NEW YORK — Did you feel the ground shake Sunday night? Did New York suddenly tilt from the Bronx down to Queens?
For decades, Yankees fans scoffed at Mets fans, mocking them just for loving their little team in Flushing. The big, corporate Yankees sucked up most of the oxygen in New York, and if there was any left over, only then were the scrappy Mets allowed to breathe in the exhaust.
That all changed overnight, just as Steve Cohen, the newish multibillionaire owner of the Mets franchise, promised it would. The Mets took Juan Soto from the Yankees.
Soto played only one season in the Bronx, but he helped the team get to the World Series for the first time in 15 years. And then he did what no superstar, top-flight free agent had ever done in the past: He spurned the Yankees to join the Mets for more money. He accepted the Mets’ staggering offer of $765 million for a 15-year contract.
It definitely stunned the Yankees and their devoted supporters, who have absolutely no experience in losing out, at least when it comes to money.
“This is really crushing,” said Jeremy Senderowicz, a lawyer and lifelong Yankees fan from Yonkers. “The Yankees usually get the player they are going after. I naively thought it would happen again.”
Oh, the indignity of losing out to the Mets, who, like that younger sibling bursting into adolescence, finally won at playground one-on-one. Was it a fluke? Or did this portend a new reality?
When Cohen took command of the Mets in 2020 as the richest owner in Major League Baseball, the team was coming off a decade of paltry spending after its previous owners fell victim to Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Mets fans eagerly anticipated the moment when Uncle Steve, as he became known, would bring that wealth to bear in a way that would not only help their team but would stick it to the Yankees and their haughty fans.
It took four years, but Sunday, Soto’s defection seemed to signal a sea change in New York’s usually one-sided baseball rivalry. John Minetti, a Mets fan who owns coffee shops in Westchester County, perused his collection of Mets hats Monday morning, and then decided it would look like gloating if he wore one to work, especially to his customers who root for the Yankees.
“I thought it would be too obnoxious to do that today,” he said. “But I’m very excited. After all these years of losing players to the Yankees, it’s nice to see the shoe on the other foot.”
$1 million per homer? $27,000 a point? $229 per second? Sports is loaded with money oddities.
Asked if it meant the Mets were now the dominant team in New York, Minetti was cautious.
“Not yet,” he said. “But the pendulum is swinging our way.”
It’s hard to convey to the non-baseball fan just how unnatural this feels. It is as if Staten Island stole all the art galleries from SoHo, or the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway became a giant bike lane.
Some on the losing end were less eloquent in their disappointment, more passionate in their disgust. Actor Nick Turturro, a well-known Yankees supporter, embodied the anger felt by some fans when he grabbed a baseball bat and recorded a menacing, profanity-filled video lashing out at Soto for selling his soul by going to the Mets. Another fan tore his Soto T-shirt on camera.
In the past, when the Yankees wanted the top superstar free agent, they usually got him — and if they didn’t, well, the Mets certainly didn’t either. The Yankees strutted down the aisle with great free agents such as Catfish Hunter, Reggie Jackson, Dave Winfield, Jason Giambi, Mike Mussina, Hideki Matsui, C.C. Sabathia and Gerrit Cole, while Mets fans had to see the upside of Kevin Appier and Jason Bay.
“Most of the time, the Mets didn’t even want to get in the ring with the Yankees, let alone knock ’em out,” said Bobby Valentine, the Mets’ manager from 1996 to 2002. “Now they are in another weight class.”
What made it even more surprising is that the Yankees’ offer was very close to the Mets’ winning bid. They promised Soto $760 million over 16 years — more than they had ever offered to a player. But it was not enough, because Cohen had decided this was the moment to dig in and really go after a player, and nothing would stop him. The sense in the negotiations was that if the Yankees offered $770 million, Cohen would have offered $775, and so on until he had his man.
And that is why some Yankees fans were actually OK with it all. They wonder if even Soto is worth that much money. After all, Soto was third in the voting for the American League’s MVP, which his Yankees teammate Aaron Judge won. Soto has never led the league in home runs, doubles or runs batted in, but the Yankees’ offer to him was more than twice what the team committed to Judge.
“Absolutely ridiculous,” said Edgar Bayrami, a 70-year-old Yankees fan from Queens. A general contractor familiar with running a business, Bayrami thinks that spending so much on one player makes no sense.
“His talent level is very high, but he’s just not worth that kind of money,” he said. “Now they can get a couple of guys and make that team gel. If it were up to me, I would have let him go, too.”
But for many Mets fans, Sunday night was euphoric. Ruby Thomas, a health care executive in Manhattan, went to sleep early but woke up when someone on the street yelled, “Juan Soto!” She looked at her phone and exclaimed to herself, “Yes, we got him.” Then she, too, started yelling Soto’s name out the window.
“I couldn’t get back to sleep, I was so excited,” she said. “This means so much to Mets fans. Now we’re the heavyweights in New York.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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