One of the greatest rivalries in professional sports history was surely that between the Red Sox and Yankees from 2003 to 2011. They were the best teams in baseball many of those years. They participated in two of the greatest playoff series of all time. They brawled. They fought over free agents. The Yankees were generally slightly better, but the Red Sox still triumphed in two World Series. They were like the United States and the Soviet Union in the Cold War. But, now, as then, we have a winner.

As Ian Crouch wrote in May, the Red Sox, this year, are terrible. They trail the Yankees by thirteen games. The players are in open revolt against the manager. They suffered perhaps the most appalling late-season collapse in the history of the sport last fall, and then it was revealed that their three best pitchers had been drinking beer and eating fried chicken in the clubhouse when not on the mound. On Friday, we learned that the Sox are close to trading away three of their most expensive players—Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford, and Josh Beckett—and their contracts, and more, with a cumulative value of about two hundred and sixty three million dollars, to the Los Angeles Dodgers. That is it. They have fallen, and they will not recover for a long time.

Leaving moral and political issues aside—this isn’t about right or wrong, but about models of disintegration—and admitting that the stakes of the great Pedro versus Clemens battles were lower than those between Khrushchev and Kennedy, the Red Sox of 2012 are, in fact, quite a bit like the U.S.S.R. in 1989. They tried to keep up financially, and intellectually, with their rival for many years. Glasnost has passed; the end is here.

Ben Cherington, the new general manager of the Red Sox, to stretch the analogy, is Gorbachev. He started in the job this year, and tried to clean up the mess. But he was stymied by the old guard—including owners who foisted the current, and awful, manager, Bobby Valentine—on him, and now he has to move drastically. Crawford is like Kazakhstan, expensive but troubled; Beckett is Georgia, valuable but liable to start a war; Nick Punto, the throw-in utility infielder is Moldova; Gonzalez, the valuable breadbasket, is the Ukraine. And John Lackey, the grumpy pitcher who stays behind, is now Chechnya.

Historians will debate who ruined the wonderful Red Sox of the past decade: was it the general manager, Theo Epstein, who fled last fall? Was it Beckett, the main perpetrator of the beer-and-chicken shenanigans? Did Johnny Damon, the charismatic center fielder, who departed for the Yankees, leave a curse? Some people would pick Bobby Valentine—but to me, he’s just Yeltsin, the disruptive, late arrival. The man who really did it is Brian Cashman, the canny general manager of the Yankees (and the most aptly named man in sports, besides Lance Armstrong). He is Ronald Reagan: the man who kept spending and spending, driving the Red Sox into delirium and then oblivion.

Photograph of Josh Beckett, Bobby Valentine, and catcher Kelly Shoppach by John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe/Getty Images.