Yankees’ rivalry with Royals was once fiercest of them all

I once wrote a book called “Emperors and Idiots,” a history of the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry, and for that I interviewed close to 150 ex-ballplayers and managers and executives. Here’s what struck me most: Almost all of those players had played for teams other than the Yankees and the Red Sox. More than not, they identified with other teams beside the two teams.

Yet all of them, when talking about Sox-Yanks games, spoke with as much fervor — and often anger — as when you get a bunch of old high school football heroes talking at the 40-year reunion about their heated crosstown rivals.

“It’s like this tattoo in your soul,” is how the late Tim Wakefield described it. “I know when I pitched for the Pirates, we had intense feelings about the Mets or the Cardinals or the Braves. But that was different. Red Sox-Yankees was on another level.”

Here’s the thing, though: All of those interviews with all of those players, as much vitriol as they’d spill about each other — trust me, ask Bill Lee about Billy Martin, watch a man’s neck veins bulge — “it all paled in comparison to three unforgettable hours I spent on a steamy Kansas City summer night in 1998. I was sitting in the front row of a luxury box. A few minutes before first pitch I clicked my tape recorder on.

I said, “So tell me about the Yankees.”

And for three straight hours, George Brett talked and I never — not once — had to ask another question.

He filled up four tapes. Only one of them survives. But it’s probably my favorite one, because after about 90 minutes of warming up — and perhaps an assist or two from a cold beer or two — Brett had already passed from the “man, we respected them and they respected us, it was an honor to compete against those guys” phase of his dissertation to the tell-us-how-you-really feel part.

“Who am I kidding?” he said, his face flushed, his hand pounding the table in front of him. “We hated those [granddaddy curse of them all]s, and they hated us. They thought we were a bunch of [second-greatest granddaddy curse of them all]s, and I don’t blame ’em for that. Those games were beyond baseball. It was something else. It was something different.”

I often think of that night, because though it’s true that Yankees-Red Sox is a rivalry like no other, it is also true that, for a brief, shining baseball moment Yankees-Royals may well have been the fiercest rivalry of all. Maybe when the Giants and the Dodgers shared New York. Maybe certain specific pockets of Yankees-Sox, or Cardinals-Cubs.

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But from 1976-80, the Yankees and the Royals detested each other, meeting four times in five years in the ALCS, and though the Yankees were thick with stars, it was Brett who was the central figure in all of it.

Brett: who hit one three-run homer in Game 5 in 1976 that tied it in the eighth and another upper-deck blast in Game 3 in ’80 that clinched that series.

Brett: who in 1978, Game 3, hit three home runs off Catfish Hunter, and in 1977 got into a fight at third base with Graig Nettles after a hard slide in the first inning of Game 5.

Brett, speaking in the summer of 1998: “I’m telling you, there were moments where I thought someone was gonna get seriously hurt.”

Hal McRae once threw a body block into Willie Randolph, sending poor Willie halfway toward left field, in order to ruin a double play and allow a runner to score. In the very next game, Nettles returned the favor to Frank White. And then Brett went in spikes-high.

“It was glorious, man,” Brett said. “Glorious.”

It’s different now, sure. The Royals mostly went into witness protection for 30 years after winning the 1985 World Series, and when they played the Mets in the ’15 Fall Classic, they were an impossible team to dislike, filled with gamers and high-IQ grinders. That group was not dissimilar to the one that will play Saturday night at Yankee Stadium. And so, in large measure, are these Yankees.

Besides, if anyone pulls a McRae — or a Nettles, or a Brett — they’ll get booted out of the game, maybe the series. Not back then. Rub some dirt on it. Get back out there. The uniforms are mostly the same, but little else is. A different time. A different game.

“Glorious,” George Brett said.

Vac’s whacks

In one extraordinary broadcasting lifetime Howie Rose is going to have three signature calls — “Matteau! Matteau! Matteau!”; “This one has a chance!”; “He did it! He did it!” — that sports fans around here will be repeating out loud for decades to come. The second-best thing the Mets did Thursday was cheer Howie on the team plane home. Very cool.