Babe Ruth, Joe di Maggio, Lou Gehrig, Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle, Derek Jeter, Reggie Jackson, Mariano Rivera, Alex Rodríguez, Thurman Munson, Jorge Posada, Don Mattingly… The list of Yankees legends looks like an alphabet of the inmates of the Cooperstown Hall of Fame. And if you add to that their 27 World Series and 40 American League titles, it’s almost impossible to overshadow the fearsome Bronx Bombers. The humble Mets have it as complicated as Espanyol, no matter how bad things are at Can Barça.
But this season the Mets, with an owner willing to throw the house out the window, have so far won more games than their crosstown rivals (a 79-44 record, tops of their group). And that’s because the Yankees (74-48) are also having an excellent campaign and have practically assured a place in the playoffs. They were champions in 2009, which by their standards is like saying forever.
In baseball you can win in many ways, hitting home runs or thanks to an excellent pitching rotation (in addition to defending well, stealing bases and everything else). The Mets don’t overwhelm, like the Yankees or Dodgers, hitting the ball with the bat, and many of their wins are just one or two runs apart. But in Max Scherzer and Jacob deGrom they have one of the best pitching duos in the majors, complemented by Edwin Diaz, Carlos Carrasco, Taijuan Walker, Chris Bassitt, Tylor Megill and Mychal Givens.
Between 2016 and 2019, Sherzer (then playing for the Washington Nationals) and deGrom each won Cy Young Awards (soccer’s equivalent of the Ballon d’Or) for pitcher of the year. By bringing the two together on one team, the Mets have automatically become World Series contenders, despite being injured earlier in the season, if not one, the other.
In the history of baseball there have been unforgettable tandems of pitchers like Wynn and Score (Cleveland) in the 1950s, Drysdale and Koufax (Dodgers) in the 1960s, Ryan and Tanana (Angels) in the 1970s, Maddux and Glavine (Atlanta) in the the nineties or, more recently, Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling. Scherzer and deGrom are on track to emulate them. When they play (as they often do) on consecutive days, the Mets have excellent chances of winning both games.
Until the Dodgers and Giants left New York for California in 1957 (the “great sellout”), it was common for all the professional baseball teams in the city to have a good season at the same time. This was the case, for example, in 1947, when the New York Cubans also won the Black World Series – those were the days of racial discrimination and black players had their own tournaments. Since then it is very rare (it happened in 1986, when the Mets became champions, and in 1999, when the Yankees did).
After the exile of the Dodgers to Los Angeles, the Mets landed in 1962 amid enormous expectations and with veteran Casey Stengel as coach (the Yankees had fired him for the “sin” of having turned seventy). Although they won the World Series in ’69 and ’86, and have had stars like Keith Hernández, Mike Piazza, Gary Carter and Tom Seaver, their journey has had many more failures than successes, with a reputation for pupas, such as Atlético de Madrid before Simeone arrived. They were synonymous with ineptitude. But not anymore. This year it’s the Queens Bombers, and Bronx Bombers beware.
