The American League Championship Series between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees got off to a rousing start last night, and we’re looking forward to plenty of good baseball in the days ahead. But we couldn’t help notice the editorial column yesterday in the New York Times, which, so far as we could tell, came out rooting for the Red Sox to beat the Yankees and end up in the World Series against the Chicago Cubs. “With all due respect to our New York readership — Yankee fans among them — to George Steinbrenner and to the Yankees themselves, we find it hard to resist the emotional tug and symmetrical possibilities of a series between teams that seem to have been put on earth to tantalize and then crush their zealous fans,” the Times wrote.

For our part, we don’t mind saying that we’re a New York newspaper and are rooting for the home team. As for what could account for a New York-based newspaper taking a stance against a New York team in the baseball playoffs, It might be, as the Times editorial claims, an “emotional tug” or the “symmetrical possibilities” of a Red Sox-Cubs series. But surely there’s a suspicion about town that the Times’s preferences are about something other than purely emotion. After all, as the Times editorial writers could have read on the Times Company’s own Web site, The New York Times Company on February 27, 2002, “acquired a minority interest in the Boston Red Sox.”