The Yankees and Mets have met 142 times since interleague play began in 1997, 147 times if you include the 2000 World Series (which you definitely have to include).
There have been times when both teams have entered the season on a roll (see: 2000). There have been times when both teams have struggled, like last July, when the Mets had already traded away most of their team and the Yankees were just weeks away from ruining their season with a nine-game losing streak.
There have been times when one team has been significantly better, and in those cases it has almost always been the Yankees, and other times the rivalry has brought out the best in the lesser team, such as in May 2013 when the Mets (who were already 11 games below .500) beat the Yankees (who were already 10 games above .500) four times in four days in both the Bronx and Queens.
This is a little different.
The Yankees are cooling off after spending most of this season in a baseball sauna. They were on a roll, but lost three straight series, four of their last five, and are 3-7 in their last 10. And now the Mets are on a roll in June, having won four straight series and 13 of their last 17 games after spending most of April and May in a baseball igloo.
The Yankees are riddled with injuries — they’re without Giancarlo Stanton, Anthony Rizzo, Clark Schmidt and Ian Hamilton — and the Mets are shorthanded, too: Starling Marte is out for the season with a sore knee that he underwent a special evaluation on Monday, Brooks Raley is out for the season and Edwin Diaz is likely out for 10 games after being ejected Sunday night in Chicago for having gunk on his hands.
And interestingly, while the Mets already have a boost heading into the season thanks to three former Yankees (Luis Severino, Harrison Bader and Luis Torrens), the Yankees have gotten a great job out of former Mets reliever Michael Tonkin and are hoping to repeat the success once they add former Mets player J.D. Davis to their infield.
Admittedly, this isn’t like any other kind of subway series.
But it will take an inning, maybe two, before the next two games over the next two nights remind us that this is one of the most entertaining landing spots on the New York sports calendar each year. The newness may be gone now. So it will never be like it was in the days and hours before June 16, 1997, when these teams played their first game of significance, or in the days and hours before Oct. 21, 2000, when Game 1 of the 2000 World Series took place.
But there’s still something thrilling about the “Let’s go Yankees!” chant heard inside Citi Field when the visiting team is battling back, the same “Let’s go Mets!” chant heard inside Yankee Stadium when the Mets are battling back in the Bronx.
Our civil war is, after all, the most civil of the bunch. We’ve been fighting it for 27 years, and we remain a city divided by baseball lines, where arguments often heat up at the water cooler, in the bar, on text threads, but never get ugly. There’s good-natured name-calling in the hallways and heated exchanges on talk radio.
It wasn’t always this way: In the past, the Dodgers-Giants rivalry could turn violent, as when a Giants fan named Frank Klug was murdered at a Brooklyn bar called Pat Diamonds after an exchange of some caustic banter with a Dodger fan named Robert Joyce, who, in perhaps the first and most extreme first-timer, decided to make his final statement with a gun.
In other words, the Mets and Yankees never There.
(good.)
(Let’s knock on wood.)
So while we’ll enjoy this most civil of civil wars again this week, and again a month from now when the final two games of this year’s Subway Series take place at Yankee Stadium, Mets fans and Yankees fans alike will be primarily concerned with what matters: The Yankees are yards behind the Orioles for the No. 1 seed in the American League, and the Mets are within striking distance of clinching the National League wild card.
And, as a bonus, you get to chat — politely, of course — with your friends, siblings and neighbors who support other uniform colors.
