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TagsBY DAN GRAZIANO
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
If you're a baseball fan in New Jersey, you've become grumpy, and for good reason. The Mets keep choking away the division. The Yankees missed the playoffs last year. Each team has a gorgeous new ballpark, but you need a third mortgage to afford the tickets. If you're a Phillies fan in South Jersey, things are good. But for the Mets and Yankee fans that make up most of the state's baseball-fan population, the past few years haven't exactly been the best of times.
Except...have you looked at the standings lately?
The Yankees, for the first time since 2006, are in first place all by themselves. The Mets have had so many injuries they could film an encore season of ER in their clubhouse, but they've been trading first place with the Phillies for about a week and a half now in spite of it all.
And sure, it's early, but it's not THAT early anymore. It's June 1. By now, the baseball season has started to give us some sense of how its long, hot summer might shape up. And from the looks of things, we're looking at pennant races in the Bronx and in Queens, and a couple of teams that might just give us more thrills than we thought they would.Start with the Yankees. The story of the season so far has been the new Stadium, how they can't sell the ridiculously priced $2,500 seats behind home plate and the embarrassing fact that any fly ball anybody hits to right field (no matter how hard they hit it) seems to go over the fence. These are unfortunate matters for a team that prides itself on the dignity of its image, but they're not having much of a deleterious effect on the on-field product.
Whether anybody's buying those seats or not, the Yankees are still a team that's going to spend its money to make sure it fields a good team. The most recent proof of this comes in the form of free agents CC Sabathia and Mark Teixeira, each of whom overcame a shaky April and finished May on a tear. Teixeira, in particular, has looked every bit the monster slugger for which the Yankees shelled out $180 million this past winter. Since cleanup hitter Alex Rodriguez returned from his hip surgery, Teixeira has taken off, hitting .371 with 11 home runs and 29 RBI in 22 games.
And the hitter-friendly ballpark, which has yielded more home runs in the first 23 games of its history than any big-league park ever has? It actually may work for the home team. The Yankees, who played shorthanded (sans A-Rod) for the first month, are 14-9 at home. Of the 87 home runs hit at the new Yankee Stadium, the Yankees have hit 45. With sluggers like Teixeira, Rodriguez, Hideki Matsui and Nick Swisher in the middle of the lineup, the Yankees are a team that likes to win with home runs. And when the rotation's at full strength, it'll feature strikeout pitchers Sabathia, A.J. Burnett and Joba Chamberlain as well as groundball pitchers Chien-Ming Wang and Andy Pettitte. The Yankees may well be built to play in a homer haven.
The Mets are built for their ballpark too. Pitchers such as Johan Santana, John Maine and Livan Hernandez are fly ball pitchers suited for success in cavernous park like Citi Field. Hernandez in particular seems to relish pitching there, since he can throw his 80-mph fastball for a strike and not fear that his opponent will hit it over the fence.
The Mets' big power hitters, Carlos Beltran and David Wright, don't have slugger egos that will negatively affect their psyches if their home run numbers drop. Beltran works every day on a curveball drill in the batting cage that trains him to hit the ball the other way. The Mets are fine with the idea of being a doubles/triples offense, and once Jose Reyes is healthy again that'll work even better.
But the most impressive thing about this year's Mets so far is the appearance of a surprising toughness that was clearly missing the past two Septembers. Carlos Delgado gets injured? Gary Sheffield comes out of nowhere to have a big May. Brian Schneider's out? Omir Santos comes up from the minors and goes from fill-in catcher to game-winning Fenway Park hero.
New closer Francisco Rodriguez is the emblem of the 2009 Mets and what is so far different about them. It may not always be pretty, but Rodriguez gets the save, usually because of a borderline insane refusal to allow himself not to. These Mets aren't always pretty, but they win more than they lose. And once they're whole again, they'll be better for having survived this tough time in such a gritty way.
Yes, gritty. The Mets. There's a long way to go, for sure, in the 2009 baseball season. But the Mets and the Yankees have so far made it look as if they're going to give us all a fun summer ride.
Dan Graziano is a sports writer for newjerseynewsroom.com and FanHouse.com.
The Phillies are cranking along just fine, thank you.