LEIT' MY FIRE
Ex-pitcher knows how rivalry series can turn around season
Three games in June may not define a baseball season, but the Subway Series is not just any three games.
The Yankees and Mets will enter Citi Field on Friday charging in opposite directions — the Yankees on fire with the second-best record in MLB at 40-18 and the Mets having dropped 11 of their past 13 while sinking to 27-32.
Will any result be enough to change the narrative of two seasons that seemingly are headed for much different endings?
“I would say broad-based, no, because it’s 162 games, it’s a marathon and all that, but there are also epiphany moments within the season I do believe, certainly as a player, where you have that, ‘Ah, OK, I got it. I feel good about it,’ ” said Al Leiter, the YES and MLB Network analyst who pitched on both sides of the rivalry. “You can roll with it.”
Leiter speaks from experience. He was part of the 1999 Mets team that entered the Subway Series on an early-June weekend with a record of 27-26, scuffling with six straight losses — the same streak they’ll bring into Friday. The Mets lost the first two games of the series, and after Saturday’s loss, general manager Steve Phillips fired three of manager Bobby Valentine’s coaches: pitching coach Bob Apodaca, hitting coach Tom Robson and bullpen coach Randy Niemann.
The Mets won the following day in the series finale — backed by seven strong innings from Leiter and Mike Piazza’s home run off Roger Clemens — which began a stretch of 40 wins in their next 55 games and a season that ended in Game 6 of the NLCS.
“It was kind of the turnaround for the 1999 Mets,” Leiter said.
“The Mets were really struggling and it looked like they were in danger of slipping out of it,” longtime Mets radio voice Howie Rose said. “Bobby was ticked off [by the firings], and he said something like, ‘You watch, we’re going to win 40 out of the next 55,’ or something like that, and damn if they didn’t. That was a springboard, no question.”
Of course, the Yankees came out of that series just fine themselves, just a blip on the radar as they went on to win the World Series against the Braves in October.
And though players on both sides may try to downplay this weekend’s series as just three games in a season of 162 — as Leiter said they should — the three-time World Series champ now can admit how much of an impact it can have.
“There’s no doubt you look at this series, and if you can be talking Sunday night that your team just swept or won two of three, you’d say how important this series was,” Leiter said.
Citi Field has been a house of horrors and a soundtrack of boos lately for the Mets, and this series could either send that to a nadir or begin to change the noise, even if only briefly.
“Whether the Mets have been up and the Yankees a little down or vice versa, they take on a different tenor and tone,” Rose said. “It’s always a trip.”