This past Friday, New York Magazine contributor Ross Barkan tweeted out anti-New York Mets fan sentiment on Twitter. It was less a tweet and more of an internal gripe being publicized. A thought shot into the ether more than a harmless conversation starter. Barkan, who is a notable figure in the left leaning politics scene, tweeted that “Baseball season is a reminder of all the laptop, gentrifier class Mets fans who operate in my “sphere” and pollute my air. However, I will offer an olive branch: David Stearns had a very good offseason. It’s a strong roster. Enjoy it.” The next tweets were decidedly not olive branches; they were poison ivy. Barkan categorized Mets fans as insufferable and whiny. New York Magazine contributor Sam Adler-Bell tweeted that it used to be that the Mets were the team for the unsuccessful shmucks, and it is the insecurity of the Yankee fan that repeats lazy talking points about the Mets. “The Yankees, a team famous for never attracting any superficial fans who aren’t from New York City”, Adler-Bell said, the tweet oozing with collar popped sarcasm. The conversation went on from there, with Mets fans from NYC talking about the Yankees fans’s arrogance, to the Yankee fan talking about Mets fans’s propensity for being fine with being losers. I got my two cents in. My buddy Will Menaker, left-wing Yankee fan, talked his shit. Opening Day was on Thursday, and Mike Trout is back healthy again, yet this argument, and how it stopped Twitter, feels like the most important thing happening within Baseball fans, at least the ones in New York.

The two decades that separate the last Yankees title and the period of perennial playoff losses of this current era has seen Yankee fans lose some of their imperial status. It has left a sour smell in our noses. We used to be world killers, wrecking balls of intrepid patriotism that aimed to kill, to destroy AL Central and National League opponents that came to Yankee Stadium. Now, we’ve essentially become what the Braves were in the 1990’s. We have significant players — Aaron Judge is the best hitter on the planet, and along with Giancarlo Stanton and Gerrit Cole, will be in Cooperstown some day — but we have not won a championship since Number 2 was standing at shortstop, struggling with his range but still hitting the crap out of the ball. Our lone trip to the Fall Classic ended in embarrassment, where the Dodgers and their clean baseball, otherworldly talent, and timely hitting showed us what it is like to really be champions. To hell with remembering the pitfalls though: the Yankees will be very good again in 2026. We’re a baseball factory. The rotation is loaded this season. As soon as I lamented the loss of Gerrit Cole from elbow surgery, Cam Schlittler became the best rookie pitcher since Chien Ming-Wang. He wore his chains out during his postgame presser after shoving down eight San Francisco Giants hitters. Cole’s back season and his elbow feels his sharp, reaching 99MPH at Tampa in March. As long as he is healthy, he will be good. Max Fried is a bulldog; Carlos Rodon might end up as our fourth starter. Jazz Chisholm Jr is a genuine lightning rod that can change the game with one swing, the most fun and unpredictable Yankee since Alfonso Soriano. With a few tall boys of Modelo inside of me, I might just explain to you why Ben Rice could be the next Tino Martinez. We’re going to win 94-100 games again this season. Mark my words.

Yet, I might be living in a Mets town right now. It started in 2021 when Steve Cohen, a lifelong Mets fan, bought the Mets. The financial details were not disclosed but Cohen bought 95 percent of the team. The team is estimated to be worth 2.5 billion dollars so you do the math. If Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants to make this city more affordable, and he surely does want to, then he should hire me to rob Cohen blind by gunpoint. To see Cohen is to see a different kind of rich person than the Steinbrenner family though. Where Hal Steinbrenner is a son of a shipping magnate, a capitalist, chaotic, conniving, charming man name George, Cohen is cheeky in a way that reminds me of a Billions character. He’s rich from the private sector, not because he inherited it, and he wants to win. He has chosen to spend money so his boyhood team can win a championship. The Mets immediately signed Frankie Lindor for 361 million dollars the first year Cohen was named controlling owner.

The transformation from NYC being a Yankee town to a Mets town was official when Juan Soto had the greatest first season of any Yankee since Babe Ruth yet broke Yankee fans hearts by going to the Mets in free agency. The guy signed for 765 million dollars over fifteen fucking seasons and any Yankee fan who says they don’t have a bruised ego from that is telling a bold-faced lie. He was free to do whatever he wants, and nobody will ever get to me to dislike him, especially not after that homerun, but it was startlingly amoral. We felt used. Soto knew that the Yankees were the biggest stage, so he played his tail off for us in order to get himself the biggest contract in baseball history the next season. We were a pawn for someone else’s career aspirations. Soto had a big year last year after a slow start and odds are that he’ll be even better this season. The Mets have their chests out, puffing smoke at us, unafraid to bask in the fact that they are the talk of the town. They have the aesthetics that matter in Baseball too, since it is a leisure sport that is about the environment as much as it is about the game itself, especially during regular season nights where you go to socialize with your date or your buddies. Citi Field is a good ballpark; tougher to get to than the House that Ruth Built unless you live in Greenpoint, Queens, or live by Times Square but the Jackie Robinson Rotunda is very dashing to look at as soon as you walk in. I will defend the new Yankee Stadium, the old one had character but it was also aging and narrow, and I enjoy a chicken bucket on a nice, warm Friday night at the Stadium as much as anybody does, but the design of the park is not as colorful or unique as Citi Field is.

The argument about transplants joining Mets fandom for clout is an intriguing one. The Mets haven’t won a damn thing in this town since 1986, and although they have come close, usually when it is October, they are the kid at the lunch table that throws up on himself while challenging his friends to a eating contest. It is interesting that so many fans view them as the proper baseball team to root for. The Wilpons were terrible owners. Sexual harassment was rampant in the office. They had open disdain for the fanbase, often refused to spend money, entrusted their finances to swindlers. Transplants, not transplants from the Tri-State who already have a team and are contributing to the evils of the West Village, but classical transplants from the Midwest, move here because they want to live where they are other queer people. Then, they root for the Mets. Is it because these people care about whimsy at the ballpark or is it because they are new to the city, thus the Mets remind them of the lackadaisical AL Central or NL Central teams that they grew up rooting for? It is hard for me to imagine someone moving to New York from St. Paul, Minnesota and cheering on the Yankees. It’s too appetizing, too vulgar, too ethnically diverse, too fill of bros with Sopranos t-shirts; Sophie from St. Paul and Jeb from Des Moines wants a small community in this big city that she is still frightened by, which is what Mets fandom still feels like despite Cohen being the epitome of American capitalism.

That’s what makes transplants frustrating though. It’s what I keep thinking about in relation to the swagless white pop music that stays on the charts, or the 1990s Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and John F. Kennedy Jr cosplay that I see in the West Village. Love Story was fun to talk about, and CBK is a cool ass fashion girlie, but whiteness, corniness is everywhere now, whether nostalgic or current. Yet, I have meaningful political solidarity with many transplants — so many transplants came out in support for Mayor Mamdani, someone who I proudly voted for despite my distrust of anything political in this city — that the talk about how transplants are ruining New York can scan as a nativism that is conservative in nature. To see New York is to see a city that people move to in hope for a better, more progressive life. To gatekeep it, to say that transplants are the problem and not the affordability crisis, not the NYPD and its power to oppress, not landlords, is to sound like nativists, or even possibly worse, a Zionist. That’s a tough comparison, since New York isn’t a Jewish supremacist state, but the mentality — a way to maintain a certain hierarchy — is the same. My Uncle married a transplant. She was a woman that he met at the NYC Marathon, two wide-eyed volunteers on duty, passing out waters to runners, some of them possibly transplants. I think Aunty Pique hails from Texas. They had two beautiful kids, my cousins, and raised them on the Upper East Side. My mom is an immigrant from Jamaica who moved here in her teens. My Dad is born and raised in The Bronx. One of the problems with the transplant talk is that it is centering white people, not Caribbeans who are naturally in touch with different cultures like my mom is, but my point is that all the people — no matter where they came from — living together in this one city made me happen; it made my native-born friends happen. The same people who have loved me deeply despite myself, the same people who cared for me when I was in a tight jam.

I want people to move here. It is the greatest city in the world. I am from Uptown and have lived in the Bronx for many years now. I see the city through the eyes of an Uptown Black man, because a lot of cool things in this city are driven by us, and after 9/11, Bloomberg’s New York made a conscious effort to become a corporate city for transplants. To make matters worse, I have met some lame ass transplants. People who grow up in such Republican ass states that they have no sense of taste or culture, just their whiteness that becomes more noticeable in a “liberal” city where they can rightfully have abortions, meet a model girl, or have a pride parade that is full of cornballs and cops. They can build a community, which is undoubtedly important, but they are not committed to actually understanding what makes this city culturally significant — the idea that everything you could need to become more culturally diverse is at your disposal. Look, I’m human despite my politics. They are people who voted for Mamdani who I do not want to have a beer with; they are people who voted for Silwa that I want to have six beers with. I’m a straight Black man saying this, a really cool guy but also definitely a guy’s guy, so the skin that I have in the game can be based on that. Nobody told me to date or meet girls that I would grow to hate six months later but I am a romantic at heart. Some of the transplants that I have met are so weak, so full of rubbish, daughters and sons of white supremacy that move here to say they did it only to move back to the cocoon of the suburbs. I don’t mean to sound aggressively diverse, because that can sound neoliberal and fanciful, since most people stay within their identity group. Yet, with interest I watch transplants move through this city and I just don’t trust them; most of you all have contempt for this place, yet have moved here because it became the only metropolitan option.

Mets fans remind me of transplants because of the self-righteousness they contain. So many Mets fans forget about the community of Afro-Latino Yankee fans that call Washington Heights or The Bronx home. I am one of those people, the aforementioned son of a Jamaican woman and an African-American man. It pisses me off when I see Yankee fans ashamed of being fans because their individual politics are different than the capitalist politics of the Steinbrenner family. The comedian Joe E. Lewis once said “rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for U.S. Steel”, yet the brand is coolest brand in the fashion world. The Yankee cap is the cap of the whole world. I type with no shame of being a Yankees fan. Even when there was a moment of silence for Charlie Kirk at Yankee Stadium like he wasn’t somebody that would have had open contempt for The Bronx, it didn’t make me sad that I was a Yankees fan. It was just a mistake on the Yankees part; Trump is one thing, he’s the President with a documented relationship with the Steinbrenner family, but Kirk was a glorified video blogger.

Whenever the Yankees organization needs to be better about highlighting their Black and Latino fanbase, I openly tweet at them, or write something about the privileges that are afforded to white Yankee players compared to Yankee players of color, of which they are more than critics give the Yankees credit for. Methinks that we are fractured in this city because of how unaffordable that it is, and our pain is leading us to become art odds with one another like the community and Sal’s Famous Pizza in Do the Right Thing. I do not hate, nor think about the Mets, because the rings on my finger causes a deafness in me. Transplants are part of life in a big city. Yet, the majority of them aren’t as cool as the majority of natives. Therefore, if the transplants are choosing the Mets, the Mets will continue to be second fiddle to the Yankees. Baseball is the pastime because it mirrors life.