The Yankees and the Mets have played 142 times since the advent of interleague play in 1997, 147 if you include the 2000 World Series (and you should always include the 2000 World Series).
There have been times when both teams have entered on extreme highs (see 2000). There have been times when they’ve both been scuffling, like last July, when the Mets had already parted with a chunk of the team and the Yankees were a few weeks away from the nine-game losing streak that submarined their season for good.
There have been times when one of the teams — and when this has happened, it’s almost always been the Yankees — is significantly better. And there have also been times when the rivalry brings out the best in the overmatched team, such as the time in May 2013 when the Mets (already 11 games under .500) won four games in four days against the Yankees (already 10 games over .500) in both The Bronx and Queens.
This one’s a little different.
This time, the Yankees are coming in ice cold after spending most of the season in a baseball sauna, they were so hot — the Yankees have lost three straight series, and four of their last five, 3-7 in their last 10 games. And this time the Mets are coming in red hot in June after spending most of April and May in a baseball igloo, winners of four straight series and 13 of their last 17 games.
The Yankees are banged up: no Giancarlo Stanton, no Anthony Rizzo, no Clarke Schmidt, no Ian Hamilton. The Mets are coming in shorthanded, too: Starling Marte is iffy with a knee that was getting an extra look Monday, Brooks Raley is gone for the season and Edwin Diaz is likely gone for 10 games thanks to his ejection for having too much sticky stuff on his hand in Chicago on Sunday night.
And, interestingly, the Mets have already been buoyed in their attempts to get back into the season thanks to a trio of ex-Yankees (Luis Severino, Harrison Bader, Luis Torrens) while the Yankees have gotten some wonderful work out of ex-Met reliever Michael Tonkin and hope to get the same once ex-Met J.D. Davis arrives to beef up their infield depth.
It’s a different kind of Subway Series, for sure.
But it’ll take about an inning, maybe two, before the next two games across the next two nights remind us that this remains among the most enjoyable landing spots on New York’s sporting calendar every year. Maybe the new is long gone, so it’ll never be like it was in the days and hours before June 16, 1997, the first time these teams ever played a game that counted, or in the days and hours before Oct. 21, 2000, Game 1 of the 2000 World Series.
But there is still something stirring in the acoustics of hearing pockets of “Let’s Go Yankees!” inside Citi Field when the visiting team is rallying, same as the segments of “Let’s Go Mets!” inside Yankee Stadium when the Mets return the favor in The Bronx.
Ours is the most civil kind of civil war, after all. We’ve been doing this for 27 years now, and while we remain a city divided along baseball lines, and while those disputes can often grow heated alongside water coolers, inside saloons, on text threads, it’s never turned ugly. There is much good-natured trash talk in the aisle, some fiery back-and-forth on talk radio.
That wasn’t always the case. Back in the day, the Dodgers/Giants rivalry sometimes got violent, and one time ended with the murder of a Giants fan named Frank Krug after he’d engaged in a little salty banter with a Dodgers fan named Robert Joyce at a Brooklyn bar called Pat Diamond’s. Joyce, maybe the first and most extreme first-time-long-time, decided to get the last word with a gunshot.
So, no, Mets/Yankees has never quite gone there.
(Thank goodness.)
(Knock wood.)
And so we will embrace this most civil civil war again this week, and again in a month when the final two games of this year’s Subway Series return to Yankee Stadium. Mets fans and Yankees fans will care mostly about the important stuff — the Yankees focusing on keeping a few yards ahead of the Orioles for the No. 1 seed in the AL, the Mets trying to keep within shouting distance of the NL wild card.
And as a bonus, they’ll get to yammer with their friends, siblings and neighbors who happen to root for the other uniform colors. Civilly, of course.
