Mets, Yankees in LCS in same season for only the third time

It is more baseball season than ever in New York now, as much as it ever could be — a game a day and sometimes two for the Mets and Yankees, with both teams in the League Championship Series in the same year for only the third time in history. It first happened in 1999 and then again in 2000, and that year we ended up with a Subway Series the Yankees won in five games.

In ‘99, the Mets had made it all the way to Game 6 of the National League Championship Series against the Braves before finally losing in the 11th, when Kenny Rogers walked in the Braves’ winning run. It’s noteworthy that the Mets even made it that far after having fallen behind 0-3 in that series.

Before Game 4 of the NLCS that year Bobby Valentine, managing the Mets then, said this about his team trying to become the first in history to come from 0-3 down and win a postseason series:

“Someday, somebody’s going to do it.”

Of course, the Red Sox did it to the Yankees five years later in the ALCS of 2004. Valentine’s Mets didn’t get their shot at Joe Torre’s Yankees in October 1999. They had to wait another year, and then New York had the kind of Subway Series it used to get a lot back in the ’50s, when the Dodgers were still in Brooklyn and the Giants were still not so far away from Yankee Stadium in the Polo Grounds. The Yankees and the Dodgers, in fact, played four World Series in the ’50s against each other, and the Yankees and the Giants played one.

It was a time when New York thought it would always be the baseball capital of the world at this time of year.

Now, all this time later, it is the Mets who go up against the Los Angeles Dodgers as they try to make it back to the World Series. And there is a chance, depending on how things go now, that both New York teams make it to the World Series — and if the Mets lose and the Yankees win the next round, we could get two New York-vs.-Dodgers series one right after another, just involving coast-to-coast flights now and not MetroCard rides.

Two New York teams. Two League Championship Series. The Mets trying to win the four games that will put them into just the sixth World Series since they came into existence in 1962, trying to win their first since 1986. The Yankees? They are trying to win their first World Series — and just play in their first Series — in 15 years. In Yankee Stadium years, that feels like 115.

“Every time you went out of your house,” the great Joe Torre told me once about that Subway Series of 2000, “it was only baseball. All anybody wanted to talk about in New York was baseball. It’s the way it was when I was a kid.”

Joseph Paul Torre was a child of Brooklyn who would later grow up to manage the Mets, Yankees and Dodgers, and who was at the old Yankee Stadium in 1956 as a 15-year-old kid when Don Larsen pitched his perfect World Series game against the Dodgers. So a child of Brooklyn was also a child of that time in the ’50s, when New York did seem to own October in baseball. Now it feels that way again, whether one of the New York teams or both of them keep going from here.

“When you win in New York,” Torre said once, “there’s nothing like it.”

The Mets? They got that ninth-inning home run from Francisco Lindor to officially put them into the tournament, got a three-run, ninth-inning homer from Pete Alonso when they were two outs away from next season in the Wild Card Series against the Brewers and then finished off the first-place Phillies on Wednesday, when Lindor made his own grand slam swing to set up the series against the Dodgers that begins on Sunday night at Dodger Stadium.

There is a famous line from a giant of a sports columnist named Jimmy Cannon, one September day out of the past in the press box at the old Yankee Stadium, when he heard a lot of chatter from what was still a male-dominated place about college football games being played that day.

“Baseball, gentlemen,” Cannon growled. “Baseball.”

It is that way in New York right now. Four teams left in big league baseball by tomorrow. Two of them from New York. You’d think it would have happened more than just two times in the past. It hasn’t. But it sure is happening now. Let’s play two.