“There was no rush hour in New York that evening,” wrote Roger Angell about Game 6 of the 1986 National League Championship Series, being played by the Mets and Astros in Houston. “So many office workers stayed in their offices to follow the game that the buses and avenues in midtown looked half empty.” He mentions a New Jersey Transit train that just happened to have “signal difficulties” before a long tunnel that would have prevented the game’s radio transmission from coming through, but resumed service as soon as the Mets scored three runs in the top of the 16^th. A man running in Central Park was stopped by a “strange, all-surrounding noise…It came from everywhere around the Park, he said, and it wasn’t a shout or a roar but something closer to a sudden great murmuring of the city: the Mets had won.”

It may be hard for anyone under the age of 30 to believe, but there was a time that the Mets, not the Yankees, were New York’s team. The Mets were younger, more entertaining, and better. That hasn’t been the case, at least not the “better” part, for 20 years. That may be changing.

Continue reading It’s Time for the Mets to Take Back New York →