THIS is what the Subway Series means to Bernie Williams: “I’m just glad we don’t have to fly anywhere.”
This is what the Subway Series means to Paul O’Neill: “The World Series is what we all strive for. This is what we work all year for. How much can you hype a World Series?”
Too much, Paul, way too much.
This is what the Subway Series means to the fans: Everything.
In one sense, the series of seven baseball games between the Yankees and Mets that begins tonight at Yankee Stadium will be just another World Series.
But in another sense, this a World Series like no other, at least if you were born after 1956.
It hasn’t happened like this in a long, long time, 44 years to be exact, a period that spans nine U.S. presidents and the advent of free agency.
The world has changed tremendously since the last time two New York teams played a series of games in October. So too have all professional sports, but none so much as baseball, and with it, the World Series.
Teams don’t hate each other the way they once did. Today’s rivals are tomorrow’s teammates. This afternoon’s opponent is tonight’s dinner companion.
Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, take note: Can you imagine Phil Rizzuto and Pee Wee Reese chatting on the infield while their respective teams brawled around them?
These days, the players leave that stuff to the fans.
Years ago, Leo Durocher may have brawled with Charlie Dressen and Carl Furillo, but these days, Jeter and Mike Piazza are more likely to double-date than duke it out.
The game, and the players, have gone soft. It is the fans who have gotten tougher.
These days, rivalries exist mainly between the fans, not the players.
And why not? Between the two teams, there is only one New York City native, and that is John Franco.
And he spent most of his career in Cincinnati, where he was a teammate of … Paul O’Neill. The Yankees’ David Cone and Dwight Gooden, of course, were formerly Mets of distinction. Al Leiter, the Mets’ Game 1 starter, began his career with the Yankees and cried when they traded him away.
Nobody is married to a team or a city anymore. That, too, is left to the fans.
To the players, this is a seven-game series, and perhaps less, that may result in some of them collecting a much-coveted piece of jewelry next year.
But many of them, particularly Piazza, Williams, Jeter and Cone, will play for less money in the World Series than they do during the regular season.
Nobody, with the exception of rookies, plays the World Series for money anymore.
In the purest sense of sport, they are playing it for the glory. And the fun.
Not so the fans.
Yankee fans disdain Mets fans. Mets fans abhor Yankee fans. Some people are afraid to wear their team’s colors to the other team’s ballpark. Some go the other way, and wear them as a badge of honor, or a show of defiance.
I even heard some talk-radio blowhards the other day blowing hard about which fans “had more to lose” on the outcome of a Met-Yankee World Series.
The truth is, no one has anything to lose, and everything to gain.
Because this so-called Subway Series could be that rare World Series in which there is no loser.
Stripped of the silliness of blind team loyalties and the pathos of vicarious thrills, a Yankee-Met World Series really should bring this town together, bound by a common love: Great baseball.
And yet, the only prediction I can make with any certainty is that over the next seven games, no player in a Met uniform will be cheered in Yankee Stadium and no player in a Yankee uniform will be cheered at Shea.
Believe me, none of the players – not even Piazza or Roger Clemens – hate each other as much as some Met and Yankee fans I have spoken to, seen interviewed on TV, or listened to spouting mindless venom on the radio.
“I just hope nobody gets hurt,” said Franco, who will not allow his 8-year-old son, J.J., to wear his Met jersey at Yankee Stadium, just to be safe. “I hope the fans remember it’s just a game.”
Just a game, huh? That’s easy for Franco to say.
He only has to play in it.
For the people who have to watch, the Subway Series is more than a game.
It’s life and death.
It’s also sad and foolish, because there’s really only one thing this Subway Series should be.
Fun.
Great fun, not only for the teams playing in it, but for the fans paying to watch it.