In a town that prides itself on giving no free rides, the Mets have enjoyed a lifetime Metro card into blissful anonymity for most of their 47-year history.
They build an $800-million ballpark (Troubled Assets Relief Program Field) financed in large part by government subsidies and taxpayer bailout money, and nobody gives a damn because the Yankees did the same thing, only on a bigger scale, in the Bronx.
The Mets raise their highest ticket prices to nearly $300 a seat, which in most locales would be a scandal and an obscenity, and compared to the Yankees, they look like a discount store.
The Mets spend more on ballplayers than all but one other team in Major League Baseball. But because that one team is the Yankees, who outspend their nearest competitor by the value of the entire
Colorado Rockies roster, nobody cares.And when, with that $140-million roster, the 2008 Mets execute the second of two of the most disheartening back-to-back collapses in baseball history, they somehow fly under the supposedly sensitive New York radar.
Why?
Because in 2008, the Yankees failed to make the playoffs, too.
