Fennelly: New York Mets Fans Were Born Out of Hatred for Yankees

As we close out another disappointing football season here in New York, I will be focusing on baseball mainly going forward. I cover the Mets (a team that I am one year older than) and there’s a good reason for that.

Many who know me as a longtime member of the New York Giants’ media community wonder how a Giants guy could not be a Yankees’ guy. 

Easy. Here’s the history. 

Baseball in New York was once a three-team dynamic. The Giants were in upper Manhattan, the Dodgers in Brooklyn and the American League upstarts – the Yankees – landed in the South Bronx in the 1920s after spending their first two decades in Manhattan. (Quick note: the NFL Giants were commonly called the New York Football Giants as to not confuse them with the original team that had the name). 

As great as the Yankees would become, New York was a National League town. When the Giants and Dodgers left for the West Coast in 1958, there was a huge void to be filled as their combined fan bases vastly outnumbered the Yankees’. The majority of the fans left in the lurch by the moves did not become Yankee fans by default as the urban legend suggests. In fact, just the opposite happened.

These were diehard fans. You didn’t change allegiances that easily. Some fans followed their old teams remotely though the newspapers and television while others were too brokenhearted and bitter to follow at all. 

For four years, the National League was absent in New York. Old Giant and Dodger fans banned together to root against the Yankees rather than for their old teams, who not only abandoned them, they couldn’t have moved further away. 

In 1962, the Mets came along. They were the sorriest expansion team to ever hit the four major sports until the Tampa Bay Buccaneers joined the NFL in 1976. 

With the Yankees and the South Bronx in decline and the Mets moving to a brand new stadium in Queens, the New York baseball pendulum swung back to the National League again. 

The Mets were the galvanizing force that brought Giant and Dodger fans, who were historically violent rivals, together. They became Met fans, and their kids did, too. 

I was one of those kids. My father was a rabid Giant fan. His favorite players were Mell Ott and Carl Hubbell. He loved Willie Mays and Monte Irvin and Bobby Thomson. He hated the Dodgers and the Yankees. 

When I four years old, I got to see my first game in person. Shea Stadium 1965. The World’s Fair was raging on across Roosevelt Avenue but I could care less. There was baseball going on. Who cared that the Mets stunk? They were our team and for the last fifty-five years, I’ve stuck by them. 

Many talk about 1986, which was great, but for me 1969 will be the year. The Mets had been perennial doormats for their first seven years of existence. Then, a miracle happened. For a third grader who ate and slept sports, the Mets winning the 1969 World Series was the greatest thing to ever happen.

Then the Knicks won the NBA Championship. That was a close second, but the Mets winning was still tops to me. 

So, as we go forward this season and beyond you’ll know your’e getting a warehouse of experience from me in my Met reporting here at ESM. I don’t know of any other blogger or writer covering the team has been a fan as long as I have. 

I hope they give me something uplifting to write about.