You’re wrong because anyone who knows his baseball lore (and you don’t know baseball if you’re not big on lore–it’s our most historical sport) has to admit that there’s something extra about the civil wars periodically fought on the diamonds of New York. An extra zap of electricity in the stands, an extra surge of emotion on the field, an extra dose of civic humiliation awaiting the loser–whatever the reason, these games have produced some of baseball’s most indelible moments. In 1941 Dodger Mickey Owens fails to catch strike three, starting a game-winning Yankee rally. In 1947 Dodger pinch-hitter Cookie Lavagetto’s double breaks up a no-hitter with two outs in the ninth, winning a game the Yankees had apparently wrapped up. Bobby Thomson of the Giants (they were New Yorkers then) smashes the Dodgers with a last-chance homer in the deciding game of the ‘51 National League playoffs, and Don Larsen, nursing a hangover, pitches a perfect game against Brooklyn in 1956.
The first game last week in the Bronx showed the early promise of a great Series, with the Yankees winning 4-3 after 12 nail-biting innings marked by bloodthirsty competition between the two hometown teams. Even before the first pitch, the throngs beneath the El near Yankee Stadium were packed with howling, partisan New York fans; one carried a sign reading Yankees rule, Mets drool, while another repeatedly screamed, “Start spreading the news, the Yanks are going to lose.” Indeed, for days New Yorkers had been picking sides. Schoolchildren defied dress codes by sporting the T shirts of their favorites. Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a lifelong Yankees fan, clamped on a Yankees cap for what was likely to be the series’ duration (in a rare gesture of evenhandedness, he pressed Mets caps on municipal leaders who were known to be of the other persuasion). Rick Lazio, the Long Island congressman who is running against Hillary Clinton for the Senate, gleefully declared his devotion to the Mets, while Mrs. Clinton, who last spring had startled New Yorkers with the news that she’s a Yankees fan, said she was trying to clear her campaign schedule to attend at least one game. Good tickets soared to more than $1,000 at the hands of scalpers and on eBay. Giuliani laid on a joint Mets-Yankees rally in a city park, with a large contingent of cops to separate the two camps.
The mayor, ever a scrapper, seemed to relish the prospect of civic strife. “It’s going to be crazy,” he declared with a happy grin, “electrified and crazy. Families are going to be divided against each other. Brother against brother. Sister against sister. Father against cousin.” The permutations of living-room tension suddenly seemed boundless–grandparent against mother-in-law?–and New York’s already thriving industry of family therapists undoubtedly braced for a boom.
Giuliani is right, of course. Mets fans and Yankees fans are very different breeds, and the layers of antipathy and scorn between them–no, let’s just call it hatred–run very deep. This is a difficult subject, if only because it is nearly impossible to approach with the degree of scrupulous objectivity for which this magazine is justly famous. The main thing about the Yankees, and by extension their fans, is that they are winners. They have an extraordinary record of 25 World Series victories, 16 more than any other club, and if they win this year they will have taken three in a row. The ghosts of Ruth and Gehrig, DiMaggio and Mantle seem to hover over the stadium, inspiring the current wearers of the sacred pinstripes with a confidence no other team can match –Yankee pride–and perhaps from time to time nudging a ball over the fence or into a glove–Yankee luck. Their fans, understandably, love this and expect it.
Mets fans do not; they call Yankees fans arrogant and smug. (Remember those words from the first paragraph? You New York haters can take some satisfaction from the fact that the nasty things you say about New Yorkers are the same nasty things Yankees and Mets fans say about each other.) Because the Yankees win so often, it is easy to claim that their fans are really fans of victory. It hasn’t often been possible to say the same of Mets fans. Their team was born only 38 years ago as a bunch of stumblebums and castoffs. Casey Stengel (ex-Yankee) molded them into mediocrity, and Gil Hodges (ex-Dodger) cajoled them into a moment of greatness, the Miracle Mets of 1969 who knocked off the mighty Baltimore Orioles, four games to one. It took a further 17 years for the Mets to claw their way to another World Series victory. Everything always seems a scramble for this team. Great pitchers come and, all too often, go: Nolan Ryan (dealt to the Angels, then on to the Astros just as he hit his peak), David Cone (to the Yankees!), Dwight Gooden (now also Yankee, but with a career sadly deadened by drugs). Mets fans bear all this adversity–even rather expect it–and then erupt with childish glee when everything clicks, as it did in the ‘86 series against the Red Sox and in the playoffs this month.
This childish glee is exactly what Yankees fans so despise. Mets fans are loud and boorish (Shea Stadium rocked with chants of “Yankees suck!” last week as the Cardinals were sent packing). “Mets fans get all hyped for nothing,” says Jose Palma, 22, of the Bronx. “The last time they won anything, they won because of an error [that would be the ‘86 series, sixth game, Bill Buckner]. And they got a ring for that crap.” Let the record show that Palma is wearing a Yankees jersey with the words mets suck on the back–New York is a town of equal-opportunity boorishness. Yankees fans can’t suppress the feeling that a team like the Mets just doesn’t belong on the same ball field as their heroes. “You ever watch the WWF in the early days?” asks Mark Zona, 25, standing outside Stan’s Sports Bar across the street from Yankee Stadium. “There was Hulk Hogan, and then some unknown guy that no one ever heard of? You root for Hulk Hogan–it’s just what you do. You don’t root for the Vinny Barducci that they pulled off the street. That’s the fundamental difference. We’re rooting for Hulk Hogan; they’re rooting for Vinny Barducci.”
There are other differences between the fans, though many of them are clouded by prejudice and sociological murk. Mets fans are thought to be more suburban; many of them come from Long Island, which stands to reason because Shea lies on the tip of that vast New York bedroom. On the other hand, a recent survey suggested that a quarter of Yankees fans come from New Jersey, a stat the Yankees understandably suppress. According to a ballpark poll conducted during the playoffs by a PR firm called Jericho Communications, Yankees fans prefer George W. Bush by 2 percentage points, while Mets fans go Gore by 18. The same survey found that Mets fans are twice as likely to put ketchup on their eggs, and Yankees fans are four times more likely to fold toilet paper before use instead of crumpling it. We report these data without even the wildest attempt at interpretation and in full awareness that it will probably open up new vistas of anti-New York prejudice.
There’s more, but perhaps it can be reduced, Letterman-style, to two lists:
FIVE REASONS METS FANS HATE THE YANKEES 1. Roger Clemens, who beaned Mike Piazza with a nasty fast ball in an interleague game on July 8. In the series, he will pitch only at Yankee Stadium, where the ridiculous designated-hitter rule will keep him out of the batter’s box.
Bob Sheppard, the venerable “Voice of the Yankees,” whose plummy “Welcome to Yankee Stadium” and “now batting” announcements sound like an introduction to St. Peter’s Basilica and a team fielded by the College of Cardinals. Yankee arrogance personified.
George Steinbrenner, the “principal owner” whose megabucks buy winners and whose temper won’t tolerate defeat.
Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle and all that musty, 20-ton Yankees Tradition. That was then, this is now.
Those 25 World Series victories. The Yankees do tend to win.
FIVE REASONS YANKEES FANS HATE THE METS 1. The Mets get so emotional. Did you see Timo Perez jumping up and down before he caught the fly ball that ended the St. Louis series? A Yankee wouldn’t have done that.
Mr. Met, the idiotic, baseball-headed clown who cavorts around Shea between innings. Mets immaturity personified.
Bobby Valentine, the brainy, conceited, aloof Mets manager. As a boy he was a Yankees fan.
The Mets uniform. They keep changing it; we’ve had the same one for 80 years.
Those two World Series victories. They generated more excitement in the media than our 25.
Now we come to the all-important, but somehow less interesting, question of who will win. Tradition, of course, is with the Yankees. But this is not a traditional Yankees team. In place of the invulnerable supermen of yesteryear, relentless crushing machines who did their job without breaking a smile or a sweat, this year’s Yankees are oddly human and fragile. Manager Joe Torre went through surgery for prostate cancer in 1999. Pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre is out, recovering from treatment for cancer of the bone marrow. Strange goblins haunt second baseman Chuck Knoblauch when he tries to throw to first, making routine plays an adventure when he’s in the field. Lately he’s been acting as designated hitter, but he’ll be back at second for the games at Shea. Right fielder Paul O’Neill is struggling with a hip injury that’s never fully healed. Starting pitcher David Cone has gone into a swoon of ineffectiveness that may mark the end of a brilliant career with both the Yanks and the Mets (during the playoff games in Oakland, his only role was to protect the bullpen pitchers from getting hit by foul balls). These troubles conspired to produce a truly terrible end-of-season slump: the Yankees lost all their last seven games before the playoffs, and 15 of their last 18.
All might have been lost but for George Steinbrenner’s checkbook. The Yankees signed seven players from other teams after June 1, a record for a defending World Series champion. Luis Sojo and Jose Vizcaino bolstered the infield, Glenallen Hill added batting punch and, most notably of all, David Justice was acquired from the Cleveland Indians. Installed in left field, Justice promptly went on a slugging spree, becoming the first player to hit 20 home runs for each of two different teams in the same season. It was his three-run homer that won the deciding playoff game against Seattle.
For some fans, even Yankees fans, this buying binge plants a big asterisk on the 2000 pennant now flying over Yankee Stadium. Like other pro sports, major-league baseball has fallen prey to money troubles, but baseball’s are far worse than most. According to the report of a blue-ribbon panel set up by Commissioner of Baseball Bud Selig, 27 of the 30 teams lost money in the last five years. An effort to impose a salary cap, like pro football’s, was knocked down by the players’ strike of 1994. The disparities in revenue are vast: in 1999, the Yankees took in $176 million, the Montreal Expos $12 million. This, plus the free-agency rules that enable players periodically to offer themselves to the highest bidder, produce a tawdry annual spectacle just before the trading deadline. Teams that have fallen out of contention offer up their high-salary players, particularly those about to become free agents, to the teams battling for the pennant. Result: rosters are substantially remade in midseason–no good for fan loyalty–and only rich teams win. It is no accident that the Yankees have the highest payroll in baseball ($114,336,616) and the Mets the third highest ($99,793,463). Selig calls this the game’s darkest threat.
The 2000 Mets have at least demonstrated that excitement doesn’t have to be measured in dollars. Their outfielders–Benny Agbayani, Jay Payton and the electrifying rookie speedster Timo Perez–among them make barely enough to pay for a month’s garage parking in Manhattan. Yet they provided much of the offensive punch in the Mets’ march through the playoffs, from wild card to World Series. On paper the Mets match up nicely against the Yankees. They’ll throw two strong left-handed pitchers, Al Leiter and Mike Hampton, at a Yank lineup that much prefers righties. Their bullpen is far deeper in talent (though Yankees closer Mariano Rivera is without compare). The Yankees, with the exception of Knoblauch, aren’t fast on the base paths, which may neutralize Piazza’s weakness in throwing runners out.
And yet. The shores of baseball history are littered with the wrecks of teams that figured this was the year they’d sail past the Yanks. This is an encounter of Mets scrappiness with Yankee pride. There’s no telling how it will go, but it should, as Casey Stengel said when he took over the Mets, “be amazing.” So, America, go ahead and hate us. But tune us out at your peril.
