This is the way it used to be for so many springs in New York City — even after the Yankees started to build their dynasty in the back half of the ’90s, even after the Mets rose from irrelevance at around the same time. That was the way it was in those days. That was the law of the land.
Back then, baseball season — even as New York became the biggest baseball town anywhere, even after both teams began to regularly attract 6 million fans a year to their doomed old stadiums — didn’t really begin until the day after the Knicks were eliminated from the playoffs, whether that was in April or May or June.
On the evening of Tuesday, May 14, 1996, Dwight Gooden lived out a sports movie in real time at Yankee Stadium, throwing a most improbable no-hitter against the Seattle Mariners of Junior, A-Rod and Buhner. And while that was an indisputably glorious moment, it had to share the city’s attention simultaneously with the Knicks fighting well but losing 94-81 to the 72-win Bulls, eliminating them from the East semifinals in five games.
Three years later, in the third regular-season Subway Series, the Mets fell into chaos — GM Steve Phillips firing half of Bobby Valentine’s coaches when they lost 6-3 to the Yankees on Saturday, June 5, 1999, falling to 27-28. In most pockets of the season, that would’ve been a 24-hour fire alarm (better still, it worked: The Mets went 40-15 over their next 55 games).
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