Wanted: A True Rivalry

By David Pritchard
Posted Wednesday, March 21, 2007

I am the sort of fan who values a great rivalry.

Who doesn't love to hear a stadium rock with the power of a million voices? Rough slides. Brushbacks. Bitter post-season memories that resurface season after season. Truly great rivalries bring out the best in the game of baseball, or any sport. They connect the action on the field now to the present and the future, make victory sweet, and defeat a thing of sorrow beyond measure.

Rivalries between teams also have the capacity to achieve some not-so-great things as well. Just ask a European "football" fan (or any knowledgeable European, for that matter) to describe for you the potentialities of passion for sports gone awry. A rivalry between two national soccer teams, as it is debated by historians, even contributed to the outbreak of a war in our century*.

But this is America, to which generations of sports lovers have fled so that they might enjoy heated rivalries without the threat of dismemberment. We root passionately, but civilly. On the very edge of civility, though, lies New York baseball.

Nearly echoing the international rivalries of other countries, the rivalry between "our" Mets and "their" Atlanta Braves is so intriguing for its historical and political overtones. Every meaningful game seems to hark of the battles of Appomattox or Shiloh. It isn't lost on any Georgian that Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman was educated in the ways of total war at New York's West Point, or that the Mets play in the same city as a team with the audacity to call itself the Yankees.

Baseball, America's game, was since time immemorial a product of the North, and the histories of the two are intertwined. Baseball was brought to the South in Confederate POW camps during the war; after it, no team settled in Dixie for over a hundred years (with the exception of the American Association's Richmond Virginians, who played for one season in 1884).

Now there are five teams in the old South, but two are in Texas, which has a mind of its own, and two are in southern Florida, which is no longer "Dixie" at all. Nothing can be more Southern in the game of baseball than rooting for Ted Turner's Atlanta Braves. I say "in the game of baseball," however, to highlight an important and undeniable fact: there are plenty of other sporting activities that are plenty more Southern that have nothing to do with baseball at all. I live in north Central Florida, I can tell you: the Southeast is not baseball territory, in the same way as I remember it being up north.

This is precisely why the Atlanta Braves, irrespective of their success on the field over the years, are an inadequate arch-nemeses for you and I. If you're still reading, it means that you have become resigned to the over-arching opinionated nature of this article, and this "journalist" thanks you, heartily inviting you to consider reading on, to my final thesis:

Within a few seasons, the New York Mets and the Philadelphia Phillies will sport one of the finer rivalries in baseball.

What an utterly outrageous claim, I know. But it is not without rationale. A rivalry of true depth and sweetness would need to exhibit a few essential ingredients:

1). Geographic proximity. This is the true meat of many of the country's greatest college rivalries. Fighting over territory, redefining the hinterland where one team's realm meets the edge of another. Most time-tested rivalries in sports have a geographic component .......... except for Redskins-Cowboys. Go figure.

2). Meaningful competition. Few displays are as passionate as the show New York puts on when the Yankees and Mets clash. These games are also central in the war for the city waged by both these corporations in terms of merchandise and attendance. But with very few exceptions (2000 being a very significant one), the results of these games and this feuding are typically about as meaningful as any other in inter-league play, which is to say, not very. Two teams really must be in a position to compete directly in a pennant race, ie. for the National League East, to have a solid rivalry.

3). Psychology of the fans. It is this point that truly leads me to conjecture about the future of these two teams. Baseball, as I suggested above, is historically a Northern game. As such, one can certainly sense a palpable difference in the approach fans take to the sport in the Northeast as compared to other regions. Kansas City baseball is a quaint family outing, and Arlington baseball adequately holds us over until football season starts again. Only a few teams have fans for whom a baseball game is among the least relaxing activities. Only a special breed of people bleed the colors of baseball and feel something deep inside them need to prove their knowledge of the game. New York has these people, and I would say Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia have them too.

It has always frustrated me in recent years to observe the intellectual substance with which Mets fans blast the Braves, and, by and large, the lackadaisical response we get in return from Braves Country. As I said, this region is not baseball territory. (ie. The oft-repeated fact that Atlanta has trouble filling its stadium for the post-season). It feels silly when such zeal for contest only flows one way. And a few years ago, I began to wonder if life would make more sense if a new rivalry emerged.

For the first time, I took a serious look at the Philadelphia Phillies. Though their fan base is certainly not as animated as that of New York or Boston, there is a definite "Phillies Nation," and knowledgeable Phils fans who sweat during May games and swear at the television can be found all around the country. In fact, the Phillies fans can be down right vitriolic.

One of the most intense sporting environments I have ever witnessed outside of New York was at Veterans' Stadium during and inter-league Phillies-Yankees game. There is not much brotherly love to be lost for New York among them. The two cities are as close as binary stars, and the two share a culture and colonial history that could lend interesting context to a good pennant race. In short, Philadelphia is what I call a "real team." By this I don't refer to professional success, but rather the quality of the fan base, and the relationship between the city and the ball club. This is what makes a potential rival.

The teams of New York and Philadelphia have developed heated rivalries in every other professional sport. The Giants and Eagles have a long simmering contempt for one other, a relationship that has perked up even more so in recent years. In hockey, too, the Philadelphia Flyers and all three teams from the New York area constitute an interesting four-way hate fest that is one of the newest and hottest in the NHL. Verily, there was once a time when the Philadelphia A's and the New York Giants facing each other in the World Series was a perennial event. These two teams played out on the field the blustery relationship of two of baseball's most storied managers, Connie Mack and John McGraw.

As we set to begin the 2007 season, the Mets and the Phillies will have more reason than ever to watch each other in the standings, to consider each head-to-head match up with the division title in mind, and dare I say, engage in behavior conspicuously similar to that of teams engaged in a R-I-V-A-L-R-Y.

Jimmie Rollins has already had the gall to predict our ouster, and the Phillies seem hungry to undo us (Perhaps they're still bitter about Billy Wagner's affront in signing so close to home). The Phils have far from a perfect team, but so do the Mets. It's interesting to note that our typical strengths (bullpen) are their weaknesses, and theirs ours. Ultimately, I know that our Mets will come out on top in the end, like any starry-eyed fan should know. But maybe something will happen between our two teams this year, something different that should get the ball rolling on the next hot rivalry of the future.

Of course, "what should happen," as defined off the field, means nothing without being manifested on the diamond. No rivalry can materialize if the two teams never compete as bitter rivals on the field. The hard-fought contests, the pennant races, maybe the occasional brawl. At least for the last few decades, the Phillies and the Mets have never managed to surpass mediocrity at the same time.

Until now.

The question is this: will the passions appear? Will sparks fly, will the cannons roar with wild rage all along the New Jersey Turnpike if the Mets and Phillies find themselves in a few heated pennant races in the near future? Predicting emerging rivalries is much like predicting the success of a blind date: "maybe it will, very likely it won't." Who knew that the Mets and the Braves would eventually feud with such raucous howls after realignment landed the two in the same grouping after 25 years of divisional play? Maybe all this speculation (and that's all it is) is for naught. Who knows?

Fight on team, no matter the foe!

(*1969 "Football War" between El Salvador and Honduras)
 

David Pritchard can be reached at dluke.pritchard@gmail.com, or at
Blueandorange86@yahoo.com.