A 25-YEAR REIGN

NYC became a Yankees town in ’93

WE DO love our anniversaries so, and this baseball season will provide one, and an appropriate one given the restoration of the Yankees as the team with the biggest target on their backs in the whole sport.

For 2018 represents the 25th anniversary of New York’s most recent conversion. For a solid quarter century now, this has been a Yankees town. It happened in 1993, and it’s continued ever since, even as the Mets have done their damnedest a couple of times to halt that tide, most recently in 2015 and ’16, when they really did get close.

OK, a disclaimer here: In some ways, this has always been a silly debate (though one I have always enjoyed, admittedly). If you are a Mets fan, it really shouldn’t concern you how many of your friends, family or coworkers root for the Yankees — and vice versa. Your team is your team.

The reason why this has ever even been a subject, of course, is because baseball is a different animal in New York, always has been. Nobody questions the status of the Giants, Knicks and Rangers in the other major sports, for instance, for even when the Jets, Nets, Islanders and Devils have enjoyed more success, they never came close to breaching the dominant teams’ dominance in the market.

But the Yankees shared New York from the start, and even in their most dynastic decades of the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s and ’50s there were entire segments of the city where rooting for the Yankees was akin to rooting for Stalin. Famously, in 1958, the first of four straight years where the Yankees would have the city to themselves, their home attendance actually fell by some 70,000 fans.

And this is fact: The advent of the Mets united (at least for a long while) the disenfranchised Dodgers and Giants fans, and allowed the Mets to outdraw the Yankees in 1964 and every succeeding year through 1975. And even after the Yankees rebuilt the old Yankee Stadium and seized control of the town while the Mets were drifting off into irrelevance, that was only a temporary hold: The Mets zoomed past the Yankees in 1984, and for nine straight sea- sons were only occasionally even threatened.

That’s 20 of the first 33 seasons the teams shared the city when the town was clearly painted orange and blue. That isn’t a matter of debate. That’s fact. But so is this: In 1993, the Yankees emerged from one of their darkest chapters and chased the Blue Jays all the way to September, topping 2 million in attendance for the first time in three years. And at the same time the Mets became not only one of the most unlikable teams in the city’s sporting history, they were an abject baseball calamity — losing 103 games, drawing barely 1.8 million to old Shea Stadium.

And that, as they say, was that.

The Mets have tried to break that stranglehold, but the flying head start the Yankees got on them from 1993-98 has been far too much to overcome. The 2000 NL champs were an enormously popular team still dwarfed by a Yankees team fixing to win its third title in four years — at Shea, of all places. The 2006 team was a feel-good ride from start to near-finish … yet still won exactly as many games as the Yankees did — and drew almost 900,000 fewer fans.

Even in 2015 and ’16, when the Yankees were flailing and the Mets were rising, making the World Series and two straight playoff appearances, the gap narrowed but the Yankees were still the more popular box-office draw. And there were still plenty of Yankees caps and jackets and jerseys to be seen. Even in Queens.

Again, this really shouldn’t make Mets fans feel any worse about their team, or make Yankees fans feel any better. But the debate exists, and it is real, even if we are now 25 years into the reality that this is about as one-sided a debate as there ever could be. Happy anniversary!