Who Owns Baseball In New York?

HOLLANDER: Baseball divides New York like no other sport. It always has. This summer, who owns baseball in this town?

The Mets get the populist vote. They play in Queens, the bastion of New York's neglected, vanishing middle class. Queens represents old New York City authenticity while nurturing the city's most diverse ethnic melting pot. The Mets progressive international roster perfectly fits Queens' open door to new Americans. Snubbed by the ungrateful Jets and dismissed by the snobby mayor, Queens is the unwanted borough. It is the borough of hard-working, thick-necked losers. The majority of New Yorkers identify with the perennial uphill struggle of Queens and the Mets. The teams' burgeoning success makes them very appealing. But they do not own baseball in New York.

The Yankees don't own it either, though if they could buy it, they would. A decade ago they made sense to us. Names like O'Neill, Brosius, Williams and Rivera, restored a quiet dignity to the Yankees championship tradition. They did it with class and selflessness. They were built with brains and character. They won us over. But today's Yankees are selfish, indifferent and boorish. They were forced on us, and on each other. They feel more like wealthy, visiting guests than partners in our cause.

Baseball in this city belongs to coach Mike Turco and Monroe High School in the Bronx. Blocks from Yankee Stadium, the Monroe Eagles chase their fourth New York City baseball championship in five years. They do it on a Boynton Avenue home field that's filled with rocks, enclosed in barbed wire, and has a centerfield that slopes downhill to a backdrop of projects with broken windows. New York baseball also belongs to Bayside High School's Anthony Velazquez, who failed earlier this month in his bid for a third consecutive perfect game, pitching a one-hitter instead. "I really didn't care about pitching a perfect game," he told reporters. "I just wanted to win."

New York baseball belongs to these kids and their families who go home after their games and talk about it around the kitchen table. It belongs to the mothers who wash their jerseys for the next game. These kids can't afford a ticket to the big stadiums that are just down the street. They certainly can't afford the $4 stadium pretzel. But they play, every day. In a city where fields and coaches are increasingly hard to come by, they gather their bats and mitts and cleats and make do. They own baseball in New York. The Mets and Yankees are just taking up space subsidized by involuntary taxpayer assistance.

SULLIVAN: So you get on your sports purity soapbox and write your parochial missive on how the masses own baseball in New York. You know damn well they don't. The high school playing kids, I am all for that. But get real, Hollander, just because once in a great while you get the nerve to visit the Bronx, don't get all Monroe High School on me.

Dave, New Yorkers have been playing Little League and high school baseball for years. I played baseball in the Bronx when the Yankees and Mets were both mediocre, but we didn't feel we owned basball. That is the venue of the pros. Look, the Mets are my team and they are hot now and New Yorkers are coming around again. Where were they in 2003, as I suffered under Art Howe's regime? Until Willie Randolph's crew wins a World Series those damn Yankees still own New York.

The 2006 Yankees are a brutish and thuggish lot, and I would love to let all the Bronx Little Leaguers loose in that locker room with bats and beat those spoiled Bronx Bombers-but they are still New York's team. The Mets have to win a World Series for that to change. That is how it works in this city, Dave. You win the big ones, you win the city.

HOLLANDER: What a heartless, dopey bastard you've become. Right, you played baseball in the Bronx. I'd like to take you up to Hunts Point right now, gag you with a Spalding and beat you silly with a stickball bat. "Mets-Yankees, Mets-Yankees?" Please stop. It is so tired. Does anybody see or do anything else in this town?* Have you all become so glassy-eyed, so pliant from the multi-media inundation of the two local baseball media conglomerates that you are too scared or too stupid to bite the ass that shits all over you? Baseball is dying in this country because of men of weak imagination and lazy character-men like you-who go home after work, flip on YES, SNY, TNT and/or ESPN and, like a mental patient, munch on burnt Jiffy Pop while succumbing to the narcotic effect of the morning-noon-and-night Yankees-Mets marketing campaign. C.J., you are the unwitting but inexcusable accomplice to the ruination of baseball in America. That's right: I don't suck-ass to the sports-entertainment-merchandise Inc.'s, LLC's and subsidiary interests of the Mets and Yankees

The kids from Monroe and Bayside live here, in the five boroughs. They buy groceries here. They don't tend their Connecticut gardens on off-days or get name-dropped on Page Six for being spotted at Lotus. Neither YES nor SNY covers these boys, but they should. These kids, and only these kids, keep baseball alive here. The Mets and Yankees don't own baseball in New York, C.J. They just own you.

SULLIVAN: Dave, you have clearly lost your mind. I am trying to take this column to a new level, and you're having me gagged and beaten in Hunts Point. Take your medications and let us get back to being sports writers. I will not sink to your level. Dave, the argument regarding New York baseball has always been about Major League Baseball. Far from being a dying sport in this city, New York is becoming a baseball town once again. With all the Latin players and Latin population in New York, baseball is ready to reclaim its crown. New York City summers-and especially this summer-baseball will be the talk of the streets. And the conversation will be Mets and the Yankees. That is not media brain-washing. That is how it is. The best of the best are now playing in our city, and New York once again cares deeply about baseball.

Now the Mets are back in play. They are a good and fun team, but the Yankees still own New York. The Mets have to dethrone the Yankees like they did in 1969 and 1986, and almost in 2000. But the Yankees are still this city's champs. The Mets need to have a consistent decade of good baseball, and with this young crew of players, we just might get that. But until Jose Reyes and David Wright have a ticker tape parade down Wall Street the Yankees still are the champs of New York baseball.