People have been asking me why I haven't written more about the baseball off-season. I think perhaps the major reason is that it's mostly about which of the handful of very wealthy teams can afford the top free agents, a question that doesn't interest me very much. When Enos "Country" Slaughter (player from 1938-1958) was asked if it bothered him that players get paid so much more now than he got paid he simply said, "Well. in my day the owners got all the money" and when asked how he felt about Reggie Jackson owning a number of Rolls Royces he simply said "I can go anywhere in my pick-up truck he can go in a Rolls Royce." As recently as 1979 Mets third-baseman Richie Hebner had a job during the off-season digging graves. But this all changed when Marvin Miller became head of the player's union and negotiated arbitration and free agency. Instead of insisting that all players could immediately become free agents, as he could have, he agreed to six years of experience. The owners thought they had a victory until it quickly became clear that limiting the number of free agents drove up the price considerably, which then could be used as arguments for arbitration for non-free-agents!
Both the Mets and the Yankees have teams which could produce a subway series, but only if everything goes right. Which is highly unlikely. Some of the young pitching on the Mets could fall apart and some of the older players on the Yankees could fall apart (literally!). My guess is that some things will go well with both teams and some things won't and there is not enough margin for error in either team to keep them from ending up somewhere in the middle of their divisions. And I certainly agree with Juliet Macur in The New York Times that the Yankees should release Alex Rodriquez as soon as possible: whatever minimum contribution he may make is certainly not worth the distraction!
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