The Conflict Within

There is a particular kind of sports loyalty that begins before you understand what loyalty is. It arrives through hats, television broadcasts, family arguments, the neighbor who talks too loudly at a barbecue, and the unspoken education every fan receives about who is ours and who is absolutely not ours. I became a Mets fan in that world.

The Yankees were not simply another team in another league; they were the standard rival, the gleaming machine across town, the organization whose success made every Mets disappointment feel a little more theatrical. That arrangement made perfect sense when I was younger. The Mets were my people. The Yankees were the people we complained about. Nobody needed to hold a meeting about it.

The old Somerset Patriots made that loyalty easy to carry. They were our local baseball team, with their own personality, their own rhythms, and a ballpark experience that felt wonderfully separate from the giant televised universe of Major League Baseball. For a while, they were connected to the Red Sox organization, which made the arrangement even cleaner in the way sports logic can be clean. A Mets fan could enjoy the Patriots without feeling like he had wandered into enemy territory. The Red Sox were not the Mets, of course, but they had long occupied a familiar position in the rivalry map. We all understood the basic geometry: Yankees over there, everybody else making do.

Then the Patriots became part of the Yankees system, and the map did not exactly collapse, but it did develop a crease right down the middle. Suddenly, the players I was watching on warm summer nights were future Yankees. Their promotions would move them toward an organization I had spent a lifetime treating as a natural rival. The Patriots had not changed their zip code, their crowd, or the small, local pleasures that made the place matter. The team was still the team I had watched with affection. The hot dogs were still hot dogs. The kids still hunted foul balls. The stands still filled with families who had come for a night out and maybe a little baseball if the night cooperated. Yet the affiliation gave the whole experience a new complication.

At first, I treated the complication the way a lot of sports fans treat anything that threatens a settled identity: with suspicion and a little unnecessary drama. I could hear the argument forming in my own head. How am I supposed to cheer for a Yankees prospect? What exactly happens if the kid hits a double in Somerset and then, three years later, hits a double against the Mets in a game that matters? Is this a conflict of interest? Do I need a legal opinion? Can I still wear the same hat? These are ridiculous questions, obviously, but sports fandom is built on ridiculous questions. That is part of its charm. The rules do not need to be rational as long as everybody understands them.

The more I sat with it, though, the more I realized that the Yankees affiliation was forcing me to do something adulthood asks of us all the time: revisit an old loyalty without throwing it away. That is different from abandoning it. It is different from pretending the old feeling was foolish or meaningless. The Mets are still my team. That part is not under review. If the Mets play the Yankees tomorrow, there will be no inner debate, no softening of the edges, and no need to consult my evolving philosophy about player development. I know exactly where I stand. But the Patriots had begun asking a different question. Could I keep the loyalty I had always had while making room for a reality I had not expected?

The answer turned out to be yes, although it took a little longer than it should have. The reason was simple: Somerset has never been meaningful to me because of a parent organization. It is meaningful because it is local baseball, which is its own category of joy. It is a place where the game still arrives at human scale. You can watch a pitcher work through a rough inning without the moment being instantly converted into a national argument. You can see a player sign autographs after the game because there are kids waiting at the rail and because, at that level, the distance between the person in the uniform and the people watching is still small enough to cross. You can hear the crowd react to a ball in the gap before anyone has time to turn the moment into a clip, a take, or a fight on the internet.

Minor league baseball also makes it harder to hold onto the clean villains-and-heroes version of the sport. The young man taking batting practice in a Patriots uniform is not carrying the full weight of Yankees history on his shoulders. He is trying to make the next level. He is trying to stay healthy, stay useful, learn a new pitch, fix a hole in his swing, and survive a career that remains uncertain even when the scouts are interested. He has probably spent most of his life working toward this strange, demanding dream. The fact that his eventual destination might be the Yankees is not really a statement about me or my allegiance. It is simply where his work happens to be taking him.

That perspective matters because it is easy to forget, especially when teams become symbols. At the major league level, organizations can start to feel like permanent mythological forces. The Yankees become The Yankees, which is a much bigger thing than a roster of people trying to win baseball games. The Mets become The Mets, which is also bigger than the players in the clubhouse, though the emotional weather tends to be a little less predictable. The symbols are useful because they give us a shared language. They make the game feel inherited, but symbols can also flatten people. They can make us forget that every prospect, every coach, every trainer, and every kid on the field is living inside a much more ordinary story of work, hope, pressure, and the chance to get better at something hard.

I have started to think that this is what changes as we get older. When we are young, loyalty often means drawing a hard boundary. It means being able to say, without hesitation, who belongs on your side and who does not. There is comfort in that certainty. It makes the world feel organized. Adulthood keeps introducing people and places that do not fit the old boundaries so neatly. The coworker from the competing shop turns out to be the person who helps you when a project goes sideways. The neighbor whose sign you disagree with is the first one outside when the snow is heavy. The institution you distrust produces someone you admire. The person you thought represented a category turns out to be a person, which is always more inconvenient and more useful.

None of that requires us to become mushy or pretend that every disagreement is imaginary. Rivalries can still be fun. Preferences can still be real. You do not need to flatten every distinction in the name of nuance until nothing means anything. I still enjoy the clean electricity of Mets-Yankees baseball. I still understand the emotional shorthand of it. I still think a Mets fan is allowed a certain amount of theatrical irritation when the Yankees are doing well, just as Yankees fans have been generously invited to practice that emotion in reverse. The point is not that the rivalry disappeared. The point is that it no longer has to decide every other relationship I have with the game.

The Patriots are a good reminder of that. They are part of the Yankees umbrella now, but they are still our team in the local sense that matters. They belong to the people who make an evening of it, to the families who know where they like to sit, to the little kids who are still learning which way to run after a foul ball, and to the regulars who have seen enough baseball to recognize when something small is about to become important. The affiliation gives the team a path. The community gives the team a home. Those are not the same thing, and I think I confused them at first.

There is also something quietly enjoyable about watching the beginning of a player's story, even when you are fairly sure you will root against him later. That is not hypocrisy. It is an appreciation for the part of baseball that exists before the headlines. You can watch a prospect become more confident, see a hitter learn how to adjust, or notice a pitcher discover that one pitch he can throw when the count is against him. You are seeing the work before the mythology. The player may someday become a Yankee to you, in the big, symbolic, old-rivalry sense of the word. At Somerset, he is still a young player trying to earn the right to find out.

That may be the real conflict within: not Yankees versus Mets, but the difference between the loyalties we inherit and the loyalties we build. The old loyalty is instinctive. It comes with history, jokes, losses, victories, and the familiar satisfaction of knowing where to point your applause. The newer loyalty is more personal. It grows from evenings spent in the same place, from the habit of coming back, from the stories that accumulate without announcing themselves. One loyalty says, 'This is the side I chose.' The other says, 'This is the place that became part of my life.' Those two things are allowed to coexist.

I would have had a harder time understanding that when I was younger. I would have treated the change as a test of whether I was still a real Mets fan, which is the kind of question only a younger person or an internet commenter can ask with a straight face. Now I think the sturdier version of loyalty is the one that can survive an adjustment.

You do not prove that you care about something by refusing to see anything else clearly. You prove it by knowing what is essential and what is merely familiar. The Mets are essential to the part of me that grew up believing baseball could break your heart and still be worth watching. The Yankees are still the rival. The Patriots are still the local team I love, even when the development path runs through the Bronx.

That is not a betrayal. It is simply a more grown-up way of keeping score.