Subway Series #1

New York Mets v New York Yankees 6/18/1997:

Yankee Stadium Section U25 Row X:
MLB's First Interleague Series (3rd game)

For the 1st time in a regular season game, the New York Mets traveled cross town to the Bronx for a game that counted.

No one was really sure how the public would embrace interleague play. We were 2 years removed from the players strike that ripped the World Series from the fans hearts. Interest in the league was dwindling. Baseball was disparate for a gimmick.

And this was it.

I did not end up with the best seats in the house, but did buy them face value just a few days before gameday.

The bars in the area were a little surreal before gametime. Guys in Mets jerseys drinking beers with guys in Yankees jerseys. No brass-knuckles, no broken beer bottles, no head locks. Just.......surreal.

It was a day game. A damp and overcast 68 degree June day.

The overlapping chants for the Yankees and the Mets from 56,278 were impossible to ignore when they reverberated throughout Yankee Stadium on a gray afternoon. Bouncing back and forth, the cheers made an epic baseball game seem like a rock concert where the audience insisted on providing backup vocals. Lots of backup vocals for lots of crisp baseball.

It was entertaining baseball, entertaining enough for 168,719 fans to attend the three games -- the most for a three-game set since the renovated Stadium opened in 1976. It was exciting baseball, exciting enough for the deciding game of the series to stretch into extra innings. And it was intense baseball, intense enough for John Olerud to describe it as the most intensity he has ever felt on a baseball field. By the way, Olerud played in two World Series with Toronto.

''This was huge,'' Catcher Joe Girardi said. ''You want to win the series in your city. I think as time went on, it got more and more emotional because we fed off the fans. It was a great atmosphere and a great series.''

Yankees starting pitcher David Cone, who struck out 11 and permitted two runs and two hits in eight innings, was the story for most of the game as he used a robust fastball, a slippery split-finger fastball and a nasty slider to breeze past the first 11 Mets. He walked Olerud on a 3-2 pitch with two outs in the fourth and, after ending a 22-pitch sixth by whiffing Gilkey for his sixth strikeout in eight batters, Cone was mortal in the seventh.

Yankees Chad Curtis and Cecil Fielder poked homers off the Mets starter, Rick Reed.

Met's releiver Greg McMichael walked Paul O'Neill with one out in the Yankee 10th and Fielder singled him to third, driving the ball through the hole between first and second.

John Franco, the lifelong New Yorker who was aching to pitch in the historic series, was summoned to face Tino Martinez, who had not had a hit in a week and was 0 for his last 21. With a 1-2 count, Martinez wanted a sacrifice fly and Franco wanted a strike. Martinez won, slashing an outside fastball for the single that was heard 'round the five boroughs.

''The Yankees and Mets should play three games every year,'' Martinez said. ''You don't get this type of atmosphere in a June game. This was a playoff atmosphere.''

At the same time just blocks away, Princess Diana and Mother Teresa were posing for pictures that would appear in the next day's tabloids.