The Yankees play the Red Sox at the Stadium tonight, Mike Mussina vs. Josh Beckett (fantastic!) and even though the season’s only one-third over, already these games feel important. The two teams are, as usual, at the top of their division, with the Sox up by half a game. (Yesterday, they were down by half a game.) Both teams showed their quality by whupping the Detroit Tigers, who have the best record in the majors but lost five of seven in consecutive series to the Yankees and Tigers. (It would have been six of seven, were it not for an injured Mariano Rivera.)

You have to give the Sox a slight edge at this point, if only because the Yankees are so beaten up: Hideki Matsui, out with a broken wrist; Alex Rodriguez and Jason Giambi, wiped out by a nasty flu; Derek Jeter, hit by a pitch on the thumb; Gary Sheffield, out with who-knows-what’s-wrong with his wrist; Bubba Crosby out with a bum hamstring; and so on. At this point in the Yankee season, who’d have thought that Melky Cabrera and Andy Phillips would be so important to the team?

I recently read Buzz Bissinger’s book about Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa, Three Nights in August. It’s a terrific book, but there’s one point on which Bissinger reaches too far—his claim that the Cubs-Cardinals rivalry is a vastly better one than the Sox-Yankees one. Bissinger calls the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry “a tabloid-fueled soap opera about money and ego and soundbites….a pair of high-priced supermodels trying to trip each other in their stilettos in the runway.”

That’s nonsense. It’s eloquent, but it’s nonsense. Even in early June, the Yankees playing the Red Sox, with first place to the winner—that’s what baseball is about.

I can’t wait…..