If you loooove the Subway Series, wonder why in the devil they cut it back from six annual games to four instead of upping it to 12, then you can find allies among the team owners. It’s the players who have injected sanity into this formula.
Here’s hoping — OK, more like fantasizing — that the players can lead a move even further in this direction. That Yankees-Mets, initiating its 18th straight year Monday night at Yankee Stadium, eventually becomes just another interleague matchup without special treatment.
That it arrives once every three years and no more.
Of all the major professional team sports, none contains such a more egregious violation of scheduling integrity than Major League Baseball’s “natural rivals.” We get Yankees-Mets, Cubs-White Sox, Dodgers-Angels et al. every year for the sole reason that they generate revenue.
Imagine if the NFL decided, “Ah, what the heck, let’s have the Giants and Jets play each other all of the time!” and shrugged off its much-scrutinized schedule protocol.
Our two locals wobble into this matchup, the Mets’ offense and the Yankees’ starting rotation both falling apart like any Johnny Depp movie of the last five years. Maybe the buzz, if any remains, can fire up one or both clubs. And sure, Masahiro Tanaka’s Subway Series debut Wednesday night at Citi Field ranks as something to anticipate, and if the Mets counter with Rafael
Montero’s major-league debut, then that would be pretty cool.
That would serve as the exception to the recent rule, however. Consider that, in honor of Monday’s game marking the 100th game between the Yankees and Mets, The Post asked its seven veteran baseball writers to choose our favorite of the first 99. Only one of us, assistant sports editor Mark Hale, selected a game played after 2000 — Luis Castillo’s dropped pop fly in 2009.
Maybe the rest of us are angry old men yearning for better times and chasing kids off our lawn. I don’t think so, though. I think the repetition has worn down, if not altogether eradicated, the pizzazz.
“I wish they would stagger it a little bit,” Willie Randolph, plugging his new book, “The Yankee Way,” told me the other day of the Subway Series. “Every other year would be nice.”
During the last round of collective bargaining between players and owners in 2011, former Yankee and current Met Curtis Granderson attended many of the sessions. The players brought up the inequality of the natural rivalries and asked what could be done to remedy it.
“I think the big concern was, teams that don’t have natural rivals are losing those games there, where other teams are constantly having to play the same teams year in and year out,” Granderson said. “From a fan perspective, this is one of the things that all of the players talked about. It’s exciting to go to other ballparks and see teams.
“For example, when I was in Detroit, we played Colorado [two] times, but they came to us [both] times. We didn’t go there. Simple things like that. How come we’re not playing someone else? … I think that’s where the idea came from of shortening that natural rivalry series. You still play it. You still get home and home, but now you add another team that you might not see otherwise.”
The shrunken natural rivalries, a modest improvement, fits within the far greater alteration of holding interleague play all season, rather than squeezing it into three weeks as if it were some strange, alternate universe. That’s a by-product of the Astros moving from the National League to the American League, which has created six five-team divisions. Good stuff.
The next CBA will commence in 2017. So let’s do two more years after this of the two-and-two format, and then let’s fully eliminate the natural rivalries. The Yankees and Mets play every other interleague team once every three years. There’s no intellectual reason for their relationship with each other to be any different.
I know, this resolution is as likely as Kyle Farnsworth being elected the next mayor of New York City. But might as well dream, right? It’s not like the 2014 Yankees and Mets have inspired much other discussion.