“In honor of New Year’s Eve, let’s relive the best ball drop of them all…” the Instagram account @nyyhistory captioned their December 31st, 2023 post. When I saw this post last year, it was probably the seventh time I’d seen the clip that day. There are many downsides to life with a crippling social media addiction, but here’s my reward: I follow dozens of the very finest posters in Yankeeland across multiple platforms, so on New Year’s Eve, I get to watch Luis Castillo drop A-Rod’s walk-off, game-winning pop-up over and over.
Or so I thought. This year, these accounts were conspicuously quiet. Because dropped balls are no longer funny to us. And in their place, dozens of national baseball accounts I follow made sure to remind me why, over and over.
I have to explain more, don’t I? I have reliable data from substack that tells me that very few readers of this blog actually click through my hyperlinks, especially when they require you to have a TikTok account. But you have to know that I find it physically painful to go into detail about Aaron Judge dropping Tommy Edman’s routine fly ball in the 5th inning of Game 5 of the 2024 World Series. Here’s Youtuber and podcaster Jimmy O’Brien (Jomboy)’s 13-minute long breakdown of that inning. I’ve watched every single Jomboy breakdown on his channel, most of them at least three times. This one has been out for two months and I haven’t been able to watch it.
I don’t have an error phobia. Unlike many old-guard Yankee fans, I don’t actually care that much about errors. I’m able to watch, for example, this compilation of haunted shortstop experiment Isiah Kiner-Falefa boot ground balls and feel nothing. Some of them are actually kind of funny! What I do have, though, is attuned sensitivity towards ghosts, and the two dropped pop-up clips described above contain enough spectral activity to make a PKE meter explode. Within the 2009 A-Rod-Luis-Castillo clip lies everything you need to know about the Yankees-Mets dynamic for the past thirty years. Within the Judge drop lies the prospect that this dynamic may have cosmically reversed. The deepest, darkest fear of any Yankee fan is not that we might be bad, not meet our expectations, succumb to the ghosts of our exceptional history, and fade into irrelevance. That’s already happened, dozens of times, and we’re always arrogant and delusional enough to sweat it out and plug our ears until the team starts winning again. No, our deepest, darkest fear, the one that haunts the Judge drop, is that we become the Mets.
I.
The A-Rod clip first. In June of 2009, for the first time in my lifetime, the Mets and Yankees seemed on similar paths, which had diverged so dramatically since the latter decisively established their dominance over the former in the 2000 World Series, winning 4-1. The Yankees had not won another World Series since, but they maintained their place as the dominant baseball superpower, making the playoffs in each of the next seven years, winning the AL East in six, and the pennant in two. Equally importantly, they remained by far the league’s most expensive team, paying unprecedented contracts to superstars, including, of course, to the 2005 and 2007 American League MVP, Alex Rodriguez. The Mets had immediately fallen back into mediocrity, returning to the playoffs only once since. Their payroll size fluctuated from year to year in between 50%-80% of the Yankees’, enough to always be one of the five most expensive teams in the league, never enough to seriously compete with the Yankees on the biggest free agents. And despite that money, except for their one playoff run in 2006, they were never one of the five best teams in the league, or particularly close to that. Through 2007, the Mets were the perennial younger sibling, the Seth Curry of New York Baseball, endearingly, if somewhat pathetically, aping the all-time great older brother, delivering about 75% of the quality and 10% of the success. I had no animosity for the Mets or their fans at this time, just mild affection, mixed in with a healthy dose of schadenfreude and even some genuine pity.
But the teams’ fortunes seemed poised to change in 2009. The Yankees had just fired legendary manager Joe Torre, then missed the playoffs for the first time in ten years. Meanwhile, the Mets were ascendant. PECOTA, Baseball Prospectus’s projection system, named them the favorite to win their division, and the second-best team in the National League. They had finished the 2008 season with the exact same record (89-73) as the Yankees, enjoyed a career year from shiny, new trade acquisition Johan Santana, one of the league’s most dominant starting pitchers, and then went out and signed closer Francisco Rodriguez to a massive multi-year contract. Rodriguez had earned the nickname K-Rod, after the “K” strikeout symbol in a baseball scorecard, and it must have felt incredibly thrilling for the Mets to sign a marquee free agent with a nickname so similar to that of the league’s most expensive superstar, the physical embodiment of the Bronx Bombers’ imperial largesse.
And 2009 must have felt like an especially fitting time for the regional baseball power dynamic to shift because it was in 2009 that both the Yankees and the Mets moved out of their old stadiums, Shea Stadium and “the House that Ruth Built”, two hallowed, decrepit cathedrals of the franchises’ mediocrity and hegemonic reign, respectively, into two brand-new, taxpayer-funded, ghost-free buildings. It must have felt for the Mets like a clean slate, on which to escape the suffocating tendrils of the past, the tradition of all the dead generations that weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. It must have felt like they could exorcise their ghosts and chart a new course.
Well. By June of 2009, expectations had been tempered a bit, due to some unlucky losses and injuries to two All-Stars, the slugger Carlos Delgado and the speedy shortstop Jose Reyes. Nevertheless, the Mets entered the Yankees series only four games behind their division-leading Philadelphia Phillies, in a virtual tie for the National League Wild Card spot. Rookie backup catcher Omir Santos had just hit a heroic ninth-inning, go-ahead homer off elite closer Jonathan Papelbon of the league-leading Boston Red Sox two weeks earlier. Three days earlier, they’d beaten the Phillies to close the division gap from three games to two, off commanding performances from starter Johan Santana and closer K-Rod. They lost the other two games, but they had a hundred more games to make up the gap, an eternity. They could still right the ship.
And the 2009 Yankees did not seem such fearsome opponents on June 12th. Despite their massive payroll, they’d also been up-and-down, due to inconsistent starts from new expensive signings CC Sabathia and AJ Burnett, and Alex Rodriguez’s months-long absence due to a hip injury severe enough to require hip surgery. A-Rod had finally returned with a vengeance in mid-May, swatting three home runs in his first game back, but the Yankees remained two games behind the Red Sox, despite outspending them by $80 million.
The Mets took a 6-3 lead in the 5th, off a home run by former Yankee slugger Gary Sheffield. The Mets love to sign former Yankees, it is one of the most adorable and pathetic aspects of their younger sibling routine. “Look,” they say. “We are just like the Yankees! They signed Gary Sheffield, and so did we. We’re exactly the same.” Never mind that this Gary Sheffield was now 40 years old, four years removed from his two years as an All Star and fringe MVP candidate on the Yankees, painfully slow and with barely any power left. “You are like the Yankees, but worse” hear the Yankees, as do the rest of the league. The Mets repeated this trick with Bobby Abreu, Curtis Granderson, Robinson Cano, Dellin Betances, Luis Severino, Todd Frazier, Adam Ottavino, and Harrison Bader. The faces changed, but the spiritual dialogue remained the same.
Anyway in this case, Gary Sheffield actually hit what might have been a decisive home run, in a close game, against his former team. How humiliating! Maybe the dialogue had changed somewhat. And then, after the Yankees tied the game up in the 7th, David Wright came up in the eighth with two on and two out, and smacked a double to put the Mets up 8-7! Off Mariano Rivera! The symbol of the Yankees’ untouchable World Series dynasty, still great ten years later, had been vanquished by David Wright, one of the very best Mets hitters of all-time, who would play his entire career with the team.
The game wasn’t quite over. After a quiet two half innings, K-Rod came in to close in the bottom of the ninth. He retired Brett Gardner, then gave up a single to Derek Jeter, then struck out Johnny Damon. Jeter stole second, and with two outs, K-Rod elected to walk the lefty Mark Texeira, to pitch to righty Alex Rodriguez. K-Rod on A-Rod. A-Rod, in the midst of one of his characteristic slumps, in which the New York press would abuse him mercilessly, and decry him as an overpaid prima donna who didn’t understand the Yankee Way like Jeter. Were the Yankees finally finished, and ready to let the Mets declare themselves as a peer in New York baseball? Had the Yankees finally become a cesspool of wasteful extravagance, that had corrupted the sacred lineage of pinstripe-dom and left the New York baseball throne vacant?
A-Rod answered that question affirmatively, popping a 3-1 middle-middle fastball straight up in the air. With a live ball in play, he hurled his bat against the dirt in frustration. He’d missed his shot. Second baseman Luis Castillo drifted back into the outfield, ready to make one of the easiest plays in his career. The game was over.
And then he dropped the ball. “Dropped the ball!!! He dropped the ball!!! Here comes Texeira! AND THE YANKEES WIN!!”, cried Yankees announcer Michael Kay, as Yankee Stadium fell into bedlam. K-Rod put his glove on his head in shock, then shook his head and walked off the field. He was a professional, after all. It’s a long season. They could still right the ship.
The Mets did not right the ship. They went 9-18 in the month of June. Carlos Beltran joined Reyes and Delgado on the injured list with a bone bruise that would eventually lead to surgery, which the Mets would then argue he didn’t need, because medical stuff has always been a farce with the Mets. Soon, Luis Castillo, Jon Niese, David Wright, and pretty much every other Met would get injured as well. On July 12th, the mechanical home run apple, a charming Shea Stadium gimmick that they moved to Citi Field, malfunctioned after rare Mets home runs. On August 23rd, Jeff Francouer hit into an unassisted triple play to kill a ninth inning rally. They did not make the playoffs that year, or in any of the next five. The Mets had a different future literally in their hands. And they dropped it, and could never pick it up again.
Meanwhile the Yankees went on to win the 2009 World Series.
II.
Aaron Judge’s drop did not happen in a vacuum either. Aaron Judge hit 62 home runs in 2022, breaking the American League record. He hit 58 in the 2024 regular season, but by every other metric he was even better than 2022. He became one of only six players in baseball history to slug over .700 in more than 700 plate appearances. He was a god, and the obvious, unanimous AL MVP for the second time in three years. In the playoffs he was complete garbage. He struck out in 20 of his 64 plate appearances, all excruciating, mind-boggling whiffs at pitches nowhere near the strike zone, or else pathetic waves at wimpy 90 mph fastballs right down the middle that he made seem completely overpowering. He hit .184, slugged .408, and was -.3 clutch according to a Fangraphs stat that I do not understand, but that makes intuitive sense to me because a lot of those strikeouts happened with men on base in close games.
Despite this, the Yankees made a deep run in the playoffs, thanks mostly to the heroic efforts of Juan Soto. Who of course was just signed by the Mets to a 15-year, $765 million contract that the Yankees were, for the first time ever, too cheap to pay, obliterating the spiritual dialogue I so arrogantly depicted with Gary Sheffield and the rest. Soto, along with heroic performances from Giancarlo Stanton and Gerrit Cole, carried the Yankees to the World Series, and as I wrote in my series preview, they seemed spiritually capable of going all the way, if only Judge would rouse himself from his slump, just for a few games. He did not. Until Game 5, where he came up with runners on in the first inning, like he did in every single playoff game, and finally, finally, rocked one into the right field bleachers. He’d done it. He was back. And so were the Yankees, who leapt to a 5-0 lead. A lead they seemed poised to keep, when Tommy Edman hit the routine fly ball to center, which Judge dropped.
“This is going to haunt the Yankees”, the @mlbonfox TikTok account wrote in their caption of a nine-second edit of this drop. As the self-appointed leading expert of Things That Haunt The Yankees, I emphatically concur. The Yankees had World Series Game 5 in their hands, just like they had Game 1 (I’ll need a whole other blog for that one, woof), and just like they had Juan Soto’s services for the rest of his career. They dropped it. Judge dropped the ball. I pray I’m wrong, but history tells us that the New York baseball ghosts are not kind to those who drop the ball.