Sports: Subway Series

Subway Series

Husband vs. wife. Parents vs. children. New Yorkers are in a fanatical frenzy over Yankees-Mets.

By MARC TOPKIN

NEW YORK -- The matchup is so huge, the stakes so high, the spotlight so bright, the stage so grand. The Subway Series matchup between the Mets and the Yankees is so big, it's actually turned New York into a small town.

You see it on the streets, you see it in the tabloids, and you'll see it on the Empire State Building, which will be lit in team colors on an alternating basis.

New York may be the City That Never Sleeps, but this week it has become the City That Roots, Roots, Roots for One of the Home Teams. There is a fervor and fanaticism in this rivalry, as much as in any college football showdown or family feud, that has spread throughout the city and extends far beyond the game on the field.

"It's going to split up a few families, I think," Yankees manager Joe Torre said.

New Yorkers are standing in lines for hours to buy merchandise, they're paying obscene prices for tickets, they're ordering party food in record amounts, and they're pulling for one team -- or the other.

"It's the kind of thing where you're not arguing with people who live 700 miles away," said Bill Shannon, longtime official scorer for both teams. "You're arguing with the person at the next desk, or in the same bed. If you're for the Yankees and your wife is from Long Island, you're in big trouble. It's that kind of thing."

There is no doubt about the passion of this rivalry, and it is deeper among the fans than the players. It's the first all-New York matchup in 44 years, and it might be the last for just as long, or forever. There have been spring-training games, Mayor's Trophy exhibition games, and, more recently, interleague games to provide a glimpse of what it's all about, but this is something else.

"It'll be nuts," said comedian, actor and major Yankees fan Billy Crystal. "It'll be insane, I don't know whatever you have to take to calm down for the next 10 days, but take it. It's going to be wild.

"And, I would say, pick your cab driver very judiciously. If you're a Yankee guy and you get a Mets driver and he's cranky sitting on those beads all day, you don't know what you're going to get. That's my big warning."

Normally, a politician would seek a politically correct position in the middle of something like this. But New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani makes no secret of his affection for the Yankees -- and urged others to make their feelings known.

Speaking at a city-sponsored rally Friday at Bryant Park, which was divided in half by metal barricades to keep the fans apart, Giuliani took out a hat that featured the logos of both teams.

"This," he said, "is a coward's hat. ... You have to pledge your allegiance. You root for the Yankees, or you root for the Mets, and that's it."

Actually, that shouldn't be hard. "I've never met anybody who likes both teams," said Dwight Gooden, who has pitched for both.

There is more than just a difference in leagues, and in ballparks, and in personnel. There are different cultures.

The Yankees are the blue-bloods, what with the 25 world championships they love to remind people they have, and their fans react as such.

"Being for the Yankees is like pulling for Microsoft," said actor Tim Robbins, a native New Yorker and longtime Mets fan. "It's easy to support the Yankees. It's not so easy to support the Mets."

Born in 1962, the Mets were a welcome replacement for the fans abandoned when the Giants and Dodgers fled west after the 1957 season. They were bad, very bad, at the beginning, but they became the darlings of the underdogs, of the suburbs, of the proletarians. "There was something very charming about the early Mets teams," Robbins said.

There are many subplots and theories to this series, and one is that the Yankees, because of who they are and what they've done, have much more to lose.

The stately New York Times was concerned enough to run a story, complete with a photo of a bottle of the anti-depressant Prozac in a baseball glove, explaining that some die-hard fans were rooting against such a matchup because losing "would be too much to bear."

Could that be why George Steinbrenner has been so uncharacteristically quiet this week? (Or maybe he's just trying to decide how many people to fire if they do lose.)

Yankees general manager Brian Cashman said he takes "the other perspective -- that there's a lot to win."

The fans are certainly treating it that way. "This is the most competitive city in the world," said Karen Ranzer, a fan on the Mets side of the fence at Friday's rally.

That competition -- CIVIL WAR, screamed the New York Post -- is being played out in many scenes. But perhaps none more ironic than for the Mets-backing students at the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary school near Shea Stadium in Queens. Their principal is Sister Marguerite Torre, whose brother happens to manage the Yankees.

It's brother-brother, teacher-student, mother/father-son/daughter, worker-boss, tenant-landlord ... "I wouldn't be surprised if there's fights at work during the day, people going at each other's throats," Yankees first baseman Tino Martinez said.

In an effort to maintain calm at the stadiums, the city will deploy more than 1,200 police officers, 10 times the usual amount, at each game.

But the ballparks aren't the only potential places for excitement. At the world-famous Carnegie Deli, they plan to use one room for Mets fans and other for Yankees backers. "We have to divide them," vice president Sandy Levine said. "We still have to run a business here."

Walk-in traffic and catering orders have been so strong, Levine said, "it's like a Super Bowl happening for seven days."

Business is also booming at Mickey Mantle's, the pinstriped pub on the south side of Central Park. Most of their customers figure to be Yankees supporters, but manager Stacey Silverman said they're planning to allow Mets fans in. "It's a touchy subject," she said.

It is an interesting phenomenon, this Subway Series, with a definite New York touch. There are tickets supposedly being scalped for $5,000 apiece, there are huge lines just to get into the team's Manhattan stores, there are signs and banners and made-for-TV interview subjects. And there are two twenty-something guys standing a few feet apart just outside Grand Central Station, one selling shirts that read, "YANKS S---," the other offering ones that read, "METS S---."

As divided as New Yorkers may be over the teams, they are unified in their fervid interest. As for the theory that fans around the rest of the country don't care?

"If they tune in to watch Dick Clark on New Year's Eve, they should watch this," said David Cone, who has pitched for both teams. "This is as much about New York as New Year's Eve."