Subway Series excitement returns to Bronx

According to www.anniversarygift.org -- a real website -- the proper gift for a 14th anniversary is ivory.

No one was passing out soap Friday night at Yankee Stadium. But the Yankees and Mets did renew acquaintances in the 15th edition of the Subway Series -- a novelty when it first began and now a much-anticipated highlight of the long baseball season.

Interleague play began in 1997. The Mets and Yankees faced each other three times in each of the first two seasons before it was expanded to the current six in 1999.

Yankees manager Joe Girardi was their catcher on June 16, 1997, when the first Yankees-Mets regular-season game was played at Yankee Stadium. Girardi went 3-for-4, but the Yankees were nine-hit by Dave Mlicki in a 6-0 Mets victory.

The Yankees went on to win the next two and held a 45-33 series lead going into Friday night.

For much of the Subway Series' existence, the storyline has been the same -- the little brother Mets trying to prove themselves against the big brother Yankees. It's no different this time.

"They're the elite team in baseball," said Subway Series rookie Terry Collins, the manager of the Mets. "No matter where you play, everybody wants to be compared with the Yankees. So here we are in the same market as the Yankees, and to be able to come out and compete -- which we will, we'll compete very hard -- to come out and play well against them shows everybody that we're on the right track. We've got good players also and we'll be able to compete against anybody.

"That's where I always salute the Yankees -- because on a daily basis, no matter who they play, that other team has to pick their play up. And they just stay calm because they have to do it every day. So this is a great series for us to come in and pick our play up, to know we've got to raise our level of play. If we do that, and we find out it's somewhat easy to do, I think you'll see us even play better."

Fourteen years ago, when the teams first met, the Yankees were coming off a world championship and the Mets were coming off a fourth-place finish in the NL East.

"I was just reading an article," Girardi said. "It's been that long. It's hard to believe. I think it brought a lot of excitement to baseball. There's some real intriguing crosstown rivalries in this, and then there's some where there's no natural rival and it becomes somewhat of a natural rival . . . Overall, I think it's been a success."

Collins was the manager of the then-Anaheim Angels in 1997 and participated in the first Freeway Series with the Dodgers. As any good New Yorker might imagine, he said it's nothing like Yankees-Mets.

"Obviously, when you're on the outside looking in, you can't recreate the excitement of playing in New York anywhere," Collins said. "I mean, I was in Anaheim, we played the Dodgers and obviously it was a big deal. But it's not like this. I've had too many friends of mine who've been in the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry and the Yankees-Mets rivalry, and they've all said until you experience it, you can't realize the excitement involved."

One person who knows about the excitement but would never admit to feeling it is Derek Jeter. But he certainly has picked up his play against the Mets.

Entering Friday night, Jeter was a .380 hitter (117-for-308) in the Subway Series and had a 22-game hitting streak dating to June 28, 2003. He was batting .489 (46-for-94) in that span.