I had such high hopes for you, John Giuffo, after reading your wonderfully vitriolic rebuttal to those NYC-hating, passive-aggressive sushi gobblers out West. But your "Why you should root for the Mets" piece is filled with the same kind of latent self-loathing suffered by our unfortunate tree hugging friends in California. It would appear that years of choking on too much exhaust from the Long Island Expressway has made your recollections a bit fuzzy.
As we've all come to realize, the entire country suffers from attention deficit disorder and/or selective amnesia when it comes to sports, especially the teams they love to hate. Most of the "real" Mets fans that you so fondly champion in your piece are middle-class kids in their 30s who grew up during the mid-1980s when the Mets were the team to beat in New York, not the Yankees. I assure you that Wayne Tolleson, Mike Pagliarulo, Dan Pasqua and Alvaro Espinoza would have given their left nut to be hated back then. The point is, nobody cared. The Yanks were as harmless and hapless as, well, the Mets usually are. I'm not asking anyone to feel sorry, or even root for the Yanks.
Now that the Yankees are good again, you and all of your lobotomized friends rail against the monolithic, overspending, free agent-poaching juggernaut. Two words for you pal: Tough shit! The nucleus of this well-oiled Yankee machine is homegrown. Jeter, Bernie, Jorge, Pettitte and Mariano all came through the system. And by the way, the Mets ain't the Minnesota Twins. Their owners' pockets are just as deep and they've written checks just as large as the Yankees. The Mets payroll is $99.8 million; the Yankees is $114.3 million. And Mike Piazza certainly isn't making the league minimum.
By the way, your boy Piazza's a real New Yorker, too. Just like that other famous New Yorker, '86 World Series MVP Ray Knight. Not only is Knight as hayseed as Clemens, but he makes Giuliani look like Eugene Debs. While we're on the subject, I bet Tim and Susan probably root for the Mets because "Mets" sounds a lot like "Debs". Coincidence? I think not. Shouldn't they really be rooting for the Yanks? After all, Cone is a big union guy -- and Mets stars Benny Agbayani and Rick Reed are former replacement players (some call them "scabs.")
For the good of baseball and your sanity, get over yourselves, Mets fans. Please. All of your yammering is starting to make Tim McCarver's shtick sound concise.
Suck it up! Yanks in 5.
-- Jason Corliss
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