I will get it out in the open first and foremost: I am a Yankees fan.. A die-hard Yankees fan. However, I have never actually disliked or hated the Mets - over the course of my lifetime, I have lived through great Yankees teams, bad Yankees teams, and teams somewhere in the middle. I am not one of those teenagers or 20-somethings who think it is their birth right that the Yankees win every year. I lived through Bam Bam Muelens. I lived through Ken Phelps (acquired for Jay Buhner) and Rick Rhoden (Doug Drabek, anyone?) and Dale Murray (Oh, how fun it may have been to watch Fred McGriff in Yankee Stadium). I watched as Steve Trout thought home plate was actually five feet in front of him. I lived through all of the "next big things" in Dan Pasqua, Kevin Maas, and Sam Militello. But I never wavered - never looked across town at the Mets or any other team for that matter.
I never truly have disliked the Mets - to be exact, I have found myself over the course of many years hating teams like the Red Sox, Blue Jays, Rays, Orioles, Indians, Mariners, Tigers, Angeles, etc. a lot more than I found myself disliking the Mets. Why? Because those teams had a much bigger role in the ultimate outcome of my team than the Mets ever have, and ever will. Members of the other side of my family are Mets fans, and perhaps there is a small part of me that wouldn't mind seeing them enjoy something that resembles a baseball season.
This is not a blog entry about the ultimate moments in Subway Series history - regardless of how much I would truly love to remind Mets fans of Armando Benitez, Mel Rojas, Luis Castillo, and those one hit wonders singing about letting the dogs out....followed ten seconds later by a Derek Jeter home run.
The Mets of course have had their share of Subway Series moments - but there has always been one storyline surrounding this series: It was always about the Yankees success or the Yankees failure. "Yankees Win Subway Series" came with nothing more than a shrug. If the Mets actually played well and beat the Yankees? 90% of all articles you would find were about the failures of the Yankees, not the successes of the Mets. It was the same old stuff every year, and it became tiresome.
With all that came a general apathy about the series, and not just from Yankees fans. Joe Torre's teams routinely downplayed the series, even suggesting that it was more of a nuisance to them than anything else. In their minds (and rightfully so), a June series against the Mets had the same significance as a June series in Colorado - that is, hardly any at all. It was all about winning divisions, winning playoff series, and hopefully winning the World Series. It was about beating the teams that truly blocked their way to their ultimate goal.
But now, for the first time ever, the Subway Series will not feature any one player from the Core Four teams. The Yankees haven't won a World Series since 2009, and haven't reached the playoffs since 2012 (as Mets fans sit there saying, "Nice problem to have!"), making any proclamation they have about this not being fun or important for them hollow. A team that no longer can rely on farewell tours and core superstars suddenly needs a little more excitement in their lives.....
...and here come the Mets, winners of 11 straight games, with two excellent young pitchers taking the hill on Friday and Saturday night. There is no way the Yankees can sit in their locker room and downplay the importance of this series. Winners of six of their last seven games (including three of four from the team that was as red-hot as the Mets were), the Yankees are on a bit of a streak of their own, highlighted by solid starting pitching, their trademark home run offense (which has been missing the past few seasons), and a beast of a bullpen that most teams hope to avoid having to see. Like most of their American League brethren, they are flawed. The offense still has to prove they can sustain their recent success over 162 games, and Pineda/Tanaka have to actually get through the season without their arms falling off. Meanwhile, A-Rod has to continue to hope that Cousin Yuri is hiding the needles in a safe place.
In other words, all of a sudden New York doesn't just have a series between two crosstown teams on their hands - New York has a series between two of the hottest teams in baseball on their hands (and make no mistake about it - the Mets are on a bit of a historic run for their franchise and look every bit the part of a fun team to watch, as they have overcome several injuries, the typical front office question marks, and Bartolo Colon's food bill to reign supreme in the first month of the season).
This is not a series about who "owns New York". (Do people actually sit on their couches after a Subway Series game and proclaim, "Wow! We own New York now!" I know from my Jersey Shore house that the last thing I care about is owning New York. Plus, I am not even sure if I would ever want to actually own New York.)
However, there should be an actual buzz in the ballpark this weekend. It is the first time in Subway Series history that both teams are in first place at the same time (Heck, even in 2000, the Mets were a wild-card team). We should see fans show off their passion for both teams. It should actually be fun - feel something like an actual rivalry - and the air should be as electric as it possibly can be in the New Yankee Stadium, which seems to have been built with some sort of noise-drowning contraption, as even when fans APPEAR to be cheering, you still can't hear it anyway. Hopefully, Mets' fans will proudly show up (especially on "Matt Harvey Day") and make their voices heard, and not in just a "Has that Yadier Molina Home Run landed yet?" kinda way. Perhaps they will even cheer if Matt Harvey clocks A-Rod in the arm with a 99 MPH fastball (I know I would be). (By the way, Saturday is also Brett Gardner Replica Bat Day. Did they really have to throw the "replica" in there? Would fans actually expect a real Brett Gardner bat?)
I find myself looking forward to this series for the first time in many years myself. I too have fallen into the "What do the Yankees actually gain in this series?" attitude - but this year it is different. This year, the Mets come in with a bit of swagger and their chests puffed out far and wide. It should be interesting to watch. Come September, when they play again at Citi Field, who knows what both teams will look like. Baseball is a game of ebbs and flows. The Mets could enter that series on an 11-game losing streak. The Yankees may be hopelessly out of a playoff race. Baseball is a funny game in that sense.
But nobody cares about September now - people care about April, and where these two teams stand right now. They can only hope their favorite team is standing in a similar spot when the two meet again. If not? Well, we will hopefully all still be able to look back at these three little games in April and remember what it was like to be good.
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