“We are through the looking glass here, people. Up is down. Black is white.
— Jim Garrison, “JFK”
“Human sacrifice … dogs and cats, living together … mass hysteria.”
— Dr. Peter Venkman, “Ghostbusters”
“Gosh, I sure like the way the Mets do business instead of us.”
— Yankees fans, May 2014
OK . Maybe that last one is pushing it a bit too far.
But only to a degree, only to a point. Because if you listen long enough to baseball fans in New York City these days, one thing is perfectly clear: Nobody is truly happy. Nobody is fully satisfied. The grass is greener, the sky is bluer, the beer is colder, the hamburgers taste better (well, unless you’re Ryne Sandberg and Shake Shack) on the other side.
No matter which other side you’re talking about, where both teams are 19-19, and both fight the kind of restless yearning sea level inspires.
Oh, Mets fans may feel a bit better now, after Tuesday night’s 12-7 rout of the Yankees, giving them a sweep of the Bronx portion of the Subway Series, extending to six their best-ever winning streak over the Bombers.
But we also know the Mets’ perennial gift is giving their fans the biggest inferiority complex in sports, and this has been a banner, boffo year for that: the games aren’t on WFAN anymore because the Yankees are there, the team payroll suggests an address in one of the Dakotas, the owners are invisible and the general manager scoffs at “external options,” the ballpark is half-filled on good nights.
And by habit there are many Mets fans that sigh, settle in, and wonder, wistfully: “What if we did things the way the Yankees do them? What if we visited Tiffany’s occasionally, in between trips to Target? What if once, just once, we acted like the big bullies New York baseball teams are supposed to act like?”
They may not say that word — “Yankees” — out loud, of course.
But they think it. They feel it. They live it.
The funny part? They aren’t alone this year. Because their grass might not be all that terribly green, all that wonderfully lush. But at least it doesn’t die a little more every day.
Like the Yankees’ grass dies, bit by bit, blade by blade.
Tuesday, late-inning relief specialist Shawn Kelley joined the 60 percent of the Yankees starting staff exiled to the disabled list, and the mood around the team was decidedly dour. Mark Teixeira was back in the lineup but instructed to be “smart” while trundling around the basepaths. Carlos Beltran got a cortisone shot to combat a balky elbow. Ichiro Suzuki, made of iron, had a sore back and a sorer knee.
“These are some of the things you deal with,” Yankees manager Joe Girardi said. “When you get older your body doesn’t bounce back as quick.”
He shook his head.
“Nobody feels sorry for us,” he said. “I don’t feel sorry for us.”
Still, if you spent a couple of hours listening to Yankees fans Tuesday — on the radio, via social media, in your email inbox, on the telephone — these were the common themes (expressed, understandably, in fits of frustration as one player after another slips into the whirlpool or gobbles a handful of Ibuprofen):
We’re too old. We have too many mercenaries. We have too many veterans, not enough young players, we should focus on the farm system, focus on development, not rely on so many older, expensive players, we should …
You know. Be more like the Mets.
Now, THEY certainly won’t say THAT out loud, of course, because we live in a time when there aren’t many fan bases in professional sports that would willingly trade places with Mets fans. Still, the message was perfectly clear, and it mirror-matched what Mets fans were saying.
If only the Mets spent money … the way the Yankees spend money.
If only the Yankees committed themselves to youngsters … the way, for better or worse, the Mets are committed to kids …
“Patience,” Mets manager Terry Collins said, “is hard at times.”
Yankees fans probably know that, probably understand, and soon enough, they’ll stop calling radio stations yearning for players like Eric Young Jr. on their team (yes, this happened). For now? Up is down. Black is white. And there doesn’t seem to be a green blade of baseball grass to be found anywhere in town.