After Bobby Valentine’s brief sojourn to the Far East in 1995, a small miracle was required for him to return to the major leagues. That miracle occurred when another manager was somehow judged less controversial than him.

Dallas Green’s tough-nosed approach was deemed a crucial element in cleaning out the Mets’ clubhouse of its complacent malcontents and borderline psychopaths. He was able to wring enough production out of Bobby Bonilla and Bret Saberhagen to convert them into trade bait, and was praised for making the most out of what he had on his rosters, which was not much. In his first two years at the helm, the Mets’ fortunes improved, albeit at a snail’s place.

Then the team took yet another misstep. Starved for attention, the Mets promoted a trio of hard-throwing pitchers from their farm system in 1995. Young hurlers Jason Isringhausen, Bill Pulsipher, and Paul Wilson were dubbed Generation K by the team’s marketing wizards, a play on the Generation X label that was already several years out of style by that point. The moniker begged to be mocked, as if the pitchers would speed to the mound on skateboards while dressed in flannel shirts.

The belly laughs induced by the phrase “Generation K” notwithstanding, it was easy to see why the Mets expected big things from the trio. All three pitchers were ranked among the best prospects in baseball, promising a bright future for a franchise that traditionally built itself around pitching. But the Mets failed to recognize one crucial flaw in this plan. These young hurlers had shouldered considerable workloads in the minors, and neither Isringhausen nor Pulsipher were babied in any way when promoted to the big leagues in the middle of the 1995 season.

Generation K’s workload gave the Mets no cause for alarm because it wouldn’t have alarmed any front office of this era. The belief that innings limits might help prolong a young pitcher’s career was not yet accepted gospel in Major League Baseball. In the mid-1990s, pitch counts were not tallied like the ticks of a time bomb. The Mets were far from the only team of the time that worked its pitching prospects harder than they should have, and they were far from the only team who would watch promising young arms lost to the surgeon’s knife. The Mets were, however, the only team proclaiming to possess the future of pitching and daring to call them (snicker) Generation K.

Bill Pulsipher’s 1995 season ended three weeks prematurely when he began feeling some ominous elbow pain. He continued to feel it in spring training the following year and submitted himself to an MRI that revealed torn elbow ligaments. Tommy John surgery knocked him out for all of the following season. Jason Isringhausen and Paul Wilson both made it through 1996 somehow, though each of them struggled in a way typical of young pitchers facing major league batters for the first time. Fans and the media had not been promised rookies with potential working through growing pains. They had been promised the building blocks of another dynasty. Generation K’s failure to be phenoms right out of the gate proved a PR disaster.

By the end of August, the Mets were lodged well under .500 yet again. Dallas Green was already on the hot seat when he publicly criticized the team’s premature promotion of Generation K. “These guys don’t really belong in the big leagues,” he insisted. “It’s that simple. It sounds very harsh and very negative. But what have they done to get here?”

It was hard to argue otherwise. Pulsipher’s injury and a combined 9-22 record for Isringhausen and Wilson proved Green’s case. But it was one thing for the press to laugh at the Generation K storyline. It was another thing entirely for the manager to do so.

Green was dismissed with 31 games left in the 1996 season and Bobby Valentine was called up from his post managing the triple-A Norfolk Tides to take his place. Upon receiving the news, Valentine sprinted out of the stadium in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, where the Tides were in the middle of the game, and rented a car to make the long drive down to his new home in Queens. Once he got within range of New York’s sports talk radio station, WFAN, Valentine tuned in to see if word of his hiring had leaked out yet.

It had. As Valentine drove toward Shea Stadium he heard an endless string of callers moaning about the new Mets manager. Valentine’s an idiot. How can the Mets do this? Bad decision… He subjected himself to two hours of this masochism before shutting the radio off.

Fans weren’t the only ones skeptical of the choice. Many in the press credited Dallas Green with expunging the Met clubhouse of the stink of 1993 and lamented the loss of the straight shooter. Though both men were baseball lifers, Green was seen as the tobacco juice-spattered old school skipper while Valentine came off as his spiritual opposite: worldly, sophistic, cerebral. His stint with the Rangers was considered undistinguished at best, while his time with the Chiba Lotte Marines was deemed a demerit by writers who viewed Nomo-mania and the influx of Japanese players that followed with xenophobic suspicion, the kind that resurfaces whenever America’s pastime receives an injection of enthusiasm from a new corner of the world.

Amid this tense atmosphere, Bobby Valentine dared confess he’d gained a different perspective on how to play the game during his short time in the NPB, which was the last thing his critics wanted to hear. Valentine’s reliance on technology played as equally foreign to traditional sportswriters, who couldn’t understand why he asked his pitchers to watch video of opposing hitters during batting practice rather than shag flies. When Valentine admitted he learned Japanese using a computer program and developed a liking for the internet because of it, the scribes didn’t bother to contain their laughter. In the mid-1990s, the emerging online world was the exclusive province of nerds, not to be taken seriously by anyone connected with sports. What kind of manager would think he could learn anything about baseball from the internet?

In the Times, Harvey Araton captured the prevailing perception of the new Mets manager thusly:

With his neatly combed salt-and-pepper hair, his trim physique and his engaging smile, Valentine will come across better to Sound Bite America. He will reach out to those tarnished young pitchers, regale them with stories of the Japanese leagues, instruct them what to watch out for at the sushi bar.

An uninspiring 12-19 finish to the 1996 season caused no one to change their opinion of Valentine just yet. But in 1997, he captained the Mets to their first winning record in seven years, as the team flirted with a wild card berth as late as September, and was rewarded with a three-year contract for his efforts. Valentine was given credit for piloting the Mets to respectability despite having few stars on his roster. His starting rotation was a virtually anonymous bunch, and much the same could be said for his lineup. The two exceptions were switch-hitting slugger Todd Hundley, who broke the single-season home run record for catchers that season, and John Olerud, a surprise offseason pickup who would anchor the Met infield and lineup for three seasons.

Olerud was acquired from the Blue Jays the previous offseason for almost nothing, making it one of the rare times during this period when the Mets benefited from another team’s salary dump. The first baseman won two World Series rings with Toronto and was a high-average hitter who once flirted with batting .400, but after a few seasons of less impressive numbers at the plate, the Blue Jays feared he’d already reached the downside of his career. He was a quiet man, given the ironic nickname Gabby because he rarely spoke at all. In short, he exhibited all the signs of being type of athlete New York chews up and spits out. The fact he wore a batting helmet in the field—a precaution he adopted after an aneurysm nearly killed him as a 21-year-old minor leaguer—struck some as a sign of deeper fragility. Cito Gaston, his manager in Toronto, couldn’t see Olerud cottoning to Gotham, and vice versa. “He’s never had people yell bad things at him,” Gaston said after hearing of Olerud’s trade to the Mets. “And they’ll yell at him in Shea Stadium. I wouldn’t be surprised if he walks away from baseball at the end of the season.”

Olerud responded to Gaston’s challenge on all levels. New York, it turned out, fit him like a glove. More intellectually inclined than the average ballplayer, he took advantage of all the culture New York had to offer. Unlike many other well-paid players, he eschewed the suburbs of Long Island or Connecticut for an apartment in Manhattan. He even took the 7 train to the ballpark for many home games and professed to prefer the subway over the hassle of driving in city traffic. Toward the end of Olerud’s first season in New York, WNBC News captured his daily commute, riding the old Redbird-style trains from Grand Central, along with a slew of straphangers who paid him no mind.

Olerud’s cultural yearnings and proletarian transportation choices would have meant little if he hadn’t performed, but on the field he had a comeback campaign in 1997 as he knocked in 102 runs, belted 22 homers, and logged an on-base percentage of .400. And as surprising as his resurgence at the plate was, his performance on the infield was even more shocking. In Toronto, Olerud was considered a defensive liability. He was not fleet of foot, and his lack of speed made it difficult for him to hande the balls that zipped across the SkyDome’s artificial turf. But on the natural surface of Shea Stadium, Olerud changed his game and became a wizard with the glove. He was a weapon at first now, charging in on bunts, cutting down lead runners with the strong arm he’d never been able to show off on the carpet of Toronto. The Mets hadn’t wielded such an offensive defender at first base since Keith Hernandez. Met third baseman Edgardo Alfonzo followed this model and began to play his position with similar aggressiveness, showing off his own strong arm and inviting comparisons to Gold Glovers like Matt Williams and Ken Caminiti. The Mets’ infield defense, once porous, became a decided strength. The team’s pitching staff was full of soft-tossing control artists who logged far more grounders than strikeouts. Fielders like Olerud and Alfonzo made sure those grounders were converted into outs.

When a ball did manage to sneak past the infield, Olerud made the batter’s time on the basepaths uncomfortable. Rather than play on the bag or behind the runner, Olerud stood in front of him, screening him from the action. If a runner made any move back toward the first base bag or in the direction of second, Olerud would move right along with him. Bobby Valentine became fond of this pesky positioning while managing Texas. The idea was suggested to him by one of his coaches, Tim Foli, an ex-Met shortstop nicknamed Crazy Horse for his pugnacious reputation.

Opposing teams assumed Valentine asked John Olerud to play first base this way for the same reason they assumed he did everything else—to be a jerk. When pressed, Valentine played dumb. He was simply letting Olerud be himself, he said. New York, and Bobby Valentine, had finally let Gabby speak loudly, in his own way.

* * *

September 12, 1985 was a glorious day when all of New York was baseball mad. Both the Mets and Yankees were playing at home, an unusual coincidence made more so by the fact that both teams were contending for the postseason. Shea and Yankee Stadiums were each packed to the rafters, with the Mets hosting an afternoon game and the Yanks taking the nightcap. Fans young and old with bipartisan spirits played hooky and attended both games. This was a civic event not to be missed for the mere distraction of work or school. In the afternoon, the Mets beat the Cardinals on a walk off RBI single from Keith Hernandez to take sole possession of first place in the National League East. In the evening, the Yankees rode a six-run rally to a victory over Toronto, pulling them within 1.5 games of the first place Blue Jays. It was the latest in the season both teams had been in the playoff hunt since the Mets came into existence. The occasion was deemed so rare that the Times compared it to an astrological phenomenon on the order of Halley’s Comet.

This once-in-a-generation rarity did not prevent a New York brand of hubris and entitlement to wash over the city in record time. Fans of both teams wore t-shirts proclaiming NEW YORK SUBWAY SERIES 1985. One fan called for President Reagan to demand the Cardinals and Blue Jays step aside so that the World Series could once again be played within the confines of the five boroughs, “its rightful place.” A beleaguered clerk in the Macy’s electronics department grew tired of shooing away loitering “customers” who gathered around the display televisions every time a game was on. “They crowd in here and scream and yell like they were in their living rooms,” the weary clerk reported.

Then, as quickly as the city’s baseball fever had surged, it broke. The Yankees followed their thrilling win over Toronto with an eight-game losing streak that all but killed their playoff chances. The Mets hung on longer but finished short of St. Louis in the end. Over the next decade, as the trajectories of the two teams spun in opposite directions, that September day in 1985 remained the closest New York had come to hosting its first Subway Series since 1956.

And then came June 16, 1997, the evening when the advent of interleague play brought with it the first regular season Subway Series game. In front of a sellout Yankee Stadium crowd, the Mets shocked the defending world champions with a 6-0 victory. Starting pitcher Dave Mlicki—owner of a lifetime record of 17-21, a man even most Mets fans couldn’t pick out of a lineup—went the distance, scattering nine hits and striking out eight Yankees, six of them looking, including Derek Jeter to end the game.

By the end of the game, with most Yankees fans having long since left, the House That Ruth Built rang with foreign chants of “Let’s go Mets!” This did not go unnoticed by the press, or George Steinbrenner, who was infuriated by the insult. Stung by this humiliation, the Yankees rebounded to win the last two games of the series. The final contest was particularly contentious, as the Mets rallied late from a 2-0 deficit and scored the tying run when David Cone (now a Yankee) balked home a runner in the top of the eighth. Joe Torre later complained “Bobby tried to plant the seed early,” claiming that the Met manager had pointed out an odd hitch in Cone’s delivery to home plate umpire John Shulock, thus laying the groundwork for the balk call. Valentine contended his observation had no effect on the call. Mr. Baseball believed he was doing a favor for the less perceptive by pointing out a balk move when he saw one. Valentine’s eagle eye merely prolonged the game for the Mets, however, as the Yankees earned the last laugh on a walk off RBI single in the bottom of the tenth from Tino Martinez.

Prior to 1997, the relationship between the Mets and Yankees, and their respective fans, tended to be one of cool indifference. The question of which team was best was restricted to the hypothetical realm of barroom arguments. In the early decades of their coexistence, the Mets and Yankees contended in an annual exhibition for charity called the Mayor’s Trophy Game. This contest was approached in the same manner as a spring training game, with both teams’ best players appearing for a few short innings if they appeared at all. When the 1978 edition threatened to drag on into extra innings on a chilly April night in the Bronx, Yankees third baseman Graig Nettles threw a groundball into the seats in the hopes he could gift the Mets the winning run and “get the hell out of there.” For two years in the early 1980s, rather than stage a game no one wanted to play and few wanted to watch, the Mets and Yankees donated money to the Mayor’s Trophy charity instead and called it a day.

When both teams flirted with the playoffs in 1985, the event was such a novelty that it unfolded as a civic celebration. Fans of one team could be coolly generous to the other squad, even root for their crosstown rivals after a fashion, as they entertained pie-in-the-sky dreams of a Subway Series. The Mets’ and Yankees’ mutual failure to reach the postseason prevented anyone from discovering if those kumbaya feelings could extend deep into October.

A regular season game, a game that counted in the standings for both teams, was a different story. Three Subway Series games were enough to transform the Met-Yankee rivalry from cold war to open hostility. In the years to follow, every interaction between the two camps would be fraught with a tension that began with the fans and traveled all the way up to the players themselves.

The first Subway Series established the pattern that would continue for Met-Yankee summit meetings in the following years. The Mets would say they were keyed up and thrilled to be involved. They would receive kudos for giving the defending world champs a good fight if they lost, while reserving the right to treat each victory like a mini-World Series if they won. “It was a great three days, wasn’t it?” said Edgardo Alfonzo at the conclusion of the inaugural series. His team had lost two of three games in the Bronx, yet he could proclaim the series great with no fear of drawing criticism. The impact of winning the very first Subway Series game was so immense, it almost accounted for more than one win (even if the standings disagreed).

The Yankees, expected to win the real World Series no matter what year it was, treated the affair with a mixture of contempt and dread. Playing the Mets in contrived circumstances lay a few steps beneath their dignity. These games offered the Yankees little to win and everything to lose. David Cone told reporters that dropping two of three to the Mets would have sent him scrambling for a cyanide tablet. Derek Jeter said such an outcome would have forced him to move to New Jersey. (He would go on to repeat this “threat” often in future Subway Series, apparently believing there were no Yankees or Mets fans to hassle him in the Garden State.) After Tino Martinez hit his RBI single to ice the win in the series finale, the first baseman said he felt a ton of bricks lift from his back.

Former Mets like Cone and Doc Gooden chafed at questions about the differences between the teams. Now Yankees, they preferred to adopt the traditional stance of the Bronx Bombers: Refusing to acknowledge the existence of the Other Team In Town whenever possible. The Subway Series robbed them of that option. One reporter noted that upon being called up to the Yankees on the eve of the first Subway Series, Wally Whitehurst (another ex-Met) asked his old teammate Gooden when they were getting some pizza delivered to the clubhouse. The question was asked in jest, but Doc answered it with deathly seriousness. “We don’t do that stuff here, Wally,” he warned, looking over his shoulder to make sure no team officials had heard the impudent request. “This ain’t the Mets.”

There was no better demonstration of how much had changed between the two teams than the scene at Shea Stadium on April 15, 1998. Two days earlier, a 500-pound support beam collapsed at Yankee Stadium. Apart from adding ammunition to George Steinbrenner’s claims that he deserved a new stadium, the accident shut down the old one until city inspectors could ensure the facility was safe. The Mets were scheduled to play a night game but invited the Yankees to use Shea Stadium for the afternoon to complete their series against the Angels.

This was a neighborly gesture that made no one happy. Met players fretted that welcoming the Yankees into their stadium would have the same effect as inviting vampires into one’s home. Yankee players called the temporary relocation a “distraction,” worrying it would disturb their recent hot streak. They chose to dress up in the Yankee Stadium clubhouse before hopping a bus to Queens rather than dare use the facilities at Shea. Yankees fans who descended on Flushing that afternoon displayed naked loathing for their gracious hosts, comparing the temporary digs unfavorably to the self-proclaimed Cathedral of Baseball while displaying signs bearing insults like NOT BAD FOR A MINOR LEAGUE PARK. Mets fans who arrived that evening for their team’s regularly scheduled game said the place would need fumigation after being invaded by those fans. They bristled over Mets ownership being so accommodating to the team that was now their most hated rival. Surely George Steinbrenner would never be so welcoming if the tables were turned, they said.

And those were the remarks deemed fit for print and airwaves. When rumors bubbled that emergency repairs would force the Yankees to play their next series at Shea, Mets fans accused their team of playing doormat, while the Yankees worried over what playing at a minor league ballpark would do for their prospects. The issue was skirted when the Yankees’ next opponent, the Detroit Tigers, agreed to swap home series.

A spirit of citizenship that allowed the two teams to share a facility in the 1970s, and to cheer for each other in the mid-1980s. That spirit was now dead and buried. In its place was a harsh partisanship that brooked no compromise. The first Subway Series had been marked by full-blown fistfights in the Yankee Stadium stands. Players contemplated popping cyanide tablets if they lost. One fanbase compared the arrival of the other fanbase in their team’s stadium to an infestation of pests. A local sports radio personality dismissed the idea that New Yorkers could root for both teams by proclaiming, with the fervor of a Baptist preacher, “You can’t be for God and the Devil!” The host was a Yankees fan and made it quite clear which team stood for each part of this duality in his eyes.

The media made note of all this animosity, but only to dismiss it. They had already determined the Subway Series was a unifying civic event that enlivened and uplifted the entire city. Everyone said so, from the mayor on down. “It’s wonderful for the city,” Rudy Giuliani said right before the Mets and Yankees faced each other for the first time. Every outlet of officialdom adopted this line as their own, ignoring Giuliani’s own recollection of the days of his youth when fans of the Dodgers and Giants couldn’t be in the same room together without fighting. Brawls in the stands were labeled “skirmishes.” Hate-filled volleys from one team’s fans toward another’s were placed under the umbrella of playful exuberance. The belief that this antipathy could be ignored or dismissed ran deep and long. When interleague play was in its third season, at a point when Mets and Yankees had been crammed next to each other for 12 hate-filled contests, one writer dared suggest that the two teams—each of whom hungered for new facilities—could share one new stadium and thus save a great deal of taxpayer money, as if the support beam incident and all the ugliness it engendered (They’ll hafta fumigate the place…) never happened.

The press ran with the mayor’s contention and took it one step further. Now that New York had returned to its former glory, the only thing it was missing was a real Subway Series. If games between the Mets and Yankees in June were great for the city, then a World Series showdown would be even greater. Each subsequent matchup would bring such daydreaming from the scribes. Wouldn’t that be great for the city?, they cooed, blind to all the evidence they gathered that said otherwise.

Next Chapter: Skill Sets