HELL, N.Y. – Nobody saw this coming. Did you? Did anyone named Steinbrenner, George or Hank or Hal? Did anyone named Wilpon, Fred or Jeff? This is supposed to be a weekend of baseball celebration in New York City, a gathering of the baseball tribes.
It isn’t supposed to be like this. Not on the first Subway Series weekend.
And yet here we are. Here all of us are, all of us who care about New York baseball, who embrace it, who live it, who rejoice in it, who circle these two weekends every year and look forward to them for what they’re supposed to be:
Our best against your best.
Only, what happens when nobody’s best?
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What happens when the Subway Series arrives and one team is only a game north of .500 and the other is two games south? What happens when the teams are a combined 40-41 across fully one-quarter of the baseball games they will play this year?
Suddenly, the Subway Series will be filled with Subway Queries, dueling referenda on who these teams are, where they’re going, what they’re capable of really achieving this year.
“No matter what,” Billy Wagner said yesterday, “there’s really nothing to match a Subway Series – the atmosphere, the fans, the hoopla, the hype. There’s nothing else like it.”
Normally, that’s the theme of these games, especially since half of them have been permanently moved to May every year, a point in the baseball calendar when it’s generally too early to fret, panic or otherwise dread anything about a baseball season. Normally, we would be talking about how there could be three such Subway Series this year, one in May, one in June, one in October. Normally, we would grow wistful and nostalgic pondering the dying days of both ballparks.
Not now. Not this year. Not with that combined record of 40-41. Here’s something for you: The Mets and the Yankees have played 21 regular-season series before this one. Not once have they ever come into the proceedings with a combined record under sea level.
You could say, it was bound to happen some year. There’s been a lot of awfully good baseball played on either side of the Triboro the last 11 years. Probability says we had his coming some time. Laws of average insist we had to expect this some year.
Just not this year.
But this is exactly what we have. We have a Mets team still fully gripped by the effects of the baseball version of post-traumatic stress disorder, with fans that have officially parted with the premise of liking them even a little bit, with a manager who could be fired by weekend’s end if things go poorly, who almost certainly will be fired if they return home, say, 2-8 off 10 days in The Bronx, Atlanta and Denver.
And we have a Yankees team that is swinging Wiffle Ball bats, that can’t seem to piece a winning streak together, that can’t coax any life out of its celebrated young arms, that can’t get its owner to shut his pie-hole. And, to make matters even more pleasing, tonight it will throw Darrell Rasner at the Mets.
The Mets and Yankees always love to throw nonsense at us, insisting these games don’t mean any more than other games. Sometimes, it’s even possible to believe them. Not now. Not this year. Not at 40 up and 41 down. Not with two seasons inching ever closer to the abyss, and 8 million baseball fans remembering the words of the man who once managed both of them.
Sometimes, it really does get later early.