Mike Lupica: With Juan Soto on their side, Mets will be most interesting team in town

The Mets are the more interesting team in town this season. They just are, until further notice. Like the season.

Doesn’t mean that they’re going to be better than the Yankees. The Yankees are coming off a season when they made it to the World Series for the first time in 15 years, and went one round deeper into the postseason than the Mets did, even if the Mets got one more game off the Dodgers than they did. Both teams are good stories, just because they almost always are, even when things go bad. But as we finally move up on Opening Day, the Mets are a better story, if for no other reason than they have Juan Soto and the Yankees do not.

“What we have done,” Carlos Mendoza told me on Friday, “is add a player of that caliber to what was already a great group.”

The Yankees might still have a better chance to win their division than the Mets do theirs, even without Gerrit Cole and with no one knowing when — or if — Giancarlo Stanton might even swing a bat again. The Yankees still might even have the best chance to win their league now that their nemesis — the Astros — seems to have more question marks coming into the season than the Yankees do, while the Mets are in a meat grinder of a division like the NL East, and in the same league with the Dodgers, who look to once again be the class of everything.

But the Mets, because of what they did last season and the way they did it, coming back from an 0-5 start and then becoming one of the very best teams in the sport after they were 22-33 at the end of May, are having a moment right now in New York. It is only enhanced by the fact that they now have Soto and the Yankees do not. Nothing like this, a star like this and of this magnitude moving from one side of the city to the other, has ever happened before. Now it is happening in a real time, and in front of our eyes.

It was somehow nearly a half-century ago — wait…..what? — that Reggie Jackson came to the Yankees as the biggest and baddest free agent in the world, arriving in New York and expected to put the Yankees over the top, just one year after they had gotten rolled by the Reds in the Series.

Of course he became exactly that, and the straw that stirred the drink. The Yankees won the Series in ’77, the one he effectively ended with those three home runs at the Stadium in Game 6, beating the Dodgers. Then they did it again, and that was the real beginning for Steinbrenner’s Yankees; for the reinvention of the Yankees, really.

Now the Mets pay Soto big in the hope that he can do the same for them. When Reggie got to town, the Yankees had lost the previous October to the best team in the world. Both our teams in New York just did the same thing with the Dodgers.

Are the Yankees still a team to watch? Come on, they always are, and have been even before Soto got with them for a year and the only player you truly wanted to watch with them was Aaron Judge. Now, at least for the time being, maybe the most important players to watch besides Judge are the young guys who will finally get a full shot, starting with the shortstop, Anthony Volpe, on whom they have played just a big bet, simply because he is the young guy about whom they have been talking for years, the face of what has so routinely been a vastly overrated farm system.

It is the Mets, though, who have Soto now hitting behind the great Francisco Lindor, the most exciting all-around player the team has ever had, and hitting in front of Pete Alonso. It was Alonso who, even coming off a sub-standard season for him, still made one of the biggest swings in Mets history against the Brewers in that Game 3 of their Wild Card series, saving the Mets season in the process.

Do the Mets have questions about their pitching, starting with the starters? Welcome to the world, everybody except the Big Blue Machine in Los Angeles has them, but look what happened with the war of attrition with their starters last season.

“Hey, everybody has issues,” Mendoza said. “You just have to deal with them as they come along.”

Dave Roberts, the Dodgers manager, dealt rather splendidly with injuries last season, all the way until Roberts needed to use nine relief pitchers in the bullpen game that saved his team’s season against the Padres. But Mendoza was equally brilliant, especially after getting hit hard early in his rookie season, first with that 0-5 start and then at the end of May when it looked as if the Mets were imploding. We found out plenty about him, and we found out plenty about a bunch of grinders who were as tough as any Mets team has ever been, all the way to Game 6 in L.A. against the Dodgers.

“We found out last season what a tough group we had, and the ability it had to bounce back,” Mendoza said Friday, less than a week from Opening Day. “Now, even with so many of our guys back, you still have to find it again. But we did face so much adversity last year, and not just early. Even late, when we were going as good as we were, it seemed like it was always something. But we kept powering through.”

All the way to the Dodgers in the NLCS. The Yankees couldn’t take their series against the Dodgers back to L.A. when they were down three games to one. The Mets did. Ain’t nothing.

It is not as if you can somehow turn the lights up even more after a surprise and satisfying season like that. But it feels as if they have been turned up around the Mets because of the 26-year-old Soto, the best hitter of that age to ever hit the free agent market, coming off the season of his life hitting in front of No. 99.

“And we kept Pete [Alonso],” Mendoza said. “We brought back [Sean] Manaea. We added an arm like Clay Holmes, who’s pitched himself into being our Opening Day starter.”

Mendoza talked about the foundation built last season. Now we see how they do in there with the Phillies and Braves. There have been only two times since the Mets came into existence when they were the best show in town. The first time, forever, was with the Miracle Mets of 1969. Then came the 86ers when those Mets, with Gooden and Strawberry and Hernandez and Carter and them. If you were around then, you know: You were afraid to miss a single game.

Is this Mets team that Mets team? Nope. It’s still going to be a team to watch, with its chance to be THE team to watch in New York this season. Will it play out that way? We start finding out at the end of the week.

Not only do we see if the Mets can do it again. We see if they can do it better.

KNICKS NEED TO FIND SOME DEFENSE, TIME FOR VOLPE TO RISE UP & GIANTS NEED TO GO FOR DEION’S KID …

Maybe there will be a puff of ayahuasca smoke when Aaron Rodgers finally makes his decision, kind of the psychedelic version of the way they do it when a new Pope is elected.

Every single night, with or without Steph Curry on the floor, the Warriors have two guys who get after it on defense, Draymond and Jimmy Butler.

Sometimes you wonder if the Knicks have even one.

I love that people are just now starting to process that the Knicks might get the Pistons in the first round, by the way.

Whatever you think about Bronny James being a Laker, how could you not be happy that the kid scored 17 against the Bucks the other night on 7-for-10 shooting?

Both John Calipari and Rick Pitino are both in the first chapters of new books, which is pretty cool.

If it’s March, Fordham must be changing basketball coaches again.

If Anthony Volpe really is going to make a big move up the charts, now would be his own moment to do that.

It’s like what Ernie Accorsi said to his son in Glendale that night before Eli took the Giants down the field against the Patriots:

“If [Eli] is what I thought he was, he’ll be that now.”

If Volpe is the player the Yankees so desperately want him to be, this season would really be a perfect time for that.

Alex Verdugo worked out like gangbusters for the Yankees, right?

At the end, he started to make Yankee fans nostalgic for Aaron Hicks.

You can only imagine what the noise would have been like if Rory McIlroy had missed the four-footer that put him into The Players championship on the 72nd hole.

McIlroy is one of the best guys out there, he is a great player but, despite all that, slow thinkers in the galleries have picked out him to heckle.

Nice.

East Coast bias time for all East Coasters: It is ridiculous for these NCAA men’s tournament games to start at 10 o’clock at night.

The only sport that starts later is U.S. Open tennis, but that’s just because the people there left scheduling school early.

I kind of am hoping that the Giants go for Deion’s kid, if you want to know the truth.

Shohei really does make baseball the international pastime, doesn’t he?

You always go back to my old pal Liz Smith for this line, just changing the names as necessary:

Who gives Elon Musk the creeps?