I Don’t Think About You At All 

To hear Mets fans and media tell the tale, an 8-2 loss to the Yankees on Sunday, May 19^th, totally derailed the Mets season. The defeat, in front of the braying Yankee faithful, obviously shattered the former-Yankee-now-Met star Juan Soto’s confidence for this season and beyond.   

It was only a matter of time.  

Or so Mets fans and media would have you believe. Their perspective is colored by deep, historically earned ennui and more than a smidge of little brother syndrome. So, in the hopes of reality-testing their fears, I’ll direct our attention to a New York City wordsmith (I know Mets fans, he’s a Yankee guy, but hear me out): 

Following Hov’s logic, I got my hands on a few storyboards that illustrate an objective reality that juuust might differ from the doom and Soto-may-never-hit-a-home-run-again gloom that misery-pilled Mets fans seem to default to. Oh, and we’ll be paying special attention to the difference in how we talk about the Mets versus their big, bad crosstown rival Yankees.  

The truth that will set Mets fans free is that their pessimism and sense of inferiority to the Yankees exists completely in their imagination – in the world of narrative.  

By this year’s numbers, Mets fans root for a good team. They don’t have to feel so bad about it. Maybe, just maybe, letting go would help avoid social media ratios like this: 

For the non-terminally online, that’s social media personality and Yankee fan Tommy Smokes dunking on platonic opposite-of-ideal Mets superfan Frank the Tank (a true New Jersey born-and-bred sports fanatic and weight loss icon).  

Tommy is calling Frank’s recent unhinged, glasses-chewing scream rant a return to the natural order of things, as opposed to the timid optimism that a fast Mets start to the season had engendered. Tough scenes. Frank was kvetching that the series loss to the Yankees (and Soto’s performance therein) had irreparably tanked this Mets season. Adding insult to hyperbole, Frank further speculated that Soto’s woeful 1 for 10 batting performance set him on the path to become the next Bobby Bonilla, the poster boy for Mets player (and contract) mismanagement. 

Big yikes – let’s give those predictions a temperature check, starting with a clear-eyed reassessment of where the Mets stand compared to recent years, then springing into some armchair psychology backed by cold, hard numbers on the current state of Mets vs. Yankees fandom. 

My message to Mets fans in this, the year of our lord 2025, is simple – it may not be perfect, but be grateful.  

In that vein, I present Detective Marty Hart of True Detective, played by the ever-reliable Woody Harrelson: 

That’s you, Met fans. Old, tired, maybe a little bruised and battered – slightly orange – but alive. This year, you’re rooting for a team with serious World Series aspirations. Compared to any number of recent years (or decades) that should feel pretty good. I know, I know, it’s only June. But, given that every Mets season feels like an eternity ^[1], might as well have a hot start.  

I don’t expect you to blindly trust me on this – in fact, I’m actually pretty pumped to break the numbers out. Over the last couple years, we worked with one of the smartest owners in sports – a private equity company called Arctos – to build a set of dashboards based on the narratives and stories present in media coverage of MLB teams. We call them storyboards. They were kind enough to let me republish these in part, so let’s take a look at a Mets storyboard that measures how strong the media narrative has been in various core subcategories over the last ten years. 

This model parses Mets’ media clippings for the presence of narrow but pretty normal stories. Things like “The Mets starting rotation is great”, “The Mets infield is better than expected”, or “The Mets bullpen stinks on ice”, for example. There’s a lot of detail under the surface that goes beyond just sentiment, but for the sake of simplicity we roll all those into a net score here, like “Roster”. We do the same for the 29 other teams in the MLB and see where the Mets scores stack up for each category. A #1 ranking means that the stories we tell about the Mets within that category are more often describing things in that category as good, surprising, or encouraging than for other teams. 

So, in the name of differentiating material reality from long-ingrained pessimism, I’ll direct your attention to the Roster and On-Field metric categories. These narratives rank 7^th best and 5^th best in the MLB respectively, with a significant positive bump^[2] since last year for both.  

I’ll pass the mic to Detective Hart again for another message to Mets fans inspired by those numbers: 

Thank you, eloquent as ever. Point being, after years of being dumped on, the story being told about the Mets has improved in the two categories that directly relate to actual product the most – Roster and On-Field performance. That’s the media recognizing that this 2025 Mets roster is both a) better and b) has been performing better in actual games than last year’s team – and last year they made the NLCS and gave the eventual-champion Dodgers a series! The MLB standings as we motor through June also reflect this; the Mets lead their division and are neck-and-neck with the Yankees in the win column. 

So what gives? What possesses Frank to default to this kind of pessimistic outlook year after year – and why does it resonate to the degree it does with the fandom?  

That right there is impressive negativity. Question is, are superfans like Frank and Evan Roberts just darkest-possible-reality-inclined lost causes or is there something deeper going on?  

Spoiler alert – they aren’t. Turns out, the irrational pessimism of Mets fans shows up in the data. Case in point, the Mets Fanbase ranking sitting at a not-so-rosy 23^rd overall on our previous storyboard. There are two sub-categories below that aggregate that really help unspool the story behind this.  

Mets Fanbase Sub-Categories: 

That 17^th overall Local Media Market ranking can be reasoned away as typical tough NY media coverage. The startlingly low Fan Base Loyalty Ranking, however… 

I posit that this low Fan Base Loyalty ranking is not because Mets fans don’t love their team – but because they love their team by hating on them.  

This theory is supported by the behavior of Mets superfans we’ve referenced (and pretty much every host and caller interaction on WFAN aka Mets crazies local radio). They love their Mets, but they show this love by saying they are cursed, will never win, and otherwise telling anyone who will listen how torturous it is to root for them, which the sentiment machine flags as disloyalty. It isn’t that, it’s just how damaged fans do their thing.  

That noted, I still felt there was a missing piece to the Met fan psychosis collage. I realized there really is only one unavoidable way to truly understand Met fans, in this vein or any other.  

Sadly, one must compare them to Yankee fans. 

Picture the Mos Eisley Cantina of Star Wars fame (is the song coming to you?), then picture the infamous right-field bleachers of Yankee Stadium.  

I’d like to pose a question. Which group would you rather spend a Saturday afternoon with?  Me personally, I’m choosing the aliens with a live band playing a funky brand of space jazz^[3] every damn time. 

Disclaimer: I feel it is appropriate at this juncture to disclose that I am a Mariners fan and thus not necessarily partial to the Evil Empire *ahem* the New York Yankees. This may have already been more than obvious, 

That acknowledged, let’s jump into the Yankees team storyboards for some helpful contrast to our Mets findings: 

Predictably given the proximity of their current records, the Yankees’ Roster and On-Field rankings at 6^th and 8^th fall just behind the Mets’ (7^th, 5^th respectively). What’s really juicy, in my opinion, is the Yankees’ 14^th overall Fanbase ranking as opposed to the Mets’ at 23^rd. 

Now, as with the Mets, here are the sub-categories that make up that bang average Fanbase ranking.  

Yankees Fanbase Sub-Categories: 

Looking for differences from the Mets’ equivalents, I first processed the Loyalty rank of 15^th, noting that it has impressively hovered around that range for the last ten years^[4] . Then, I turned to the Local Media Market metric…  

And instantly began circling, highlighting, and internally screaming at that uber-positive 5^th best ranking – especially compared to where the Mets fell. 

Yankees: 

Mets: 

The Yankees getting the 5^th most positive Local Media Market coverage in the MLB is absurd given that the Mets rank 17^th for the same category and play in the same city.  

The Bronx Bombers enjoyed a huge bump up in this ranking from last year, likely spurred by their World Series appearance, the Mets did not. Heavy note the use of appearance there; I’ll remind you that the Yankees did not win the title last year. In fact, they were gentleman-swept 4-1 by the Dodgers, the same Dodgers that the Mets took to six games in the NLCS just prior. I mean what the hell.  

That’s fairly obvious media bias. That’s big brother, little brother. That’s why this article needed to be written^[5] . 

Local media’s predilection to disproportionately praise the Yankees over the Mets despite comparable rosters and records is certainly indicative of bias and the continued sway of historical narratives. But that’s just the start of it. Mets vs. Yankees contains multitudes; it’s also Frank the Tank’s self-hating scream tweets up against the Yankees’ Roll Call guy getting the right field bleachers to turn their backs on Soto upon his return, it’s 27 World Series wins to 2, it’s Darryl Strawberry versus Jeter.  

It’s the Lovable Losers vs the Evil Empire. 

If only there was a metric that could capture this. Oh wait hold on would you look at that – we  measure for Likability. 

Yankees: 

Mets: 

Their success in recent seasons – and let’s be real, the fact that they’re in New York – is likely the primary factor behind why both teams have a narrative of being unlikable. Beyond that, things like how their franchise, fans, and media comport themselves when engaging with others comes into play. The result speak for themselves: we still live in a world where the Yankees are a top-5 most hated team. Talk about ‘the world is healing’, Tommy Smokes. Down is not up. The sky is still blue. 

Across the East River, Mets nation might do well to practice a kind of numbers-backed gratitude as opposed to their standard knee-jerk to the negative. Juan Soto is not going to become Bobby Bonilla. In fact, Soto hit home runs in back-to-back wins to kick off a hitting streak in June. The Mets will be fine.  

That in mind, I’ll turn it over to Marty for one final request for Frank, the New York media, and any Mets fans who need to hear it. 

[1] 2024 may have set the record of narratives for a single season – Grimace, OMG Iglesias, Playoff Pumpkin, the list goes on.

[2] Shoutout the ‘86 Mets

[3] Ok, fine, at the risk of exposing myself I’ll admit I know the band’s called Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes and their musical style is literally called ‘jizz’ (SFW Wookiepedia link). No further questions.

[4] The Kool-Aid continues to go down just fine, apparently.

[5] Plus I’d been sitting on that Figrin D’an reference for too long – the world needs to know more about them and their contemporaries the Max Rebo band who played at Jabba’s palace.