|
JD, maybe this is more of what you wanted to see.
Later
]
Mets can't wait to rule
Mike Lupica
Today N.Y., tomorrow the world
The Yankee season finally ended yesterday, three days after Game 4 in Detroit. The Yankees are officially over and so is George Steinbrenner, who got talked into un-firing Joe Torre by a lot of people who worked much harder at preserving the status quo at Yankee Stadium than our Yankee millionaires worked against the Tigers.
Yeah, the Yankees were big news for a couple of days after losing to the Tigers, and were again yesterday with Torre's press conference. More than anything, though, they felt like yesterday's news. Suddenly they are only a big story in October when they can't get out of the first round again. Then they are another kind of story, two years running, because nobody knows if the manager is coming back.
Old news, old story.
The Mets are a much better story. The Mets are today. They are today, and tonight's game against the Cardinals at Shea Stadium, and this weekend and next week and maybe the World Series after that. Yankee fans ought to know better than anybody. The team that matters the most is the one still playing.
On the field, the last Yankee dynasty ended six years ago, when they beat the Mets in a Subway Series. Now a different kind of dynasty ends, because the Yankees are gone and the Mets are still here. That Yankee dynasty was one where they felt like the only game in town. It really has been ending all season.
Now the Yankees are gone and the Mets are still standing. And that is fitting, because even though both New York teams ended up with 97 wins this season, the Mets were really the better team. As usual, we heard at the end of the regular season that Joe Torre had done the best managing job of his life, because we seem to hear that every year. Willie Randolph, who was never considered worthy of being Torre's successor at Yankee Stadium, did a better job with the Mets in the regular season and did a better job in the first round of the playoffs.
"I've been dreaming about this, personally, for a long time," Randolph said yesterday.
Randolph's team isn't going anywhere, not for a long time. More than ever, Steinbrenner looks like some kind of baseball King Lear, not trying to divide up the Yankee kingdom, just giving it away to his son-in-law, Steve Swindal, and Brian Cashman, and even Torre himself. At the very same time, the Mets have the chance to become the same princes of the city they were 20 years ago.
The Yankees give us a lot of big talk about next year.
The Mets are still this year.
And, the next few years in baseball, whether they win the World Series or not.
The Mets are the two kids on the left side of the infield, David Wright and Jose Reyes.
They are Carlos Beltran and Carlos Delgado and a Brooklyn-born catcher, all National League, named Lo Duca. They are Tom Glavine painting the corners and Billy Wagner trying to throw the ball 100 miles per hour out of the bullpen. Now they are no lock to beat the Cardinals even after the way St. Louis stumbled down the stretch. So did the Tigers. It meant nothing when it came time to beat the Yankees, who dominate baseball only in the payroll department now, and in luxury taxes.
The Yankees dominated at the end of the '90s and right through the 2000 World Series, you bet. They started to break the bank and eventually break attendance records. And even when the Mets made it a Subway Series, the Yankees still owned New York. And as they did, people acted as if it had always been this way and would always be this way, acted as if the 1980s had never happened. But the '80s surely did happen. And in those days, it was the Yankees who were the Other Team in town. The Mets outdrew the Yankees, out-performed them, out-headlined them.
"We were like rock stars," Keith Hernandez says. Then he smiles and says, "In just about all ways."
You had to be there.
Maybe in the next two weeks this Mets team will even do what Hernandez's Mets team did 20 years ago this October, which means bring the whole city to a stop with a single ballgame. Stop traffic, stop a New York rush hour. Stop everything. Because that is exactly what the '86 Mets did the day and night of Game 6 of the National League Championship Series against the Astros.
It was three games to two for the Mets, but the Astros were winning Game6 in the ninth and Bob Knepper was one-hitting them and Mike Scott, unhittable that year, was waiting to pitch Game 7 the next night. Only then Lenny Dykstra tripled up the gap in the top of the ninth and the Mets came back to tie the Astros, 3-3, and a game that began in the afternoon looked like it might go all night.
It was sometime in extra innings, maybe after the top of the 12th, when I passed Tim McCarver in the Astrodome press box, both of us running for coffee. And McCarver, who didn't so much broadcast that '86 season as narrate it, said, "Can you imagine what it must be like in New York right now?"
We found out later. This was before instant-everything on the Internet, and cell phones that gave you pitch-by-pitch and Palm Pilots and all the rest of it. Commuters were afraid to go home that October day 20 years ago, afraid to leave Grand Central or Penn Station, afraid the game might end while they were on their way home and they wouldn't see it.
The pitch-by-pitch that day was passed from taxicab to taxicab on Seventh Ave. People stood in crowds, we found out when we got back from Houston, in front of appliance stores with TV sets showing the game in the front window. A baseball happy hour in New York.
That was the kind of team the old Mets were. A team that could stop the biggest city in the world dead in its tracks, all the way to old Jesse Orosco getting the last out in the bottom of the 16th the way he would get it later against the Red Sox in the World Series.
Now here come the Mets again, with the Yankees out of the way, with the stage to themselves. They are today's news, and tomorrow's. The Yankees are gone and they are back. First pitch tonight a little after eight. Next pitch for the Yankees next April.
|
|
...go...
