When Valentine returned to the Met organization in 1996, the franchise was in the midst of one its periodic ruts while the Yankees were on the rise. At first glance, this was unremarkable. History showed the teams tended to travel in indirectly proportional waves, one ascending and the other plummeting before each reversed course. Whichever team happened to be on top was said to own the city, while the other would have to wait for fortune to shine on them.

New York’s affection for baseball is boundless, but its allegiances are capricious. While the Mets and Yankees each have their hardcore partisans, there exist between them a softer middle ready to jump on the flashiest bandwagon in town. In another city such fair-weather fans might be dismissed. In New York, the media capital of the country, they are prized commodities. So when one team owns the city, what it truly owns is a slippery but valuable asset that translates into big bucks in box office, TV ratings, and jersey sales. It is also an asset whose fickle attentions threaten to drift elsewhere at the first sign of trouble.

For the first three decades of the teams’ coexistence, they passed this baton back and forth with clockwork regularity. When the Mets debuted in 1962, the Yankees were riding high on the mighty bats of Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, the lingering afterglow of their dynasty in the 1950s, and the dearth of competition occasioned by the Dodgers’ and Giants’ flight westward. By the mid-1960s, however, the glory days of the M&M Boys had passed, leaving a void begging to be filled. Even as the Mets continued to lose, they were more fun, more now, more in touch with the dynamic go-go New Frontier feeling of the era than the Yankees, who remained stuck in the gray Eisenhower years.

And then, to the amazement of everyone, the Mets stopped losing. First, they shocked the world by winning the World Series in 1969. Then, in 1973, they executed one of the most dramatic comebacks in baseball history, scrambling from last to first place in the season’s last month, besting the Big Red Machine in the National League playoffs before falling to the powerful Oakland A’s in the seventh game of the World Series. The Mets remained the darlings of the city through the first half of the 1970s. Over the same period, the Yankees scuffled through a series of listless seasons and never approached the drama staged by the Mets. The team’s corporate owner, CBS, was indifferent at best to the idea of fielding a competitive ballclub and made personnel decisions that alienated fans, such as the inexplicable firing of iconic broadcaster Mel Allen. Both the Mets and Yankees possessed fanbases that fled to the suburbs in droves in the 1960s and 1970s, but the Mets played in a ballpark with ample parking and easy highway access convenient to the expanding developments of Long Island. The Yankees played in the South Bronx, ground zero for white flight. Beginning in 1964, the year Shea Stadium opened, the Mets outdrew the Yankees for 11 straight seasons. The tallies were seldom close.

If the Yankees had any remaining illusions about their place in the New York sports landscape at this time, these were shattered in 1974, the year that renovations at The House That Ruth Built forced them to play home games at Shea for two full seasons. A day before their “home opener” in 1974, the Yankees betrayed their discomfort over being forced to play in Queens by warming up on a chilly infield while wearing road grays instead of their usual pinstripes. The opening day starter for the Yankees, Mel Stottlemyre, told the TV crews on hand that he felt like he’d been traded.

Then, the Mets lost their way. In 1975, the reserve clause—which had bound players to their teams in perpetuity since the earliest days of the major leagues—was struck down. The imminent arrival of free agency would render the Mets’ best players very expensive, a possibility that struck fear into the hearts of management. The Mets had once been owned by Joan Payson, an eccentric socialite who adored her team and spent lavishly on them. When she died the same year as the reserve clause did, the Mets fell into the hands of the de Roulet family, who were so parsimonious they once considered collecting foul balls and scrubbing them up for reuse, and so tone deaf to fan mood they thought parading a mule named Met-Al around Shea’s warning track would please the crowd.

On June 15, 1977, team president M. Donald Grant shipped the team’s two brightest stars, ace Tom Seaver and slugger Dave Kingman, out of Queens in a shortsighted effort to keep down payroll. Per Watergate-era nomenclature, these moves became known as the Midnight Massacre. It would doom the team to irrelevance for years to come.

Meanwhile, the Yankees took up residence in their renovated stadium and began to win like the Yanks of old. Their new owner, George Steinbrenner, embraced free agency as much as his crosstown counterparts ran from it. The Bronx Zoo Yankees captured headlines with soap opera storylines and two consecutive championships in 1977 and 1978. The teams switched places in the city’s affections almost overnight, with the Yankees drawing crowds that abandoned the hopeless Mets. Once-packed Shea Stadium turned into a ghost town. Embittered Mets fans dubbed the ballpark Grant’s Tomb.

Ill-suited for the new Big Money landscape of baseball, the de Roulets sold the Mets to a group headed by publishing heir Nelson Doubleday Jr. in 1980. One of the new owners’ first orders of business was to hire Frank Cashen as their general manager. The Baltimore native favored bow ties and spoke with a languid Chesapeake drawl, his persona more genteel Southern law professor than baseball executive. The image belied the fact that, as an executive in the Orioles’ front office, he helped construct the great Baltimore teams of the 1960s and 1970s. He pledged to bring such glory to the Mets, and within five years of the ownership change, Cashen’s build-up of a decimated farm system and savvy trades brought the Mets back to the top. They were not simply a good team but a gritty one that possessed the swagger and dirty uniforms that made sportswriters drool. After attendance barely broke 700,000 in 1981—a pitiful tally even when compensating for the players’ strike that occurred mid-summer that year—3,055,455 fans showed up at Shea in 1988, the highest gate total of any New York team ever to that point.

While the Mets swaggered their way to the top, their counterparts in the Bronx practiced subtraction by addition. Having found success in the late 1970s via big free agent signings like Reggie Jackson and Catfish Hunter, George Steinbrenner continued to press for big-ticket players each season, even as each subsequent shopping spree brought back a lower return on investment than the last. When the signings made at his behest turned out to be busts, Steinbrenner’s voice would the be first and loudest one denouncing these players as unworthy of wearing pinstripes. But rather than take any blame for any of these missteps, his energies would soon be focused on acquiring yet another pricey veteran.

The Yankees rarely had losing records in the 1980s and they had no shortage of stars, including Dave Winfield, Don Mattingly, and Rickey Henderson. But after losing the 1981 World Series to the Dodgers, they failed to make the playoffs for the remainder of the decade and could find little traction with a sports press fixated on the more exciting and successful Mets. The headlines the Yankees did garner during this time were negative and Steinbrenner-centric. His love-hate relationship with Billy Martin devolved from tragedy into farce. His revolving door manager policy was another sad joke, when it didn’t turn vicious and cruel. Yogi Berra, one of the most beloved figures ever to play the game, was unceremoniously dismissed from his managerial post a mere 16 games into the 1985 season despite repeated public assurances he’d get a fair chance to turn the team around. Wounded by the betrayal, Berra refused to return to Yankee Stadium for 14 years.

Steinbrenner griped to the press about Yankee Stadium “falling apart,” complained about the “dangerous” neighborhood in which it was located, and threatened to relocate to New Jersey, or Tampa, or whichever municipality would take him. Players chafed under The Boss’s yoke and tired of him calling them out in the press over the smallest offenses. Steinbrenner was fond of reminding the press that his team won more games than any other team had in the 1980s, a boast that most reporters denounced as little more than a participation trophy. When the Mets captured a World Series title in 1986, Steinbrenner’s howling in the wind became even easier to ignore.

That 1986 championship was assumed to be a mere precursor to a Met dynasty. After barely missing out on the playoffs in 1987, the Mets recaptured the National League East division crown in 1988 and cruised into the playoffs to face a Dodger team they’d beaten 10 out of 11 times in the regular season. Few gave Los Angeles a ghost of a chance. In a year-end special produced by WOR-9, an assemblage of Met beat writers looked past the Dodgers to a World Series matchup against the powerful Oakland A’s of Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire. Some believed the National League Championship Series might go as many as six games. None considered the possibility the Mets might lose it. The scene also included New York Post beat writer Joel Sherman saying he couldn’t wait to watch Canseco play in person because “I’m convinced he’s on steroids.” The remark was lobbed not as a dire accusation but as a joke, and his fellow scribes responded with laughter in kind.

No one in New York was laughing when Los Angeles, powered by the bat of Kirk Gibson and the arm of Orel Hershiser, defeated the Mets in seven games. The Dodgers went on to continue their Cinderella story by stunning the A’s in five games in the World Series. The Mets went on to implode.

The decline proceeded slowly at first, one small slip at a time. Staff ace Doc Gooden, once the most exciting players in the game, struggled with substance abuse and drew multiple suspensions for violating the league’s drug policy. Star slugger Darryl Strawberry feuded with management and left for Los Angeles. Frank Cashen’s magic touch eluded him as he traded away players like Kevin Mitchell, Lenny Dykstra, and Randy Myers and watched them all become superstars elsewhere. Manager Davey Johnson clashed with the front office over these unwise trades and other meddling from suits until he was canned in 1990, despite having never won fewer than 87 games in his seasons at the helm. Johnson’s replacement, Buddy Harrelson, was a beloved former Met from the team’s glory days on 1969, but he made it clear he was not made of managerial timber when he withered under criticism and literally hid from the press. Before long, Harrelson was gone as well.

Then it was the front office’s turn to implode. Assistant General Manager Joe McIlvaine had been all but promised he’d succeed Frank Cashen upon the general manager’s retirement. But as the 1980s turned to the 1990s with Cashen still at the reins, McIlvaine tired of waiting and took the GM post in San Diego after the 1990 season. The move blindsided the team and left Cashen with only one lieutenant, Al Harazin. Prior to McIlvaine’s departure, Harazin had dealt strictly with the business side of operations. He looked the part of the money man, his sensible eyeglasses and conservative suit giving off the humorless cast of a hedge fund manager. Met co-owner Fred Wilpon characterized Harazin’s depth of baseball knowledge as “dangerously shallow.” He nonetheless became Cashen’s successor by default.

What Harazin lacked in baseball acumen he hoped to make up for with spending power. In 1991, Harazin successfully lobbied Cashen to sign Vince Coleman, an All Star outfielder who’d tortured the Mets as a base-stealing machine for the Cardinals, to a four-year, $11.95 million contract. The following year, Harazin ascended to the general manager’s post and made a flurry of expensive deals, inking future Hall of Famer Eddie Murray and slugger Bobby Bonilla and trading for the hefty contract of former Cy Young Award winner Bret Saberhagen. These acquisitions made the Mets a chic pick to return to their former glory, but the 1992 season was doomed by injuries. Saberhagen was limited to 15 starts. Closer John Franco struggled all year before he was shut down at the end of August. Coleman missed more than half the season with injuries, but the Mets came to wish he’d missed even more time. When not on the disabled list, Coleman instigated a shoving match with his manager to earn himself a two-game suspension and blamed his precipitous drop in base stealing numbers on the sorry state of the Shea Stadium infield.

Bobby Bonilla stayed healthier than most but became emblematic of the problem with these new Mets. His antagonistic relationship with the media began with his first press conference upon signing with the team. Anticipating a rude welcome before he’d even donned a Met uniform, he promised the writers, “You guys won’t be able to knock the smile off my face.” He proceeded to give them every reason to try. In his first year in Flushing the outfielder batted a modest .249 with 19 home runs, far below the standard he set as a perennial All Star in his days with the Pittsburgh Pirates, and did not react well to his treatment at the hands of the local boo birds. Bonilla took to wearing earplugs on the field so he wouldn’t hear the taunts and inspired more jeers when he lobbied Shea’s official scorer to take away errors from his record. Fans expected Bonilla, who grew up in the Bronx, to be better prepared for the rigors of playing in the city. Editorial cartoonists depicted him wearing diapers.

Off the field, 1992 was tarnished by a series of sordid accusations against some of the Mets’ biggest stars. First, Coleman, Doc Gooden, and outfielder Daryl Boston were accused of raping a woman at the Mets’ spring training facilities the previous year. (Charges were dropped against all three players before Grapefruit League action ended.) Then, the tabloids had a field day with bizarre rumors that pitcher David Cone had lured women into the Shea Stadium bullpen with promises of autographed baseballs in order to masturbate in front of them. In an unrelated incident, Cone was also accused of making death threats against a group of women at Shea.

Ugly as these accusations were, the team’s reaction to them was even uglier. The Mets could have done some soul searching about their selection of personnel or attempted to discipline players for such behavior. The team instead decided the real villains were the media.

An air of paranoia began to pervade the Met clubhouse. The team believed that every person who entered with a mic in his or her hand was out to get them. In the face of such a “threat,” players and management alike decided the best defense was a good offense and attacked the press at every opportunity. Some blamed this shift in outlook on Eddie Murray, who brought a virulent hatred of the press with him from his years in Baltimore. Others thought the Mets smarted from the memory of the well-liked Buddy Harrelson being hounded out of his managerial job by a critical press that painted him as ill-suited for the pressures of the position. Still others thought the leering David Cone headlines poisoned the Mets’ feeling toward the scribes who covered them. It may have been poisoned long before by the media circuses that sprung up around Doc Gooden’s fall from grace and Darryl Strawberry’s front office feuds.

Whatever the seed, it was watered by Harrelson’s replacement, Jeff Torborg. The Mets’ new manager obsessed over how his team was perceived in the papers, to the point of calling constant team meetings on the subject, warning his players to pay the writers no mind. One player responded, “If we’re not supposed to be worried about the media, why are we having all these meetings about the media?” Torborg’s nigh-daily briefings on the press hindered everyday team operations to the point that Cone dubbed him Oliver North.

Torborg also miscalculated when he attempted to impose clean living on his players. His immediate managerial predecessors had “boys will be boys” attitudes when it came to postgame jockish misbehavior, and Davey Johnson was especially permissive of his players’ hard partying ways. Thus it came as a shock to the team when one of Torborg’s first orders of business was to ban beer drinking during team flights. It was an article of faith to these players that their 1980s glory days were powered by the carte blanche they had to engage in booze-and-coke-fueled mayhem. In retrospect, it’s obvious that the Mets’ bacchanalian ways did more to kill a dynasty than create one, but players did not see it this way at the time. Torborg’s teetotal edicts were interpreted as a conspiracy to rob them of their manly devil-may-care essence. When traded away to Toronto in 1992, David Cone sighed, “The day of the arrogant Mets is over.” As evidence, he pointed to Torborg’s goody-two-shoes beer ban, cringing at the sight of grown men sneaking sips of Budweiser on a team flight while the skipper had his back turned.

Despite the ugliness of 1992, many observers were willing to give the Mets a mulligan due to the spate of injuries they suffered that year. Surely a team with a healthy Bonilla, Saberhagen, Coleman, and Murray would compete. Pirates manager Jim Leyland picked them to win the National League East. Others weren’t so sure. Sparky Anderson of the Tigers snorted, “The Mets are a myth.”

Before too long, the Mets would wish they were a myth, but their monstrosity was all too real.

The 1993 Mets won their first two games at home against the Colorado Rockies, a freshly minted expansion team. They again won two consecutive games against the Rockies one week later, then beat the Reds in back-to-back games on April 16 and 17. They would not put together another winning streak of any kind again until the end of June. Over this stretch, they did not so much play baseball as execute daily nine-man reenactments of Faces of Death with bats and gloves. And as gruesome as what the Mets did on the field in 1993 was, it paled in comparison to what they did off of it.

A mere four games into the season, Bobby Bonilla executed his first meltdown by confronting New York Daily News beat writer Bob Klapisch, who had co-authored a book about the mess of 1992 with the provocative title The Worst Team Money Could Buy. Excerpts had appeared in the Daily News and Bonilla was not pleased with his portrayal therein. After calling Klapisch a homophobic slur, Bonilla promised the writer, “I’ll show you the Bronx,” then smacked away a microphone belonging to a camera crew capturing the whole thing on tape.

In his own defense, Bonilla later attempted to distinguish between attacking one member of the media and attacking the media at large, which only served to underscore the team’s contemptuous view of the fourth estate. “This team as a whole, we feel [Klapisch] abused his privilege, period, and that’s all we have to say,” Bonilla grumbled, quickly adding, “We’re not taking this out on everyone else in the media.” The press-phobia was displayed again on April 26 when Doc Gooden was scratched from a scheduled start. The Mets claimed the move came after the pitcher was “bumped” while in the clubhouse. This story collapsed when it was revealed the bump was caused by Vince Coleman, who was practicing his golf swing in the locker room and hit Gooden in the shoulder blade with a 9 iron. Rather than apologize for the clumsy cover-up, Al Harazin harrumphed his only mistake was “not doing a better job of keeping it out of the papers.” When reporters tried to grill Coleman in the clubhouse the next day, they were bum-rushed toward the exit by a crew of bouncers comprised of Bonilla, Eddie Murray, and John Franco.

With the season barely a month old, Sports Illustrated referred to the Mets as “battle-weary” and characterized a four-game series against the expansion Florida Marlins in the middle of May as having “the urgency of a pennant race.” The Mets proceeded to split the series and embarrass themselves in many other ways. In the second Florida game, a 4-2 loss, Coleman misplayed an easy fly ball and booted a grounder. In the same contest, Bobby Bonilla admired what he thought was a game-tying homer and jogged leisurely around the bases, only to see the ball caught at the warning track. When reprimanded by third base coach Mike Cubbage, Bonilla growled, “Don’t show me up on the field.” Bonilla carried the argument into the dugout, hurling obscenities at Cubbage the whole time. Fed-up fans took to booing Bonilla not after every strikeout, but after every swing and a miss. Some put paper bags over their heads when he strode to the plate. Others jeered a credit card commercial featuring Jeff Torborg when the team dared play it on Shea’s giant Diamond Vision video board.

By May 19, the Mets were 13-25, only one game better than the pace of the dreadful 1962 team. The big difference between the two was that the 1962 Mets were a lovable group of incompetents while the 1993 squad was a loathsome pack of overpaid malcontents. Torborg received his walking papers and was replaced by Dallas Green, whose previous managerial work with the Phillies and Yankees labeled him as a drill sergeant type who could whip the Mets back into shape. A few weeks after Torborg’s dismissal, Al Harazin was gone as well. Joe McIlvaine, who’d resigned his own post in San Diego after clashing with Padre ownership, returned to take the job that should have been his in the first place. It was already far too late for Green’s tough love to have any effect in the dugout, or for McIlvaine’s front office skills to cure a poisoned clubhouse. The moves were little more than deck chair rearrangement on the Titanic.

The Mets’ lone sliver of sympathy in 1993 was earned by Anthony Young, a star-crossed pitcher who experienced a Biblical plague of bad luck on his way to shattering the major league record for consecutive losses—27 in a row, a streak that extended back to the previous season, before a rare Met walk-off win at the end of July ended his misfortune. Young’s ignominious accomplishment brought more reporters into the clubhouse, however, the last thing his teammates wanted. On July 7, as the press huddled around the pitcher’s locker, one of Young’s teammates tossed a lit firecracker behind them. No one was hurt, but the outburst scared the hell out of the writers, who had every reason to believe this team harbored desires to harm them.

The offending pyromaniac kept his identity hidden for three weeks until Bret Saberhagen defiantly confessed to the act. “It was a practical joke,” he sneered with dismissiveness. “I wanted to get people’s attention. There are always tons of reporters here when something bad is happening. I don’t like a lot of them.” When asked if he’d been disciplined by the team, Saberhagen all but laughed in his questioner’s face. “What are they going to do, fine me?” It was as if the Mets were an unruly class that delighted in torturing a series of overmatched substitute teachers.

A few weeks later, Saberhagen executed an encore by spraying reporters with bleach from a squirt gun. This time, the pitcher’s confession was apologetic and accommodating, as he told the press he’d doused them with bleach “accidentally” and swore he had no intention of hurting anyone. The shift in tone was due to another horrible incident that had happened in the interim, one that turned the Mets’ season from an ugly farce to a detestable one.

On July 24, after a game at Dodger Stadium, Vince Coleman rebuffed a crowd of autograph seekers, and joined Los Angles outfielder Eric Davis in the slugger’s Jeep Cherokee. The two of them planned to attend a barbecue at the Dodger’s house later that evening. While sitting in the Jeep, Coleman tossed some kind of explosive in the general direction of a group of fans standing nearby. This was no mere Saberhagen firecracker. The Los Angeles District Attorney’s office later compared it to “a quarter-stick of dynamite.” The ensuing explosion injured three people, including a two-year-old girl who suffered corneal lacerations.

Despite the fact that Coleman had maimed a toddler, no one but the victims and the LAPD took the attack seriously at first—least of all Coleman, who shooed reporters away from his locker the next day with a profanity-filled rant. The Mets waited 72 hours before issuing an official response in which they labeled Coleman’s acts as “regrettable and reprehensible” but also made sure to classify them, with an implied shrug of the shoulders, as “off-field activities.” An untested Bud Selig—still early enough in his tenure as baseball’s commissioner that he was labeled “de facto commissioner” by Sports Illustrated—waited five days before issuing a tepid statement about “reported incidents involving New York Mets players.”

Not even Dallas Green, reputed bad cop, brought the hammer down on his outfielder until he had no choice. The manager inserted Coleman into his lineup for three straight games following the incident at Chavez Ravine before public outcry forced a benching. Even then, Green painted Coleman as the true victim and blamed the press for blowing the whole affair out of proportion. “I made the decision based on your activities,” he said, wagging his finger at reporters. “It’s difficult for any athlete to go through something like this and perform up to his capabilities.” A more rational mind might have conceded it was even more difficult for a two-year-old girl to suffer corneal lacerations, but Green had acquired the Mets’ hatred of the media by osmosis.

Coleman himself conveyed no remorse until faced with felony charges carrying a prison sentence of up to three years. He then called a press conference to beg forgiveness, his wife and kids in tow for maximum effect. He volunteered to clean up after recent fires in Malibu as a show of community service and made sure to be photographed barbecuing for local firemen. His eventual punishment would be a one-year suspended sentence plus a civil suit settled for an undisclosed amount.

These baby steps toward good citizenship were insufficient for one half of ownership. New York real estate mogul Fred Wilpon had been a tiny portion of the partnership that purchased the Mets from the de Roulet family in 1980. Over the following decade, Wilpon angled his way into 50/50 control of the team with Nelson Doubleday, but for most of that time he maintained a low public profile. Compared to his counterpart in the Bronx, he was almost invisible. The Coleman incident changed all that. On August 24, Fred Wilpon called his first ever team meeting and chewed out his employees, saying they had embarrassed the Mets and their city. “You should feel privileged to be able to play baseball in New York,” he told them. “If you don’t feel that way and you want out, let us know. We’ll get you the hell out of here.”

Wilpon then scheduled a press conference to inform the gathered media that the pyromaniac outfielder would never play for the Mets again. It didn’t matter Coleman was owed $3 million the next year. It also didn’t matter Wilpon neglected to discuss this with anyone in his front office beforehand. “I reached a point where I had to say enough is enough,” Wilpon said.

The 1993 season would prove a watershed moment for New York baseball. It marked the moment when the Mets transformed from a gritty, gutsy group of scrappers into one of the most unlikable teams in any sport. They quite literally became a punch line, invoked by hack comedians in the same breath as Amy Fisher or Pee-Wee Herman. Comparing them to another walking embarrassment of the era, Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated declared the Mets “baseball’s Buttafuoco’s.” David Letterman, who’d recently switched over to CBS to pit his New York-based Late Show against NBC’s The Tonight Show, was particularly fond of raking the Mets across the coals in his nightly monologues. Once beloved by their own fans and reviled by others, the Mets had become a joke to everyone.

The Mets had picked a terrible time to be terrible. While they were stumbling, the Yankees began their slow climb back to the top, thanks in large part to the most humiliating Steinbrenner blowup of all. In the late 1980s, The Boss suspected a charity led by star slugger Dave Winfield was a scam and resented the clauses in Winfield’s that obligated Steinbrenner to contribute to it. Another executive with similar suspicions might have tipped off the IRS, or hired a private detective to do some snooping. Steinbrenner paid $40,000 to man named Howie Spira who claimed he worked for Winfield and could dig up some dirt on the player’s charity and the man himself.

Unfortunately for Steinbrenner, he had thrown in his lot with a man who was not only up to his neck with gambling debts, but also a one-time FBI informant. Spira aggressively shopped his story of doing freelance detective work for Steinbrenner to the feds, all while recording all of his phone calls with the Yankee owner for self protection. The last straw came when Spira called up The Boss and demanded an additional $110,000 to prevent his tapes from finding their way to the newspapers. Steinbrenner went to the police to complain of the extortion. In the process, the public soon learned that Steinbrenner had employed a man who owed tons of money to professional thumb-breakers, just to unearth damaging information about Dave Winfield. Even in the sordid annals of Steinbrennerian history, this stood out as a low point.

Once the commissioner’s office completed its investigation, Steinbrenner received a “lifetime ban” from the game in 1990. His meddling had become so reviled that when news of his ban was broadcast over the Yankee Stadium PA system during a game, the fans in attendance responded with a standing ovation.

To all the world, this looked like the Yankees’ darkest hour. In truth, it turned out to be the seed of a new dynasty. Steinbrenner’s enforced absence allowed the Yankee front office one brief, blessed respite in which to operate unhindered. General Manager Gene Michael was able to retain talent in the team’s farm system rather than trading it away for overpriced veterans, and to supplement emerging prospects with judicious free agent signings—two things The Boss’s incessant interference never allowed. Homegrown stars like Bernie Williams, Derek Jeter, and Andy Pettitte blossomed alongside the imported bats of Paul O’Neill, Tino Martinez, and Wade Boggs.

The Yankees began to win again. In 1993, they passed the Mets in attendance for the first time in over a decade. They would not relinquish that crown for the rest of the 1990s. In 1990, a New York Times/WCBS-TV poll showed that almost three times as many New Yorkers professed to be Mets fans than those who said they rooted for the Yankees. Most respondents named George Steinbrenner as their primary reason for this preference. “I always enjoyed the Yankees, but George turned me off,” said one, who saw the Mets as “a quieter, more classy team.” Three years later, the Mets were no longer quiet nor classy, and another New York Times/CBS poll showed the Yankees held the edge, claiming 6 percent more fans among respondents than the Mets.

The gap between the number of professed fans for each time only widened in the years that followed as the Yankees dominated the baseball world. They showed pluck by battling back in the 1996 World Series, capturing the title after being down two games to none against the powerful pitching staff of the Atlanta Braves. Then they loaded up on even more free agents, created a super-team, and decimated all competition in a season for the ages in 1998. By this point, there was no question which was the top team in town. The only debate concerned how far the Yankees towered above the competition, or if the other team in town offered them any competition at all.

* * *

One team was up and the other was down. This was far from a new phenomenon, historically speaking, and yet, the reversal of fortunes that began in the early 1990s was different. It wasn’t the mere fact that the Yankees were winning and the Mets weren’t. It wasn’t the mere fact that the Yankees had marquee players and the Mets did not. What was truly different this time around was the city itself. New York had gone through such a radical transformation that it threatened to make the fluid relationship between the two teams settle into a bitter permanence.

In 1993, the same year the Mets were throwing explosives and the Yankees were initiating their return to respectability, Rudolph Giuliani was elected mayor. The Flatbush native was once as liberal as any child of the 1960s; as a young assistant district attorney, his first big case involved throwing the book at crooked cops. Then federal appointments during the Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan administrations, coupled with New York’s ugly descent into rampant crime and near bankruptcy, sped his transition from bleeding-heart lefty into law-and-order conservative. As a federal prosecutor during New York’s terrible 1980s, he rose to fame by battling mobsters and Wall Street’s inside traders with the same level of pit bull tenacity. His most notable innovation as United States attorney for Manhattan was his pointed use of the “perp walk”—the attention-grabbing act of marching a suspect into custody in front of a tipped-off press corps, which simultaneously humiliated the alleged evildoer and gave the prosecutor an air of machismo. The perp walk had been employed against Mafiosi for years. Giuliani’s innovation was to use it as a measure of populist revenge against the miscreants of Wall Street, shaming inside traders like Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky.

When Rudy Giuliani first campaigned for the mayorship in 1989, he rested his hopes on a platform to restore “quality of life.” Though the city was in rough shape at that moment, voters were not quite ready for Giuliani’s message. The political novice lost a hotly contested mayoral race against David Dinkins, an African-American Democrat who hoped to be a balm for simmering racial tensions in the outer boroughs. Four years under Dinkins brought little relief to crime and even more racial unrest, however. When the incumbent mayor and the prosecutor locked horns again in 1993, Giuliani squeaked out a narrow victory.

Rudy Giuliani embraced the “broken windows” theory of policing, which posited that allowing a few broken windows to go unrepaired encouraged worse lawbreaking. “Broken windows” urged an aggressive pursuit of small violations in order to create an environment in which committing any crime would be more difficult. It emphasized a shift away from crime fighting—catching criminals who’d already broken the law—to the old fashioned idea of ensuring laws weren’t broken in the first place.

The broken windows approach cleared the streets of the inconveniences New Yorkers had come to accept as part of life in a city gone to seed. Gone were the squeegee men who hassled drivers trapped in traffic, the open-air drug markets and homeless encampments in public parks, the subway cars covered from wheel to roof in indecipherable graffiti. Rather than issue tickets to cars whose owners refused to move them for street cleaning, Giuliani spearheaded the ultra-punitive measure of papering their windows with unremovable stickers plastered with the accusation THIS VEHICLE VIOLATES NYC PARKING REGULATIONS. Rather than tolerate noisy dance clubs whose patrons spilled into the street, Giuliani charged the police to enforce ancient cabaret laws, hounding the parties out of business. He dismantled the city’s vast social safety net, which he saw as a bloated fountain of fraud, and replaced it with a system that required fingerprinting, background checks, and “workfare” for benefit recipients to earn their keep (mirroring similar initiatives being enacted on the federal level by the new presidential administration of Bill Clinton). Picking up where he left off as a federal prosecutor, Giuliani flushed the mob out of the Fulton Fish Market and private sanitation. That the laws being broken in these instances were minor in the grand scheme of things was exactly the point. Let no one think they can get away with anything in this town anymore was Giuliani’s unspoken edict.

The amount of credit one gave Giuliani for improving New York City’s fortunes tended to correlate to whether one had voted for him or not. If you hadn’t, you might have insisted that the city’s increased safety coincided with a nationwide drop in crime, and that serious crime had already begun to decline measurably in the latter years of the Dinkins administration. (Both contentions were statistically provable, though in New York’s most troubled neighborhoods conditions had ebbed only from utter horror to mere nightmare). Many of Giuliani’s critics declared the methods employed by the NYPD to clear the streets of squeegee men and small-time drug dealers—stop-and-frisk, ticketing, instructions to move along under threat of arrest—were also used to harass minorities for the “crime” of walking city streets. The city’s black community in particular viewed his accomplishments skeptically, feeling that strong-arm police tactics were employed harshest of all in their neighborhoods, that his slashing of the city’s welfare system was aimed squarely at them, that he considered their existence in New York to be a criminal act.

If you had voted for the mayor, however, you saw a city that was safer and cleaner than it had been in decades. You told yourself that the ends were more than justified by the means, that the suppression of certain civil liberties was a small price to pay to walk the streets at night safely. Under Giuliani’s watch, the city’s crime rate dropped precipitously, year after year. The numbers of serious crimes—especially murder—fell off a cliff. Giuliani had done exactly what he promised he would, improve the city’s quality of life, and he had done it with an efficiency that was stunning to behold. In short, Rudy Giuliani’s way worked. Quibbles with the harshness of some of his methods could seem pointless, if not dangerous.

For the first time in decades, New York was deemed safe. Tourists returned in droves. Developers gobbled up newly valuable real estate, nowhere more dramatically than Times Square, a once seedy outpost of peep shows and porno theaters reborn as a family-friendly center for tourist attractions and corporate headquarters. Tenement-jammed enclaves like the Lower East Side, the East Village, and Hell’s Kitchen sprouted glittering high-rises and became high-rent districts almost overnight.

The transformations did not stop at the bridges and tunnels. For the first time ever, outer borough living became fashionable. In the 1980s, the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn had been wracked by the same crime and race riots that plagued the rest of the borough. Two years into the Giuliani administration, the Times could tout the same neighborhood as “a new Bohemia” where all the great artists’ lofts had already been snatched up and a two-family home cost the princely sum of $175,000.

To the world beyond New York, Rudy Giuliani was seen as the man who brought America’s largest city back from its darkest hours. He became an ambassador for New York, a living symbol of its rebirth. And when America saw Giuliani outside of City Hall, the place they most often saw him was Yankee Stadium, watching his beloved Bronx Bombers lay waste to yet another inferior opponent. When the victorious Yankees hoisted World Series trophies over their heads, Rudy was right beside them in the champagne-soaked clubhouse, wearing his lucky team jacket, celebrating as if he too were a member of the team that won it all.

These Yankees bore no resemblance to the Bronx Zoo clubs of the 1970s, who won despite the oil-and-water mix of strong personalities like Reggie Jackson and Billy Martin. These Yankees were a well-oiled machine that brooked no deviation from the championship plan. These Yankees did nothing but win, decisively and methodically. When they won it all at season’s end, they paused for only one brief moment to pop bubbly before resuming preparations to win again the next year. Even George Steinbrenner reined in his worst impulses and operated more like a button-down CEO than a tyrannical dictator. Spooked by his ban from the game, The Boss kept his public blowups and ambush firings to a bare minimum after he was reinstated by Major League Baseball in 1993. Now when Steinbrenner mouthed off to the press, it was understood the old man was only blowing off steam. Reporters expected him to mouth off once in a while, and even to make a few rash personnel moves. They did not expect him to cause the chaos he once did, because no one, not even George Steinbrenner, could be allowed to derail the Yankees of the 1990s. The stakes were too high, the money involved too astronomical.

The Yankees had been a business-first operation going back to the days when Colonel Jacob Ruppert first made them a powerhouse by snatching Babe Ruth from the Boston Red Sox. But there was something very New-York-in-the-1990s about how they operated in the last decade of the 20th century. New York’s recovery was powered, in part, by its ability to promote itself as a destination, as a brand, to be featured as the backdrop of hit shows like Seinfeld and Friends, to push its tough but grinning mayor on any talk show that would have him. Most baseball teams did not yet think of themselves in terms of branding, but the Yankees did. They beat the rest of the league in understanding free agency and they beat the rest of the league at this game, too. The Yankees no longer aimed to win between the lines alone. They sought to best the competition in ways never thought of before, to win “games” other teams didn’t even know were being played.

When it came to this new means of “winning,” there was no better example than the merchandising deal the Yankees inked in 1997. The resolution of the players’ strike of 1994 brought with it a properties agreement, under which any revenues garnered from the sale of team merchandise would be shared equally among the teams. For small market franchises that could never hope to earn huge sums of money from merchandise sales, this new revenue stream held out a small sliver of hope they might be able to compete against the big boys. This hope was contingent on those big boys allowing the agreement to go forward, however, and the biggest boy of all wasn’t about to let that happen.

In November of 1996, MLB rejected a joint merchandising deal with Nike and Reebok that would have netted each club between $50,000 and $100,000. Steinbrenner pushed aggressively for rejection, as he complained the amount was far too low. Four months later The Boss shocked baseball by brokering his own exclusive ten-year merchandising pact with Adidas for close to $100 million. This ensured the Yankees would net more from the sale of team gear alone than most other teams garnered from their broadcast rights, and they wouldn’t have to share one red cent with their fellow franchises.

Through carefully executed legal jujitsu, the Yankees argued the Adidas deal didn’t violate the strict letter of the properties agreement. Commissioner Bud Selig, himself a former owner, had championed Steinbrenner’s reinstatement to the game. The Yankees’ marketing deal left Selig feeling betrayed. But when he demanded the Yankees cancel their pact with Adidas, Steinbrenner responded by suing his fellow owners. In the political parlance of the day, he accused them of being “welfare queens” who refused to pull themselves up from their bootstraps, parasites who leeched off of his success rather than put in a hard day’s work. In his view, if the Yankees sold boatloads more jerseys and caps than everyone else, that was not an accident of geography or a reflection of a power imbalance, but a sign of his own stellar business acumen. Therefore, he and his team deserved to reap those rewards accordingly. The Yankees spent a lot of money to market themselves and he’d be damned if he’d see the value of his investment depressed by less industrious teams in Montréal and Kansas City. For good measure, Steinbrenner pointed to the Brewers—the team Bud Selig once owned—as one of the league’s more pronounced failures. The Brewers had logged only two lousy postseason appearances since Selig moved the franchise to Milwaukee in 1970. Selig therefore could not possibly comprehend the price of greatness as much as Steinbrenner did.

The commissioner fumed in private and lobbed a few symbolic sanctions at the Yankees and their owner. Then he negotiated a settlement that gave Steinbrenner exactly what he wanted. Thus was a small measure to level the playing field between the game’s haves and have-nots rendered toothless.

Incidents like these allowed The Boss to believe it wasn’t the Yankees’ overwhelming financial resources that led to the team’s success, but his toughness and brainpower. Members of the New York press varied in their level of criticism of Steinbrenner. Some gave The Boss credit when the Yankees began to win again, while others would never forgive him for being the myopic meddler who brought the team to its knees in the 1980s. When it came to the issue of whether Steinbrenner had the right to make the Adidas deal, however, nearly all the local scribes agreed that he did. The idea that money alone could lead the Yankees to conquering baseball and the city was too gauche for them to entertain. They preferred to believe grit and smarts held the day.

When a pair of Yankee coaches were interviewed for a managerial vacancy at another squad (Selig’s Brewers, of all teams), Kevin Kernan of the Post expressed a tenet held by all his fellow New York scribes when he asserted any team would be nuts to not hire these men. Why? Yankee pedigree put these coaches a step above the competition because the Yankees would never hire anyone but the best and the brightest. “A lot has been made of the big market-small market infrastructure of baseball,” Kernan wrote, “but the reality of the situation is that it is big brains vs. small brains that separates the winners from losers.” This was a debatable thesis, but no one in New York’s sports press dared debate it.

Likewise, the city’s “comeback” was also subject to debate, though few were willing to do so. The new New York was great if you were a tourist or a developer or had money to burn on a luxury apartment. It could feel less great if you’d remained in the city through the bad years, either due to regional chauvinism or a dearth of other options, only to face skyrocketing rents and a police force that seemed more determined to occupy your neighborhood than protect it. While the city’s minority communities felt they were targeted by the aggressive policing, Mayor Giuliani defended the NYPD’s actions unequivocally and showed little empathy for those who might serve as collateral damage in their quest to clean up the city. His personal dictionary defined freedom as “the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do and how you do it.”

New York and its Yankees had risen from the ashes. To question how either had done so was to question excellence itself. It implied you believed things were better the way they used to be, that you might even want to return to those awful days. To root for the Mets now carried a similar implication that you might pine for the stabby coke-dusted New York that tolerated drug abuse and sexual assault and firecrackers and bleach squirtings because it dared not dream things could be any better.

* * *

For much of the 1990s, the Mets seemed to have no entryway into this new world. The man who thought otherwise, who believed a path could be found and that he could chart it, was Fred Wilpon. The press conference during which Wilpon “fired” Vince Coleman was more than a wake-up call to his players. It was a wake-up call to himself and to the world. It was the first public sign he would run the Mets’ show from this point forward.

Both Fred Wilpon and his co-owner Nelson Doubleday were dedicated National League baseball fans devastated by the Giants’ and Dodgers’ move west in 1958, but the two men had little else in common. Doubleday was born into wealth and inherited a fortune from his family’s namesake publishing house. He was the great-grandnephew of Abner Doubleday, the Civil War hero who was dubbed the inventor of baseball by later mythmakers. His approach to team ownership fit his background: Assemble a solid portfolio and let your assets do the work. Frank Cashen assembled a championship team with almost no interference from Doubleday, who had almost no interest in the dirty business of that assembling. He bore a vague resemblance former New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, with his distinguished silver hair and his respectable yachtsman’s tan betraying his background as a well-off man of leisure.

Fred Wilpon came from a very different world. He grew up as the son of a funeral director in Bensonhurst and mined his own fortune in the cutthroat world of real estate. Wilpon played baseball at Lafayette High School alongside a lanky lefty named Sandy Koufax and fancied himself an authority on the game. He was known to smile on occasion but favored grimaces instead, his face always betraying the striver’s fear of being outhustled.

When Wilpon bought into the Mets in 1980, he owned a mere five percent of the team. He had his eyes on much more, however, and quickly found the means to get it. In 1986, Nelson Doubleday sold the publishing house that bore his name to the German conglomerate Bertelsmann. The publishing house technically owned the Mets but Doubleday intended to retain ownership of the team and saw no barriers to doing so until he was alerted to a contractual technicality: Wilpon possessed first right of refusal in any sale of the team. This revelation left Doubleday gobsmacked, since he had no knowledge of when or how Wilpon had obtained such a right. With this legal ammunition in his arsenal, Wilpon could make the resale process difficult and protracted for all parties involved. Outsmarted, Doubleday was forced to come to a settlement whereby he and Wilpon would purchase the Mets from Bertelsmann for $81 million. They would be equal partners, and barely on speaking terms, from that day forward.

Doubleday’s position was further weakened after he picked the wrong side in MLB’s power struggle. Commissioner Fay Vincent rubbed many owners the wrong way with his intervention during a players’ lockout in 1990, his suspension of Steinbrenner, and his public accusations that the game’s owners were colluding to artificially suppress salaries (accusations that would later prove true). Fred Wilpon backed the scheme to oust Vincent with a vote of no confidence, a coup led by fellow owner Bud Selig. Nelson Doubleday threw his lot in with Vincent’s lost cause. Once Selig rose to power, Doubleday was pushed even further to the margins.

Around the same as the infamous shape-up-or-ship-out presser, Wilpon felt confident enough to reveal his grand vision for the Mets to Sports Illustrated. He wanted of subjecting Shea Stadium’s employees to the same rigorous hospitality training as Disney World employees, the gold standard of customer service. He dreamed of replacing Shea with a state of the art facility and had commissioned a model of a sprawling entertainment complex with a gleaming retractable dome stadium, surrounded by pavilions housing a permanent world’s fair.

Wilpon held onto an article of faith that he shared with his team’s fans: The Yankees had not taken the city for good. The new facility plans were an expression of that faith, spelling out his own vision for a new New York. It harkened back to the long gone days of 1964, when the world came to Flushing, when Queens was a place where you could dream of the future, when Shea was a crown jewel, when the Mets were kings.

Next Chapter: "Great for the City"