NEW YORK – The Red Sox and Yankees are neck-and-neck in a playoff race for the first time in years, but if you were hoping for the kind of high-stakes drama that defined their face-offs in the early aughts, Thursday was not the game for you.

Until the ninth inning, that is.

For the first eight frames, the most comparable element to those hang-on-every-pitch contests in ‘03 and ‘4 were the sold-out crowd (47,036) and the slowness of the game; it took the Red Sox three hours and 25 minutes to complete a 6-3 victory.

But nothing says ‘Red Sox versus Yankees’ like late-inning heroics, and in his first career game in the Bronx, Roman Anthony made a little magic. After David Hamilton reached on an error by first baseman Paul Goldschmidt, Anthony blasted Yerry De los Santos’ first pitch to him

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