Jack, your recall of history needs to go back further than the Steinbrenner Era. When we were kids, New York was a National League town. The Mets consistently outdrew the Yanks in attendance, often by a wide margin, for years. In the post-Mantle days (or as I recall them, the Horace Clark Era), the Yanks in some seasons couldn’t get 1M people into that ballpark (even though it cost about 30 cents to sit in the bleachers, which they don’t have at Shea) – much less this year’s (staggeringly impressive) nearly 4.1 million.

The Yanks have taken the town, but it wasn’t always theirs. I’m sure it will never go back to the way it was because Steinbrenner has always been way ahead of the amateur-hour Mets as far as modern sports marketing is concerned. But when you’re a kid, and you fall in love with a team that loses 100 games a year every year, there’s not much they can do to lose your affection – even if I spend most of the summer throwing stuff at the TV!