Thirteen years and six days ago, former Giants manager Dusty Baker set aside his traditionalist viewpoint and wrote the name Glenallen Hill on his lineup card under at designated hitter. The Giants’ visit to Arlington to face the Rangers was the first time in about a century of playing baseball that a manager for a National League team had done that in a regular-season game.
Starting tonight at Yankee Stadium in The Bronx, the Mets and Yankees will play the fourth game of their annual six-game season series — after the Mets won two of three last month. Fourteen years ago, that would have seemed like a ridiculous statement. Now, the amazement lies in the fact of how fast something so foreign can become quickly ingrained as bedrock of the sport’s landscape.
“I do know that interleague play, as far as the Mets and Yankees, is here to stay for a while,” said Ron Darling, the SNY broadcaster who played for the Mets before interleague play. “I think any backlash would come from taking away something that has become innately part of the game. I think the Mets and Yanks six times a year is part of normalcy. Anything else, at this point, would be abnormal.”
Abnormal from a Yankees’ point of view is that no longer is there an emphasis from the front office on continuing their city supremacy.
“When Mr. [George] Steinbrenner was very involved, there was a lot of emphasis that these would be good games to win,” said John Flaherty, the former Yankees catcher who played in the Subway Series from 2003-05 and now is a YES commentator. “They seemed to count a little bit more.”
One of the main criticisms toward the current incarnation of interleague play is that teams’ schedules are substantially unbalanced. If the schedules for teams within a division are not even close, then how can that statement hold true?
“Is it perfect? Absolutely not,” Darling said. “But Mets-Yankees, I’ll be more excited than I would be for a normal game.”
Yet if the Mets get to the end of the regular season and they’ve missed out on a playoff spot by just a few games, it will be easy to look back and be bitter about the unbalanced schedule. Just looking at their division, the Mets and Phillies are the two teams with the toughest interleague schedules — both include the Yankees — while the Nationals, Marlins and Braves all get off a lot easier. In fact, the Marlins play three fewer interleague games than everyone else in the division.
“You can’t look at in contemporary bubbles,” Darling said. “People used to love playing the Tampa Bay team, now I don’t think you can look at it that way.
“Do [the Mets] have a tough go, playing the Yanks? Of course they do. But if it were 1984, ’85, you wouldn’t be saying that. Some teams get shafted a bit, of course. That’s how it goes. But if you’re a championship club, you get to test your mettle.”
At times this season, the Mets have looked both pennant-worthy and basement-worthy, and their biggest battle seems to be getting over the mental scar that the disappointment of the past three years has left.
“I think that there’s more accountability,” Darling said of the Mets clubhouse. “When they don’t play well, they have no problem talking about how they’re going to play better the next game.
“They know that they’re good and that they should be winning certain games, and when they don’t, they stand there and say so. And as a teammate, that’s what you want.”