Major League Baseball

Yankees, Mets audition for Subway Series

Published Jun. 18, 2010 4:02 p.m. ET

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Bob Klapisch

The numbers are now too crazy to ignore, even for the haters who figured the Mets’ best strategy was to flip the calendar to 2011. That was a month ago, when last place beckoned, David Wright was staring at a 240-strikeout season and Jerry Manuel was headed for the ash-heap.

But the baseball world morphs quickly, just like the perception that the Mets were beyond hopeless – they were useless. They’ve won seven in a row, nine of 10, and are so close to first place this weekend’s Subway Series almost feels like a showdown of superpowers.

The Yankees, still atop the AL East despite losing two of three to the Phillies, have plenty of firepower to throw at the Mets this weekend. But Jerry Manuel’s team has weapons, too.

If the Yankees have Phil Hughes and his 9-1 record, the Mets have Mike Pelfrey, who’s won just as many games and has replaced Johan Santana as the No. 1 starter.

If the Yankees have Robinson Cano, who leads the majors with a .372 average, the Mets have Wright, who’s batting .404 this month and is tied for the NL lead in RBIs.

If the Yankees have a 23-9 home record, the best in baseball, the Mets have won six in a row on the road, which should make for one of the better all-New York series in some time.

The rest of the country would likely gag at the prospect of another Mets-Yankees World Series – the 2000 Series had a 12.4 rating, the lowest in history – but there are several factors that make this scenario at least possible.

The Mets are benefitting from the absence of a dominant team in the National League this year. The Phillies, who scored runs at an AL-like pace in 2009, are now ranked 12th, clearly missing the aura of invincibility that intimidated their opponents (especially, the Mets).

Prior to the start of the three-game series with the Yankees, manager Charlie Manuel addressed that very deficit.

When someone asked if the third-place Phillies were too trusting of their ability to launch another late-season comeback, Manuel said, “I hope they don’t feel that way. If you think you’ve got it all figured out, this game will shut you down.

“Every game right now is a big game,” Manuel said. “Our league has definitely gotten better; we have a losing record in our division. (the other teams) have been beating us.”

The manager was understandably in better spirits after a 7-1 rout of the Yankees on Thursday, having beaten A.J. Burnett and Andy Pettitte back-to-back. “I enjoyed that, we played with some life,” Manuel said. “This is what we have to do, we have to keep taking series.”

The Yankees paid the requisite respect to the defending National League, but didn’t dwell on the setbacks; they were ready to move on. But they weren’t talking about the Mets just yet, not after Joba Chamberlain was booed off the mound after allowing three runs without retiring a batter in the ninth inning.

That wasn’t the only blemish: Burnett couldn’t make it out of the fourth inning on Wednesday, running his current slump to 16 earned runs in his last 16 innings.

Burnett won’t pitch against the Mets, as he’s scheduled to start against the Diamondbacks on Monday. Still, the Yankee hierarchy will spend the weekend trying to understand how such a talented pitcher with an elite-caliber fastball can be so vulnerable at times.

“This is something we need to talk about and find out what’s going on,” Girardi said. “We’re going to get this right.”

The Yankees instead will place their hopes in Javier Vazquez, who’s 5-1 since mid-May and Hughes, who’ll face Pelfrey in a dream match-up on Saturday, and Sabathia, who gets Johan Santana on Sunday.

Santana could have his hands full against the Yankees’ lineup, given how small his margin of error has become this season. Fangraphs.com says the lefthander’s average fastball is under 90-mph (89.2) for the first time in his career, which would explain why his strikeouts are also shrinking, less than six per nine innings, another career low.

But by Sunday, we should have a fairly good sense if the Yankees have processed the back-to-back losses to the Phillies, and, more importantly, if the Mets’ winning streak was just a mirage constructed on the backs of the hopeless Orioles and Indians.

If we’ve learned anything about this team, it’s that their unpredictability is almost a prophecy – the Mets have gone from first place to last, and are now just a half-game away from a full resurrection.

What better place to test the rebirth than in the Bronx?

“We appear to have hit our stride offensively. But that will be a good test for us offensively, because of the quality of pitchers that you’ll see with that type of club,” Manuel said. “We’re playing a world championship team. There’s a lot of things you have to do well in order to beat them or remain competitive. That’s what we have to do.”

And if they do? The Mets might just run the table with the weekend’s adrenaline. An October rematch might not play in Boston or St. Louis or the west coast, but a mid-summer series in the Bronx has an unmistakable theme: October dress rehearsal.

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