Amazin’ inroads by Mets

Part of Arturo Ramirez’s adolescent rebellion was to hate the Yankees, the team that everybody around him loved. He became a Boston Red Sox fan mostly just to tick off his uncle. The 35-year-old hospital administrator got over teenage angst. But he still loves an underdog. And so this season he’s declared himself a card-carrying Met fan, and if the ballclub that is sick of being second in this city has its way, so will thousands of other Latino New Yorkers.

For Ramirez the allure of the Sox was stellar Dominican players like Pedro Martinez and Manny Ramirez. But now the Mets have Pedro and a new leadership that is riveting in Ramirez’s neighborhood not only because it’s pure New York but also because it speaks the native tongue. The Mets’ Omar Minaya is major league baseball’s first general manager of Latino background. He’s also Dominican, raised in Queens, the team home and the heart of Met country. His new team manager is a novice named Willie Randolph, a former Yankee second baseman and assistant coach who is African American, from Brooklyn. What they lack in experience these two apparently make up in a direct, competitive style that Minaya characterizes as classic New York.

“The trust in these guys, particularly in Omar, means a lot to my people,� said Ramirez, standing at the corner of Washington Heights’ 187th Street and St. Nicholas Boulevard (a.k.a. Juan Pablo Duarte Boulevard for the founder of the Dominican Republic). This is the commercial center of a part of northern Manhattan dominated by a Spanish beat and by baseball-obsessed Dominicans who scrape together the money at least once a year to cross the Harlem River to nearby Yankee Stadium.

Ramirez suspects that just like he defected to the Sox, plenty of his friends (who won’t admit it but are fed up with pin-striped arrogance) will follow him this season to the Mets. It’s farther on the subway to Shea Stadium, but if the Mets finally play decent ball, Ramirez is going. “If Omar does the job, you’re gonna see a lot more Mets jerseys on the subway from this area.�

It is certainly part of the “new� Met calculus to appeal to the big slice -- almost a third of this city -- that is Latino and particularly to Dominicans, the fastest-growing ethnic group in the metropolis. The Mets have even launched radio commercials with comedian John Leguizamo pestering Minaya for tickets; in another ad, Minaya is waxing sincere about the “new� Mets of Pedro Martinez and Carlos Beltran, a Puerto Rican superstar whom Minaya signed this year. And why not? The players each waxed sincere about Minaya, praising him after they signed for the terrific tender he made and how he negotiated in Spanish. In recent weeks the Mets added another Latino brand to the bench when Banco Popular, the largest Latino-owned bank in the nation, signed a five-year deal to be the official bank of the Mets, winning the right to plaster its name all over Shea.

Clearly, the “new� Mets’ hope is to fill the stadium to the rafters by scouring every New York Latino neighborhood where father-to-son loyalties aren’t quite as relevant as native attachments. Clearly the long-term strategy is to spawn a loyal television following for a new team network that is to start next year. Not that this is an original idea. The Angels’ Arte Moreno, the first Latino majority-owner in baseball, has similarly hired great Latin players and made a strong push in their communities. And who could forget “Fernandomania� and how the great pitcher Fernando Valenzuela filled Dodger Stadium in the 1980s with Latino fans?

But the competition in this town is often as much about what goes on off the field than on -- about getting on the back page of the tabloids and garnering TV ratings and, well, subway/sidewalk buzz. The Mets showed last week that preseason symbolism was inching them forward at least on that front. The day after the home opener, the New York Daily News, the tabloid of choice for many Met fans, noted that about half of the 25-member roster was foreign born or from Puerto Rico: “With a Dominican at short-stop, Japanese league veteran at second, a Puerto Rican in centerfield and a pitching staff that includes a Korean and a Venezuelan, the reinvented Mets reflected the composition of yesterday’s full house.�

But for the hype to come true, the Mets have to keep doing what they did during the home opener last week -- they have to win. (The Mets lost to the Florida Marlins on Sunday, ending a six-game winning streak.) Nobody knows that better than the man behind the calculus: “There’s a buzz about our club, and the style of baseball we’re playing -- stealing bases and forcing plays -- is keeping it going,� said Minaya during a phone interview between games last week. “We built excitement by first of all bringing more players who the fan base can be excited about. But that’s only a start. We got to win and keep winning games.�

In other words, if they want crossover support at home they have to do as well if not better than the Yankees, the team that maintains a fierce grip on this city. For decades, the Yankees have had a winning tradition, so much so that now grown men wear Yankee shirts to bed at night and little kids around the five boroughs are more likely to pull on Yankee caps at their weekend games than those emblazoned with their own Little League’s logo. That’s what the Mets are up against. The Yankees have won 26 World Series and the Mets have won two, and there are tribal hatreds between these teams that go way, way back. It even comes down to the colors that they wear, a war of classic blue pinstripes versus garish orange and blue polyester.

It’s all arcane and complicated, and the best way to track the slights, big and small, is by examining the photographs of ballplayers and stadiums on the walls of Washington Heights’ Coogan’s restaurant at Broadway and 169th Street.

Don’t be fooled by the name. It’s the kind of place both Arturo Ramirez and his Irish friends at the hospital where he works might inhabit. Coogan’s is one of those crossover establishments -- sort of Casablanca on the Hudson -- where Irish and Italians, Jews and Poles, and every iteration of Latino, turns out on Tuesday nights for bilingual karaoke and where owners Peter Walsh (Yankee fan) and Dave Hunt (Met fan) perpetuate rivalries and forge new friendships.

So what do these two wise men think are the chances of the “new� Mets taking over the neighborhoods?

Being New Yorkers and sports fans, of course, they can’t agree.

Dave starts talking about his Brooklyn Dodgers of yesteryear and Pete interrupts, invoking current Yankees’ statistics, and a female columnist goes numb with confusion. Who? When? Which team? And what do National League attachments have to do with Omar Minaya’s Mets?

“Let’s talk about now,� says Pete, trying to bring clarity for a baseball idiot. “You have to make serious inroads to get past the Yankees.

“After all, they have plenty of players who are Latino, and the Dominicans and Puerto Ricans around here know that ... “

“Awww, come on, most of the Yankee players don’t even know that Bernie Williams is Puerto Rican,� Dave shoots back.

“Well,� Pete concedes, “the Mets have a chance but they need a closer, someone who can, you know -- “

“Yes,� says Dave, finally, “Omar Minaya may know the handshake, but in the end, it’ll be the checkbook that wins.�

Or, something like that.