Editor’s note: The 2000 World Series between the Yankees and Mets began 20 years ago Wednesday. On the anniversary, we look back at the series that captivated the city.
The idea had always been intertwined with fantasy, tinged by nostalgia. Nothing has ever made New Yorkers of a certain generation more wistful than the term “Subway Series.” It conjures images of stickball and porch ball and endless debate: Willie, Mickey, or the Duke?
It could immediately press a rewind button, render the world black and white where everyone liked Ike, conjure images of Elvis from the waist up on “Ed Sullivan.” The subways would forever cost only a nickel, the newspapers a couple of pennies, bleacher seats at Yankee Stadium, Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds two bits.
It led to some flights of fancy. On March 22, 1962, at St. Petersburg’s Al Lang Stadium, which had once been the spring home of the Yankees and now housed the expansion Mets, Richie Ashburn’s single in the bottom of the ninth gave the Mets a 4-3 win over the Yankees in the first exhibition game between the teams.
The Mets showered Casey Stengel with champagne, provided by the team’s giddy owner, Joan Payson. When Stengel arrived in the press room he was greeted by veteran, grizzled newsmen who broke into applause, and Stengel winked and said, “We won’t beat them every time, you know.” Then the whole Mets team went out to dinner, on Payson’s dime.
For years, this was how it seemed this “rivalry” would be contested: in meaningless games, under harmless circumstances, nothing much on the table except for nebulous “bragging rights.” From 1963 until 1984, the teams competed for the Mayor’s Trophy, but all that did was underscore how much of a non-rivalry this really was.
For the teams, across most of the first 35 or so years they shared the city, seemed destined to forever exist at opposite baseball extremes: one up, the other down. One ascendant, the other flatlining. The games drew well but mostly they afforded the struggling team a chance to swipe one sliver of glory out of endless, empty summers.
In the first, June 20, 1963, Stengel managed like Game 7 of the World Series and his Metsies — coming off a 120-loss season, in the midst of piling on 111 more — beat the two-time defending champion Yanks, 6-2, in front of 52,430 in The Bronx. Afterward, Mets fans stormed the field.
“YIPEEEEE!” declared The Post’s back page.
Seven years later it was the Mets who ruled baseball and the Yankees who were begging for attention, and while the ’70 Yankees won 93 games that counted, the one they celebrated most was one that didn’t: a 9-4 drubbing of the champion Mets Aug. 17 at Yankee Stadium that inspired the Yanks’ Fritz Peterson to crow: “Who’s amazin’ now?!”
Even when the teams started to meet for real, interleague play introduced in 1997, there was always a final layer of urgency missing from the proceedings. The Mets won the first meeting, 6-0, behind a shutout from Dave Mlicki. The Yankees won the bulk of the games that followed the next few years, 11 of the first 18 played through the 2000 regular season.
In ’99, the teams had hinted at a potential matchup, but the Mets wound up digging an 0-3 NLCS hole for themselves against the Braves and though that series ended in Game 6 heartbreak, no real momentum was allowed to build because of the hopeless deficit.
A year later was different. A year later, the Mets and Yankees won their division series in memorable fashion over a pair of Bay Area counterparts — the Mets beating the Giants when Bobby Jones threw a one-hitter to close out Game 4, the Yankees drubbing the A’s with six first-inning runs to make an extreme point in Game 5.
Then, the Mets overwhelmed the Cardinals in five games in the NLCS, the final out coming when Timo Perez danced an anticipatory jitterbug before catching the final out of Game 5. Later that night, in a quiet moment in his office, Mets manager Bobby Valentine would admit, “I’m not sure I should want the Yankees to win, because they’re some team. But, my gosh, wouldn’t a Subway Series be something?”
Twenty-four hours later, the Yankees closed out the Mariners in Game 6 of the ALCS. Trailing 4-3 in the seventh, David Justice crushed a three-run homer off Arthur Rhodes into the Stadium’s upper deck. On the radio, broadcaster Michael Kay’s voice elevated an octave or three, echoing millions of New York baseball fans as he cried, “GET YOUR TOKENS READY! YOU MIGHT BE BOARDING THE SUBWAY!”
Four days later — Oct. 21, 2000, 20 years ago Wednesday — we would. We would stuff the subway. We would cram the Deegan and the GW Bridge. There would be 55,913 of us at Yankee Stadium to watch Don Larsen throw a ceremonial pitch to Yogi Berra — 44 years and 13 days after Larsen’s perfect game had highlighted the most recent Subway Series — and to see Andy Pettitte throw a 93 mph fastball to Perez, low, for Ball 1.
The wait was over. The dream was real. And it would be just as spectacular as we’d ever hoped it would be.
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October 21, 2020 at 06:00PM
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Subway Series stands alone in baseball lore 20 years later - New York Post
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