Maybe this really is finally the year for the Yankees, and they can have a whole month of October like the week they just had, especially after those first two big wins against the Red Sox. Maybe they can finally make it all the way back to being the dominant team they were all the way into the middle of June, finish fast the way they so often start, not fade in the end. Maybe they can close out the American League East once and for all, and after the way the Orioles have done everything except gift-wrap it.
You know how it goes in Baseball New York, with some notable exceptions from the Mets, loud exceptions like 1969 and 1986 and even 2015: The Yankees suck up so much of the oxygen around here you wonder sometimes how the Mets even get enough to breathe, much less be a headline; wonder when they’re going to once again be something other than the Other Team in town, despite the chip-on-the-shoulder passion of their fans.
But here is the baseball fact of things as both the Yankees and Mets conclude their regular-season business, in the AL East and in the National League wild card race:
For nearly four months, the Mets have been the best team in baseball, and in New York. In New York, it happens to have been by a lot, to the point where you sometimes think an awful lot of New York baseball fans have been missing a really good movie while the Yankees have been more of a rollercoaster ride than The Cyclone at Coney Island.
It was on May 29 that the Mets season seemed to have bottomed out. They had just gotten rolled by the Dodgers at Citi Field, saw their record fall to 22-33, called a players-only meeting. They were 11 games under .500 after finishing last season 12 games under .500, and there was already a lot of thought about them being sellers instead of buyers at the trade deadline, not just regrouping, but throwing in the towel on another season.
Through Friday night, though, the Mets were 59-33 since then. Not just one of the best records in baseball. The best. After they pounded the Phillies 11-3, the beginning of the 16-game stretch that will decide their postseason hopes, Mets fans had a perfect right to imagine what everything would look like in the NL East if they’d picked things up just a little earlier.
“I never doubted we were a good team,” Carlos Mendoza told me not long ago, which means he was the one when the season started to look lost.
And over the same period, when the Mets did have the best record, the Yankees were 48-43. The Yankees beat the other Los Angeles team on May 29, the Angels, improving their record to 38-19 in the process, on their way to winning eight in a row and looking like they were the best team in the world.
But that record and the Mets record through their win over the Phillies on Friday and through Aaron Judge’s grand slam against the Red Sox, meant that over 90-plus games, the Mets were 10 ½ games better than the Yankees. Is May 29 an arbitrary starting point in the long season for this particular conversation? Sure. But it’s as good as any to talk about what’s happened since, just because the Yankees looked as good as they’ve looked all season at the time and the Mets looked their worst.
It’s also pretty interesting that after the Yankees did get all the way to 50-22 on June 14, they were then 36-40 through Friday night, which is nearly half-a-season of sub-.500 baseball for a team with its usual ambitions about winning it all. And when the Yankees were 50-22, the Mets were 31-37, even if we were starting to get proof of life by then. Since then, over three full months, the Mets have been 10-plus games better than the Yankees have been.
Again and again and again: The Mets might not make it. They still have five more games with the Phillies starting on Sunday, three with the Braves as they try to hold off the Braves for the third wild card spot in their league, they finish the regular season in Milwaukee against the Brewers, whose record going into Saturday’s game was exactly one-half game worse than the Yankees’. But through the first game of the Phillies series, they had won 12 of their last 14 and were playing their best ball at a time when they absolutely needed to do that.
In the process, they have become the most entertaining and appealing Mets team since the one that made it to the 2015 World Series, and that includes Buck Showalter’s 101-win team two years ago. That win against the Blue Jays on Wednesday afternoon, being no-hit for eight innings and then having Francisco Lindor start that improbable, six-run 9th inning with a rousing home run, truly was their season: Get knocked down, get back up.
But they’re the Mets. So even when Lindor has made himself an MVP candidate with this dazzling season of his, at the plate and in the field and even as an authentic clubhouse leader, he’s been doing all that as Judge has been blocking out the sun with all those home runs and Juan Soto has been aiding that endeavor, all year, by hitting the way he’s hit in front of No. 99. So what Lindor has been doing and the way he’s been playing has somehow been lost a little bit, and why we all have to hope that the lower back soreness that took him out of the Friday night’s victory over the Phillies isn’t serious, so he can finish the job that he himself really started once he went to leadoff in mid-May.
“I know there are a lot of great players doing a lot of great things for their teams this season,” Mendoza told me just the other day. “But what this man has done for this franchise is off the charts, and that means both on and off the field.”
Lindor and his teammates have given themselves and their fans more of a season than we ever thought they could have when things did bottom out. Have played like the best team in town for more than the last half of this season. Still might end up the Other Team again if they don’t make it. Doesn’t mean they haven’t been something to see.
SAYING YOU WON IS NOW ENOUGH, PLAYOFF WIN WAS BAD FOR BIG BLUE & ONLY TUA CAN DECIDE HIS FUTURE …
I knew Aaron Judge would hit another home run, I just knew it.
Hey, these would be the new rules for sports if they scored sports the way you apparently can a debate.
Even if you lose, you say you won.
So if the Giants lose to the Commanders or Sunday, or the Jets lose to the Titans, no worries.
Declare victory and move on.
They should just use the old Marx Brothers line:
Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?
There is one unchanging fact of baseball life around here, and it is this:
As soon as the Yankees win a few games, they really are halfway to the Canyon of Heroes.
It is without dispute now that the single worst victory in the history of the Giants may still turn out to be the one over the Vikings in the playoffs a couple of years ago.
Not just because it’s the one that got Daniel Jones paid the way it did.
That’s only part of it, as Giants fans know by now the way they know their screen names.
No, it’s because that one game, in Minneapolis, January of ’22, now has us into Year 6 of the Jones era.
And if he doesn’t start turning things around, even as early as Giants vs. Commanders, it’s way too easy to blame all of this on Dave Gettleman, the guy who drafted him.
What about the guys who keep propping him up?
Or trying to?
Jones didn’t sign himself to that big contract.
Does anybody remember Aaron Rodgers being outside the pocket for five seconds last Monday night?
Because I sure don’t.
Here is what the Jets don’t need, by the way:
They don’t need to lose a trap game on Sunday in Nashville and then have to turn around and try to stay out of what would look like a pretty deep 0-3 hole against the Patriots four days from now.
The reality of a violent sport like pro football is the case of Tua Tagovailoa in real time, and the most recent concussion he suffered on Thursday night against the Bills.
There is this rush now to say that he should retire, right now, on the spot, because of his concussion history.
But that is not for the media to decide, it’s not for his coaches to decide, it’s not for his teammates to decide.
It’s not even for his family to decide.
It’s his life, his career, his decision.
I hope for his sake that he makes the most informed one.
I actually thought Tom Brady did fine in his Fox debut last Sunday, even though you knew the long knives would be out for him.
That Max Scherzer contract is looking better and better for Uncle Steve, right?
I think the 49ers just ran for another first down.
John Smoltz said the other night, as a way of defending Anthony Volpe, that people forget what Derek Jeter looked like his first two years.
Well, maybe Smoltz forgot.
Because Jeter hit .314 as a rookie and ended up Rookie of the Year, then came back and hit .291 in Year 2.
When did the big political rallying cry become “Make Springfield (Ohio) Great Again?”