Opinion: Why the Yankees are the real working-class team of New York City

Rooting for the Yankees, it used to be said, was like rooting for U.S. Steel. They’re the Bronx Bombers, the Evil Empire, forever on supposedly soulless marches to pennants that, despite their lavish spending, they don’t win all that much anymore. No real New Yorker, no salt-of-the-earth working gal or fella, can root for them – so the tired argument goes. The Mets, in this formulation, must be the working-class team because they win so little. They are, in their failure, relatable – populist, even. Some have attempted to politicize this terminal incompetence: Good luck finding a Yankee cap at a DSA meeting.

But I’m here to tell you, as a Brooklyn native and lifelong Yankee fan, that the concept of the Mets as the “real” working-class team is absolutely ludicrous. Of course, there are plenty of working-class Mets fans; no one can deny that. All kinds of people root for baseball teams. But the Yankees are, as Simon van Zuylen-Wood and Kevin Dugan have argued in New York magazine, the team of the striver, the hustler, the New Yorker who wants to make it. We are an audacious, aspirational city, and our working class has grit; they really don’t like to lose. They aren’t schlumpy, they aren’t downtrodden, they aren’t taking solace in kiddie mascots and revolting, purple-accented alternate jerseys. Go tell a taxi driver in Washington Heights or construction worker in Morrisania that the Mets are the “true” working-class team and see how long that conversation lasts. (A significant chunk of the Yankee fan base is Puerto Rican and Dominican American.) The Yankees are prideful; so are actual New Yorkers. They see themselves in Aaron Judge’s towering blasts and the 25-year-old Cam Schlittler’s blazing, vengeful fastballs. They might clock in professionally, Derek Jeter-like, betraying little emotion or, in the vein of Paul O’Neill, smash something up because they want a victory that badly.

Just as the Yankees embody the battling spirit of our city, the Mets are, increasingly, the team of the gentrifier class, the laptop-addicted media and tech transplants who ditched the AL or NL Central franchises of their childhood for the warm embrace of a local underdog. The youthful precincts of Williamsburg, Bushwick and Astoria now throb with Mets energy. The Mets are the darlings of the Twitterati. Lefty politics now overlap with Mets fandom – see Mayor Zohran Mamdani – even though their franchise is owned by a multibillionaire who has cared far more about ramming a dubious casino down the throat of Queens than securing an elusive championship. And the Wilpons were no working-class heroes, either. The Yankees, of course, don’t do themselves any favors – Randy Levine, the team’s president, once served as a deputy mayor under Rudy Giuliani and remains pals with Donald Trump – and it’s fair to say they’re a red mothership in a deep blue city. If one, though, is making the argument for working-class bona fides, a Trump association isn’t necessarily a disqualifier. The working class, after all, can be reactionary, and plenty of voters without college degrees chose Trump in three presidential elections. The professional managerial class didn’t – and it’s those kinds of people, in New York City, flocking to the Mets.

Had the Mets kept their spirit of ’86 – that coked-up, brawling bulldozer of a squad was New York – they might have been able to lay better claim, 40 years on, to the title of New York’s working-class team. But they didn’t. They’re also-rans, as lost as their befuddled, baseball-headed mascot. The Yankees are the only choice: now and always.