Maybe the difference this time was that we weren’t expecting it. The calendar year 2022 had been such a joyride for New York baseball no matter which side of the Great Divide you plant your flag. The Mets and Yankees combined for 200 wins. Aaron Judge chased down Roger Maris. Trumpets blared every time the bullpen gate opened and Edwin Diaz began to jog into the ninth inning.
It may not have ended well, but all of that happened once summer gave way to autumn, when the Mets gagged away first place and then their season, when the Yankees barely survived the Guardians and were then resoundingly roasted by the Astros. But baseball is the summer game, and that summer of ’22 was an endless parade of bliss, every day, every game, Mets or Yankees, Bronx or Queens.
We figured we’d be getting more of that in 2023.
We got none of that in 2023.
We got a Mets season that started miserably when Diaz blew out his knee, and kept getting worse, culminating with a midseason garage sale. We got a Yankees season that was cruising along merrily until injuries began to pile up and the whole season was reduced to “Gerrit Cole/Then four days of coal.”
It was the first time since 2014 when both teams finished out of the playoff money, and even though that ’14 slog was tough to digest we still had the noble farewell tour of Derek Jeter for the 84-78 Yankees and we still had the emergence of the electric arm of Jacob deGrom for the 79-83 Mets.
Quick: Name your favorite moment of 2023.
Anyone?
Anyone?
“It was a tough thing to get through,” Pete Alonso says.
“It’s a reminder that you never want to go through another season like that one,” Judge says.
And so 2024 dawns with precious little carry-over momentum. Part of that is the hangover effect of ’23, when after a while fans of both teams couldn’t wait for the season to end.
(Even though, after about three weeks of football season, those same folks were already asking each other, “How many days till pitchers and catchers?” It’s a reminder that however tough baseball season might get around here, it still beats the football seasons we’ve gotten year after year.)
And part of that is … well, look. Spring is the home office for hope. Everyone can win 105 games in spring. Everyone can make parade plans in spring. But for the locals … well, maybe it’s just the exacting standards New York has for its ballclubs. There just seems to be a preponderance of caution this time around, backed by a soundtrack of The Who crooning, “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”
The entire Yankees mantra this spring was a simple one: Keep everyone healthy, keep the team in one piece, let’s see how the full roster fares against the Orioles and the Blue Jays and the Rays. But Cole is already out until June. Judge has been battling an abdominal issue. DJ LeMahieu hurt his foot and will not make Opening Day. Jasson Dominguez, electrifying in his 31 at-bats last summer, won’t be back until summer.
The Mets? They’ve made it clear that goal No. 1 is building sustainable success, and so it sure feels like that’s mitigated the possibility for immediate success. They feel a bat or two short. They feel an arm or two short. You hear a lot of “Well, if everything goes right …” from Mets fans, and that’s never the most reliable course because in baseball things usually start to go wrong on Opening Day. If not sooner (see: Kodai Senga).
So there’s that.
But there’s also this:
When the Mets host the Brewers at Citi Field on Thursday, when the Yankees open up in Houston three hours later, the truest of the true believers will be there, and they will do what they do — believe. If it feels like a long time since the city needed to hit the baseball refresh button, it has. It was 2014. Maybe we were just due for what we got a year ago. Maybe this really can feel more like the glorious summer of ’22 than the grim summer of ’23.
Maybe.
It’s Opening Day. Anything really is possible.
We need this one, Mets fan or Yankees fan, Bronx or Queens. We need this one.
