Mets, not Yankees, clowns of the town

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Wallace Matthews (COLUMNIST FOR NEWSDAY)

October 11, 2007 08:57 PM

The failure of the Yankees is the best thing that could have happened to the Mets.

Now they've got to hope all the peripheral issues involving Joe Torre's job, Alex Rodriguez's contract and Suzyn Waldman's tear ducts continue to consume the media and the public from now until Opening Day 2008.

Who says you can't get a free pass in this town? Ever since the Yankees were eliminated from the ALDS Monday night, the Mets certainly have.

In the past three days, the Yankees have been characterized as bullies. They have been called cowards, gutless, unable to take a punch.

I would have to agree with every one of those sentiments. If you apply them to the Mets, that is.

On May 29, the Yankees sat at 21-29, 14 1/2 games behind the Red Sox. They were headed for the most spectacular failure in the history of sports. On the same date, the Mets were 33-17, five games ahead in first place, headed for another Secretariat's Belmont of a divisional race.

But in the rest of the season, the Yankees went 73-39. The Mets went 55-57, crumbling like a sand castle in the final week of the season, at home, against three teams with a combined record of 222-264, with payrolls of $30 million, $37 million and $90 million.

And you want to say the Yankees were a bust? What exactly does that make the Mets?

Granted, the Yankees had a miserable October. But at least they had an October.

The truth is, the Yankees have nothing to be ashamed of. They played a gutsy two-thirds of a season followed by a bad four-game stretch in October, and minus The Invasion of the Midges, might have won Game 2 in Cleveland and gone on to the ALCS.

The Mets, on the other hand, have everything to be ashamed of. Operating, like the Yankees, with their league's highest payroll, they crumpled up and slunk home when faced with their first bit of resistance.

Now, which team was it that can't take a punch?

All the uproar over what happened this week in the Bronx and what is likely to happen in the next few days in Tampa has obscured the fact that the Mets are even more of a mess than the Yankees.

They've got a manager who is a lonely man in his own clubhouse, being undermined by an assistant general manager who is way too close to many of the players and a son-of-an-owner who is way too involved in personnel decisions, both of whom are looking for the first available reason to fire him.

They've got a GM who has abandoned his eye for evaluating young talent in favor of the easy way out, rebuilding-by-checkbook.

Worst of all, they seem to have a roomful of players who not only don't know how to win but don't care to learn.

When the pressure was on late in the season, it was the Mets, not the Yankees, who were loafing on the basepaths, forgetting how many outs there were, unraveling on the mound and arguing over stupid things.

Remember the night Paul Lo Duca, a "team leader," got himself ejected for beefing over a strike two, a move that led directly to a Mets defeat? Derek Jeter may not have hit much in the postseason, but at least he didn't do anything as dumb as that, or as dumb as Jose Reyes -- remember when you thought you would take him over Jeter -- risking suspension by getting into an argument with a backup catcher that eventually led into a fist fight.

Down the stretch, the Mets did everything to escape their first real fight but bite off an ear. Talk about bullies. Talk about cowards. But then you'd have to know something about bravery and guts to be able to recognize its flip side. Too many people in this town like to throw those words around despite not having the faintest understanding of what they really mean.

And you want to talk about money? At least the Yankees' hired gun, Roger Clemens, gave them seven outs in his final appearance. Tom Glavine -- a cut-rate mercenary compared to Clemens but a mercenary just the same -- got what he wanted out of the Mets, his 300th win, but when it came time to give something back, he couldn't get out of the first inning. Didn't seem to be too broken up about it afterward, either.

Throw the paychecks out and it is obvious that the "rich" kids showed character. The poor souls in Flushing, those $115-million working-class heroes, did not. To say the Yankees should have done better because of their payroll but absolve the Mets despite theirs is not only lazy but fraudulent, not to mention hypocritical.

For years, we have listened to the Mets and their fans whine about always being overshadowed by the Yankees. We're not hearing too much of that right now, are we?

Hiding behind the Yankees is working out quite nicely for the Mets these days