The Battle of Who Could Care Less

What are the stakes in a Subway Series where both sets of partisans would just as soon not?

The Mets and Yankees have not too dissimilar records (the Mets are bad in a meh way, the Yankees are just meh), are both mired near the bottom of their divisions, and have both stumbled through the summer with their fans shaking their heads and muttering that everything about them is just … off. Injuries, bad luck, bad decisions, bad vibes … like I said, just off.

If you’re me, you show up for the game with a sense of duty … and then find that a game with no stakes can be kind of refreshing.

I was watching with my mom in her new tower lair overlooking Brooklyn Heights and New York Harbor, which has the added attraction of giving you plenty to look at if the baseball becomes too painful and you need to avert your eyes. Which, for once, didn’t happen — the Mets weren’t exactly flawless, but they looked a lot more like the on-paper version of the 2023 Mets than the shabby, smudgy copy of a copy of a copy of a copy we’ve been stuck with. Justin Verlander was a reasonable facsimile of his former All-Star self, Jeff McNeil and Pete Alonso and Daniel Vogelbach all had non-miserable nights in mostly miserable seasons, and we even got an unlikely hero or two. (If you saw Dominic Leone as the solution to the problem he was handed, well, I’ll have what you’re having.)

Meanwhile, the Yankees looked borderline hopeless, with all three outfielders playing as if mildly concussed, wearing cement shoes or both — I was honestly a little worried that former Met Billy McKinney was going to hurt himself or a teammate stumbling around out there. There were a lot of no-name bats, some bad relief … in short, the Yankees looked a lot like that other New York team nobody in the city wants to talk about.

Speaking of things nobody wants to talk about, my mom and I had a moment of shared inattention and so wound up watching the TBS telecast — we were startled late in the proceedings when the TBS crew showed the occupied SNY booth, but stayed where we were broadcast-wise because hey, everybody knows you don’t fuck with a winning streak. Honestly, TBS wasn’t a terrible accidental Plan B: There was a lot of gee, the Mets have been inexplicably bad, but that’s been true in these humble precincts too. On the other hand there was also a lot of trade talk, which I’m already heartily sick of. I guess that counts as another silver lining: For most of the night I was thinking about how it would be nice to beat the Yankees, instead of wondering which mildly useful Mets will get helicoptered off the embassy roof before next Tuesday.

There will be time enough for that, but one more night of simpler fare sounds maybe sort of not so bad right now. Hey, it would be nice to beat the Yankees. It worked out for one night; let’s give it another go, fellas.