket prices (the highest in baseball), fans for whom anything but a Series victory is untenable—that small-town charm of the BoSox is gone, baby, gone.

And maybe that’s all right; maybe winning a couple World Series after all those decades is worth some subtle and probably not so great changes in the team’s character.

But Sox fans still like to posit that the Yankees are the “Evil Empire,” and these days, that just ain’t so—at the very least, there are now two such dominions.