The yin and yang of New York baseball

As a lifelong Mets fan, I greatly enjoyed WNYC host Brian Lehrer's recent interview with author A.M. Gittlitz about which baseball team can rightfully claim to represent New York's working class. Gittlitz, who has somehow written an entire book on the topic, comes down firmly in the Mets' camp. But Lehrer, a Yankee fan, makes a credible case for his guys as well.

For reasons we'll get into further on, I'm not so sure myself. But what I have increasingly come to appreciate is that the two teams balance each other in a profound way that truly represents different sides of the very complicated character of New York City itself. And that is pretty extraordinary in its own way.

Historically, the Mets are scrappy. They're quirky. Sometimes they are a hot mess. Sometimes they win. But they endure regardless.

The Yankees are majestic. They are dominant, having won the World Series 27 times. (You might've heard this statistic before, if you've had a conversation with a Yankee fan longer than two minutes in duration.) For decades, they have been absurdly rich compared to their competitors.

The rest of the country tends to hate them. Usually, no one bothers to hate the Mets.

The Yankees are also eternal in a way that only baseball teams can be, since Major League Baseball is by far America's oldest big-time pro sports league.

The Mets were founded as an expansion team in 1962. That means there are still older fans walking around who watched them in their first few seasons, who have witnessed firsthand the entirety of the franchise's history up to present. It can be really fun to bend these people's ear, or sometimes vice versa, to hear their yarns about the team's early days.

There are no longer any such fans of the Yankees, a franchise founded in 1903. No one alive remembers their beginnings firsthand; the Yankees just always were.

In modern times, they have played a World Series against the Mets (and won it, of course). In the first half of the 20th century, they also played (and mostly won) multiple World Series against the two National League teams that pre-dated the Mets in New York — the Dodgers and the Giants, before they moved to California. And if the Mets someday cease to exist and are replaced by yet another National League team, that new team would certainly end up playing (and probably losing) a World Series to the Yankees. This is just how the universe works.

If you are inclined toward less flattering descriptions of the Yankees, as most non-Yankee fans are, you might even say they are baseball's equivalant of Thanos in the Marvel movies. The villain fond of telling anyone who will listen: "I am (dramatic pause) inevitable."

The last several seasons have put something of a twist on the old narratives, though. Most important, the biggest hedge-fund manager on Wall Street, Steve Cohen, bought the Mets in 2020. That means their owner is now (gasp!) richer than the Yankees' Steinbrenner family.

Cohen flexed that financial might last offseason when he lured Juan Soto, a major star, away from the Yankees on a record-breaking $765 million contract. It was the sort of thing that the Yankees usually do to other, poorer teams, not something that happens to them. And the Mets had certainly never done it to their cross-town rivals in 60-plus years of existence.

So, yeah. Even as a Mets fan, I'm not so sure they're the best avatar for the working class at this point.

That said, some old patterns do still hold up. Soto hit well in his first season, but the Mets as a whole underperformed, barely won more than half their games, and missed the playoffs. The Yankees won 94 games and still made the playoffs without Soto. Objectively, they had a far better year in 2025, even though they fell short of their perpetual goal to win yet another championship.

We're just a few weeks into the '26 season, so it's still too early to tell how either team will turn out this year. But I'm guardedly, perhaps irrationality, optimistic for now. Who knows, maybe the Mets can even get a rematch in that Subway Series. ☺️