The Difference Between Mets and Yankees Fans

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Mets were eliminated in the most catastropic "crash and burn" in recent sports history. (With the exception of the Yankees stunning loss in the 2004 ALCS to those despicable Sox)

As a Yankees fan, I've got to say that I can't help but gleam at this delightfully unexpected turn of events. We're going to the postseason after a tumultuous start, and the once "best in League" isn't even going to see October (on the field, anyway).

So, why the hatred? Shouldn't it be more like pity? If the situation were reversed, would Mets fans be obligated to feel the same way?

We're not so different, Mets and Yankees fans, on the surface. Both have legions of dedicated fans who sneer at their crosstown rivals with a mixture of sinistry and snobbery.

But there is a divide. While any witting fan on either side would never willingly cheer for the other team, the hatred is more one-sided. If the Mets are playing Boston in an interleague, I would obviously want the Mets to win to help the Yankees regular season standings. This gross imbalance does not exist for Mets fans when and if the Yankees play the Braves, who staunchly refuse to accept the superiority of the Bronx Bombers over the hapahazard Johnny-come-lately's.

So here it is:

Mets fans like to root for the underdog in general, and have a high penchant in all aspects of entertainment to gravitate towards the "less fortunate." Think the 'Opie and Anthony' fans of baseball - no matter how talentless, crapped together, or poorly organized or displayed they are, they are still better than those "soulless sell-out franchises who dump millions and billions into building teams like a piece of machinery rather than comraderie."

I'm sorry, but nothing says "corporate sellout" like rebuilding a stadium with a large national bank as your funding source - and then renaming said stadium after its project sponsor.

The problem with this mode of thinking is that the Mets are a New York club, and their payroll is nearly identical to that of the Yankees. Think about how unfair this is. Teams like the Yankees and the Red Sox are franchises that have been around since the inception of American baseball and yet teams like the Mets - who weren't even aroud until 1962 - still have the same privileges as those teams. I think it's deplorable that these fans - who denounce the methodology of team-building that the Yankees and Red Sox seem to follow - just EXPECT to have the same baseball experience as the "grandfathered" teams.

No, you have to BUILD that respect. Don't be "anti-establishment" and then expect to be taken as seriously when you have a team identical in payroll and sponsorship, and much less in esteem and talent. Don't hate it because it's huge. Just because it's popular doesn't mean it's bad. And just because it pulls in all that money doesn't mean it's bad. The Yankees, as an organization an a team, have worked so incredibly hard through each era of baseball history to get to the point that they're at. It doesn't just START that way. It takes time to build.

So stop your whining.

Another thing about Mets fans is that they're not really fans. They're more a league of people who blindly follow each other, united through a hatred of winning. Yeah, I took a couple of years off of baseball in the turn of the century, but pulled right back into in 2003 when I realized I'd been living in a two year cloud of smoke. Another thing - unless Mets fans have been dwelling under a sixteen mile pound of sewage for twenty years, I can't imagine that there were as many them in 2005 as there were in 2006 and 2007. I can't tell you how many fights there were at the bar the night the Yankees fell to Detroit in the '06 ALDS and the subsequent Mets win over the Dodgers.

I've never seen so much orange and blue in my life that night. Where did they come from? I'll tell you where. They came from a class of fans that happened to watch ESPN that night and they jumped on the bandwagon. Talking to a Mets fan while smoking a cigarette, he admitted he used to be a Yankees fan in 1986 and then got tired of it when they kept losing, so he jumped on the bandwagon as well.

Yankees fans, though, get denigrated. Why? Because we do expect wins knowing that we have a strong unit that was bought and paid in full? Why invest your time into a team not wanting them to win? What's wrong with having a little pride? And what's wrong with not coddling guys like A-Rod in 2006 when he was sucking ass despite having the "most lucrative contract" in sports history?

Absolutely nothing.

So there. We're going to the playoffs and the Mets aren't. And if it were the other way around, we wouldn't cry about it, either.