Major League FEUDS: Baseball rivalries still exist, but free agency has dumped water on once-fiery hostilities.

TO THIS DAY, DECADES LATER, the accent gives away his Rhode Island youth. Ask any baseball guy from New England about the major leagues' greatest rivalry, too, and you presume he'd instinctively say "Yankees vs. Red Sox."

Davey Lopes shakes his head in disagreement. Then you remember he played for the Los Angeles Dodgers against the San Francisco Giants, the Hatfields and McCoys in cleats. Enmities between those two cross-town, same-league riyals were so intense that when both moved clear across the country to California, you'd have thought they'd never left New York.

Still, not what Lopes has in mind.

"Cubs-Cardinals," he says. "When I was with the Cubs and we were in St. Louis, I wouldn't even come out of my room. Before I went to Chicago, I'd never seen anything like that before in my life. People just don't know."

It's just good to know that rivalries continue to exist, period, considering all the modern circumstances that have conspired to take the fire out of the fireworks between teams with histories of hostilities.

Free agency certainly has acted as a bucket of cold water on whatever heat was generated over decades. With all the constant movement, players find it hard to work up a good hatred against opposing clubs when you've been teammates with so many of their players along the way.

"I don't think players get into those old feelings that much anymore," says Giants center fielder Marquis Grissom, who last year was with the Dodgers.