Being a Rays' fan I'm a bit amused at this whole war of worlds imposed by Hank Steinbrenner concerning ESPN and "Red Sox Nation". Namely that two teams located in the northeast are fighting over being "America's" team.
Although I suppose my time could've been put to better forays, I decided to see just which team has more support when it comes to being here in town / St. Pete and the market share as recently as opening day 2007.
We'll begin with the latter note first, a quick Google search found this Biz of Baseball post which exposed what I would've thought: the Yanks absolutely dominate the market.
On to the second bit, again it's an outrageously small sample size, but devoting more than 15 minutes to the topic seems foolish. Here are the attendance totals for Sox / Yank games when on the road facing the Tampa Bay Rays this past season:
The Red Sox drew 6,000 more, but, and naturally there is one when dealing with the Sox and Yanks, six of the Yankee games came during the work week as opposed to three for the Sox. I'm sure it's just me, but I have a feeling three more weekend games for the Yanks draws more than 2k extra each game.
In short: despite the recent success the Red Sox still aren't at the level of the Yankees in terms of popularity.