Yankees and Mets make Subway Series playoff dream possible

We'll try to be respectful here because there's still a lot of work to do before we can really talk about it. The Yankees free themselves-and their city-from an obstacle, the Kansas City Royals, by eliminating them 3: 1 on Thursday evening at the Kauffman Stadium and thus completing a very factual 3: 1 series of the American League Division.

So you are four games away from your first application for the World Series since 2009, and on Saturday you will cheerfully look at the Guardians and the Tigers and hope that you will play for about 5½ hours and burn both bullpens.

They join the Mets in baseball's Final Four. The Mets enjoy the first of three straight days on Thursday before heading out in search of the four games they need for their first World Series appearance since 2015. They'll have a quiet evening Friday night, the Padres and Dodgers plan to last about 18 innings before learning whether they'll fly to LAX or two hours south on I-5.

So yes, neither the Yankees nor the Mets know who will be their next opponents, so it probably makes little sense to think about a subway series.

You know what?

Anyway, let's start thinking about it.

Let's let our imagination run wild a little. Let us think about four other victories of the Yankees and four other victories of the Mets and about what this will mean for our city and the baseball fans that make up this best of all baseball cities. Let's remember how remarkable the year 2000 was and how quickly that moment passed.

Sports is about dreams, right?

Let's start with dreaming small baseball dreams as a possible prelude to the biggest ones.

“We can play for a pennant now,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “And we are happy about it. I'm really proud of the way we played. We played really good baseball in a lot of close games in this series.”

The cheering on the Yankees' field Thursday was a little more subdued than at the Mets' 24 hours earlier, but that was understandable. They were in someone else's house. And they had relied much more on their overall excellence, much less on the emotion of the moments, than the Mets had to.

But the clubhouse celebration was just as sweet, glasses for everyone, champagne for everyone, happy bubble baths for everyone. And as Aaron Judge emphasized, the frame for this jubilee was just as convincing as all the foci of crisis that the Mets had benefited in the past few weeks.

“Everything I could think about was that our season ended here in 2023,” said Judge, who started again on Thursday evening to beat the ball with authority, and it certainly looks like it would be his usual handful , considering whoever the pitchers are going to get him out next week, Cleveland or Detroit. “We didn’t want something like that to happen again.”

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Of course, it's easy to forget that because 2023 was so memorable for the Yankees. The Yankees came to Kansas City having already been eliminated from the postseason. They won the middle game of a three-game series and thus secured the 82nd victory and a record record, the only consolation of an empty season. They handed the Royals their 106th loss of the season. The games were all played in front of friends and family.

On the last two evenings, there was an electrifying and hopeful experience for the locals in the Kauffman Stadium, because there was the possibility that the Yanke's season was coming to an end for the second time in a row. Giancarlo Stanton made sure that this would not happen on Wednesday, and Gerrit Cole contributed to this on Thursday.

“What a series for the boys,” Judge said.

And what a time for the city. What a week it's going to be next week, starting Sunday in California, either at Dodger Stadium or Petco Park for the Mets, then back in New York, back at Yankee Stadium for the Yankees and a guest from the Midwest who's still must be determined. A week of table tennis between the east coast and west coast. Buy your caffeine in bulk.

Since the Dodgers left Brooklyn and the Giants left Manhattan, we haven't been to New York, New York much in the postseason. Only twice have the Mets and Yankees made it this far in the same season. The first time, Kenny Rogers passed Andruw Jones at the bottom of 11th in Atlanta, and that was it.

The next time, a year later, we pulled the one-armed bandit on the baseball slot and it came out 7-7-7. We have five games. We got Roger Clemens to throw the bat to Mike Piazza. We had Derek Jeter, the game 4 in the lead with a Homerun, and Luis Sojo's 18-hopper against Al ladder, who secured the parade, and Piazza's shot against Mariano Rivera, who tried to make game 5 as a draw, and instead in the Bernie Williams' glove died and tears of joy from Joe Torre and George Steinbrenner.

Somehow that was 24 years ago.

Maybe it's too early to book something, but it's never too early to dream. The Mets have a chance. The Yankees have a chance. The city has a chance.

“It’s definitely going to be a fun time in New York,” Judge said. “It will be fun to look forward to getting another chance to play against them later.”

Store your old tokens in a drawer. Prepare your Omny. Have your MetroCard ready. You never know.