Distinction Without a Difference

The last shreds of Interleague mystery are falling away this season. We’re in Seattle for the first time since 2017, which hints at the randomness of the way NL vs AL used to be scheduled. When this gimmick was introduced in 1997, We in the NL East played They in the AL East every year for five years. Then the AL Central and AL West got involved in our lives on an alternating-season basis, though not always each team, and it didn’t necessarily elbow aside oddball intrusions. In 2007, for example, our Interleague slate encompassed the A’s, the Tigers, the Twins and the Yankees. In 2010, it was Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit and the crosstown rivals. A year later, we were still getting paired with the Tigers, but also the A’s and Rangers (and Yankees, always the Yankees). I couldn’t detect patterns then and I can’t discern one now.

When the Astros departed the NL in 2013, it was supposed to become more predictable. We’d play one division every three years, and we’d switch off the sites accordingly…and the business with the team in the same city would remain annual. Yet circumstances still managed to ruffle the smoothness. We went fifteen years between hosting the team formerly known as the Indians. It took seventeen seasons to get the White Sox to Flushing. COVID certainly didn’t help. We’ve played three games in Buffalo (2020) since we were last in Toronto (2018), but we’ll be in Toronto in September. The last time we were on the South Side of Chicago (2019), the big story was we didn’t trade Noah Syndergaard and the jaw-droppingest home run (426 feet, 109.2 MPH) was launched by Michael Conforto. But we’ll be at whatever New Comiskey insists on calling itself in late August.

Conforto’s homecoming to Washington state was a prime storyline the last time the Mets visited Seattle, just over seven years ago, which might as well be seventy. The streak of the moment was Jacob deGrom — who was Jacob deGrom, to be sure, yet was still a season away from becoming Jacob deGrom — sitting on eight wins in eight starts. His streak got snapped in Seattle, and it would rarely again seem like deGrom’s excellent pitching was capable of producing a personal W. This was also the last weekend before the Mets did what most everybody was waiting on them to do and called up Amed Rosario. Remember when he was the personification of the future? That Mariners series was our first look at Edwin Diaz, who we might have heard was having an excellent season three time zones and another league away. We had just traded Lucas Duda for a minor league reliever named Drew Smith. We were about to trade a whole bunch of familiar names for the less familiar kind (none of whom attained a Met track record on the level of Smith’s, which, to be honest, isn’t all that voluminous). On the personal front, I had just said goodbye to one my beloved cats — RIP Hozzie, 2002-2017 — which might explain why the Mets’ trek to Seattle stays with me a little more than most fleeting Interleague entanglements.

Prior to the latest shutout at the hands of the Mariners, I concluded there is no organic reason I should particularly care about the Mets playing them ever in the regular season. There could have been. In October of 2000, the Mariners were in the ALCS when we were in the NLCS. A Mets-Mariners World Series would resonate to this day any time the two franchises crossed paths. The Mets will play the A’s and Orioles on the upcoming homestand. Echoes of 1973 and 1969, respectively, will drown out remembering that time we played them in 2010 or whenever.

In my unfrozen caveman heart, the World Series is the only proper setting for a National League team to play an American League team in a game with stakes. That’s organic. All other such meetings should be confined to Spring Training and exhibitions that fall out of the sky. The deluge of Interleague play ensures every World Series matchup of the past gets a rematch every year. There’s little charming about that when you can count on its arrival like National Potato Chip Day, but at least it’s something. Before it all got codified, those encores got your attention. Mets-Orioles. Mets-A’s. Mets-Red Sox. (Mets-Red Sox also qualified as an exhibition that fell out of the sky when they scheduled a charity home-and-home in September 1986 and May 1987 without any idea that they’d be getting together for stakes during the October in between.)

Mets-Yankees was better when it was the Mayor’s Trophy Game. Mets-Royals post-2015 lost its juice by 2019. Mets-Royals could have just as easily been Mets-Blue Jays (a World Series we would have won, I take it on faith). Mets-Orioles and Mets-Red Sox could have been Mets-Twins and Mets-Angels had the playoffs in the other league had different outcomes those years, but the two World Series in question worked out, so why mess with a good thing? We’d look at Mets-Tigers regular-season encounters differently had we done our part in the 2006 NLCS.

Had the 2000 Mariners of John Olerud, Rickey Henderson, Alex Rodriguez and whoever else was there before Ichiro Suzuki done their job in the ALCS and prevented a Subway Series, this weekend would be embellished by video clips of that unforgettable October twenty-four years ago when the long transcontinental flights were worth it, because the journey we were on allowed us to set the stage for (if we’d won in four or five) or bring home (if it had gone six or seven) our third world championship trophy. Or maybe it would have gone the other way, and we’d still sneer at the sight of anything smacking of Seattle.

Instead, it’s just another date with another opponent on another overstuffed schedule. Next time we play “at Mariners,” it will be in two years. Same deal with the White Sox and Blue Jays and every AL club we didn’t host this year. We’ll host them next year, just like we hosted them last year. Those we visited last year we’ll visit next year. And the nicest part of all, Val, I look just like you.