There is a simple way to define what the Subway Series means to different generations of New York baseball fans.
* If you are 30 or younger, then just about all you know about local ball is that the Yankees and the Mets play each other every year — sometimes four times, sometimes six times (with the eternal wish for more in October), but starting Monday, for the 20th consecutive season, New York’s baseball teams will square off and divide the city into clashing shades of blue.
* If you are between 30 and 60, there is still an involuntary, unexpected thrill attached to the moment when Yankees players touch their spikes on the turf in Queens, and when Mets players do the same in The Bronx. Mostly, this is because so many years were once spent yearning for such encounters, the old tales of fathers and grandfathers given only occasional (and less-than-satisfying) renewals in meaningless spring training games and even-more-meaningless Mayor’s Trophy Games.
* If you are 60 and older, then these games still feed the nostalgist paying rent in your soul, because you were a kid when it seemed the Yankees played either the Giants or Dodgers in the World Series every year, you remember well when the 22 games the Giants and Dodgers played every year would inflame passions (and sometimes lead to violent dispute), and if the Yankees and Mets — with rare exception — have never quite revived those angry embers, they represent quite well the possibility that they may.
This morning, on the eve of the 20th year of hostilities, it is good to go back to the start, back to the beginning, back to the summer of 1997 when the notion of Mets and Yankees playing games that counted was greeted with such glee and such excitement, when there were whole segments of the city who literally could not contain themselves for what was about to happen.
It is good to remember Todd Hundley, then the Mets’ biggest star, who gushed on the day before that first encounter on June 16, 1997: “You can’t find a bigger series in this world at this time of the year than this one. So many things about it are huge. Making history, playing the world champs, playing in Yankee Stadium with all of New York so into it. You just can’t beat it.”
It is good to remember Rudolph Giuliani, who in a few months would be re-elected for a second term as mayor and was known as much for his affinity for the Yankees as he was for his vigilance in ridding the city of squeegee men: “It’s wonderful for the city. In the old days, you couldn’t have a Dodger fan and a Giant fan in the same room together. I didn’t even meet my first Giant fan until I was 10 years old. Because they played each other so often, the rivalry that developed was extreme. Now you don’t have that, but maybe because they’re playing each other, it’ll develop.”
It has, and it hasn’t. There still are more Yankees fans than Mets fans, the natural evolution of an era, starting on June 16, 1997, when the Yankees have won four championships, six pennants and appeared in the postseason 14 times while the Mets have gone title-free, won two pennants and made the playoffs just four times.
There were seven days in October 2000 when it seemed Giuliani’s prophesy truly could last forever, seven days and five games in which the World Series returned to the city as an exclusive property for the first time in 44 years, when the Yankees beat the Mets in five games and it seemed you couldn’t walk anywhere in the city without seeing a citizen declaring his loyalty: Mets jacket, Yankees jersey, Mets cap, Yankees hoodie.
And there have been snapshots that became forever frozen due to the fact these games were played against each other and not against the Orioles or the Marlins, the Indians or the Reds: Luis Castillo dropping a pop-up, and Mike Piazza lying dazed on the ground after taking a Roger Clemens fastball to the head, and David Wright hitting a Mariano Rivera cutter over Johnny Damon’s head, and Dave Mlicki throwing a shutout in that very first game in ’97, and Dellin Betances announcing himself with authority, six strikeouts among the seven Mets he faced in a 1-0 win two years ago (which also happened to be the debut of losing pitcher Jacob deGrom).
But here is a fact that is both encouraging and depressing all at once: We have gotten used to the Subway Series. That isn’t to say we’re bored with it — the city will still be transfixed over the next four days, because baseball matters that much to us. That isn’t to say we’ve grown tired of it — the available feelings of triumph that will accompany wins this week will be equaled, if not surpassed, by the feelings of angst that will chaperone defeat. Geography may not be everything when it comes to defining rivalries, of course, but it is certainly something.
Back in the day, the Mets-Yankees dynamic was as much fueled by its absence as it was by anything else. Mostly that meant George Steinbrenner, who in 1975 famously raged when his new million-dollar pitcher, Catfish Hunter, gave up two spring training homers to new Met Dave Kingman, the game transmitted back to New York on Channel 11, the distance of both impossible to believe, harder to calculate.
“I believe they’re still going,” Ron Guidry said. In 2012!.
Steinbrenner also once called an impromptu press conference on the roof of the press box at old Fort Lauderdale Stadium after the Mets had ganged up on the Yankees’ kid pitcher and knocked him out of the game.
“Mike Griffin,” Steinbrenner fumed, “has fooled us long enough!”
If you’re scratching your head trying to recall Mike Griffin … well, that’s sort of the point. When the Boss was done filling reporters’ notebooks with a week’s worth of fury, he went down and tried to read the same riot act to his manager, only to see that manager, Billy Martin, start punching a tub of ice water and nearly flood the rickety clubhouse with his own raging retort.
“Put it this way,” David Cone said, quite diplomatically, the day before that first Mets-Yankes for-realz encounter in ’97, “it’s well documented that these games are important to our owner, as they should be. It’s for the bragging rights of New York City.”
They are for the kids, who only have known seasons of which the Subway Series was a part, and for the old-timers, who remember when Yankees-Dodgers was a rite of autumn right up there with Columbus Day and Veterans Day. And it is for those of us in between, who used to make due with our father’s stories, with the occasional spring-training game, with the Mayor’s Trophy Game …
And let’s be honest: Nobody really enjoyed the Mayor’s Trophy Game in reality as much as all of us do in memory. The last one, in 1982, drew 20,471 fans. The most famous (or infamous) one, at Yankee Stadium in ’78, drew just 9,792 (that was the game when Sparky Lyle, in “The Bronx Zoo,” hinted Graig Nettles made a late-game error on purpose to let everyone go home; Lyle always has insisted he was kidding). Nobody is even all that sure where the Mayor’s Trophy is right now. It’s a concept far more beloved in death than it ever was in life.
Yes, we have gotten used to this, to Mets-Yankees, to the Subway Series, to these games that still bring electricity to the stands and chatter to the actual subways after, that still invite trash talk and bragging rights, that may never quite reach the heights that 2000 brought but bring baseball New York together, one borough, one stadium, one field, four times a year or six. With an eternal hope, one of these days, to get four out of seven in October one more time.