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“Y’all gotta start looking at a different level. We are through the looking glass here, people. White is black. And black is white.”
Yep. The way the New York baseball season has gone so far after 120 days would flummox even old Jim Garrison as he tried to explain the inexplicable: the Yankees are way down after being way up for 2 ½ months, the Mets are must-see TV after spending two months playing virtually unwatchable baseball.
“We’ve had our struggles this year,” Carlos Mendoza said. “But we’re starting to play some good baseball now.”
“We’re a really good team that has played s–ty of late,” Aaron Boone said.
White is black. Black is white.
Through the looking glass, people.
The Yankees were the first team to win 10 games this year, the first to win 40, the first to win 50. As recently as June 15 the Yankees were 3 ½ up on the Orioles in the East and some 14 games clear of the AL’s final wild card. The Mets, as recently as May 29, had a worse record than all but four teams in baseball, and were six full games out of the final wild card.
The Mets, obviously, were going to be sellers at the deadline and they couldn’t give tickets away to Citi Field on a lot of nights. The Yankees were sure to be buyers — although when you’re playing close to .700 ball it’s hard to conjure what classifies as a “need.” It felt like a flawless transfer from the mostly feel-good seasons the Rangers and Knicks had just completed to the Yankees.
This was a month ago.
A month ago.
And now: White is black. Up is down. The Yankees of July are looking every bit as helpless as the Mets of May did, and the Mets of July are looking every bit as dangerous as the Yankees of May. The final three innings of the final Mets-Yankees game were played before 75 percent Mets fans. If it’s hard to imagine another baseball season like this one, that’s because there’s never been another baseball season like this one, not in the 62 years going back to 1962.
It’s like a baseball version of “Trading Places”: One day the 2024 Yankees are Louis Winthorpe III, commodities director at Duke & Duke; the next they’re Billy Ray Valentine, homeless con man. One day the Mets are Eddie Murphy, the next Dan Aykroyd. It’s unknown who’s pulling the strings on all of this like Randolph and Mortimer Duke.
And so now it is Mendoza who must say at least once a day, as if to remind himself and his team of this fact: “We’ve done well but we have to keep it up. We have to keep playing smart and working hard and good things will follow.”
And it’s Boone who has to daily remind everyone — starting with his own ballplayers — that there’s still a whole lot of season left and — all together now — “it’s all there in front of us.”
And all of that is true, of course. By next week both teams will have reached their 108th game of the season, the official two-thirds mark, and the way the first two 54-game segments have gone for both teams it’s starkly apparent that one third of a season can have absolutely zero resemblance to another.
We’ve seen the good, the bad, both sides now for both teams now. When the Yankees were 50-22 they were winning at a .694 pace; the Mets are 39-13 for their last 42, a .690 clip. When the Mets were 10-25 to sink to 22-33, the winning percentage looked like this: .286; the Yankees are at .312 for their last 32.
My father used to say: “The difference between a bad haircut and a good haircut is about a week and a half.”
Buck Showalter used to say: “Ten days is all it takes to turn you from a fool to a genius in baseball. And it only takes 10 more days to change it all the way back.”
Different words, same idea. And in a baseball season, there’s 17 of those 10-day stretches and it’ll drive you crazy trying to predict one from the other. After 10 of them, after 120 days, we see that as clearly as ever as we go back and forth from Queens to The Bronx, back and forth through the looking glass.
