These are strange times. Up is down. Left is right. And the two Major League Baseball teams in New York are trading places.

Meet the new New York Mets, same as the old New York Yankees.  

New York has been ready to become a Mets town for a while now, as Quinnipiac University found that their fans outnumbered Yankees fans in the city as far back as 2017.

Not bad, considering that the only thing that the Mets have in as much abundance as the Yankees have wins and World Series championships is tragicomic backpage headlines in the New York Daily News.  

It can only help the Mets' cause, then, that the franchise's apparent new goal in life is to out-Yankee the Yankees.

Even if Steve Cohen's first season as the owner of the Mets in 2021 wasn't as successful (or as uncontroversial) as he hoped, he at least succeeded in what the Wilpons never even tried to accomplish when they owned the team: climbing into the same payroll stratosphere as the Yankees. He's since forced the organization into an even higher stratosphere in 2022, and this time it's paying off accordingly. As the Yankees are just 6-5 out of the gate, the Mets are 9-3.

The 2022 season isn't even two weeks old, so it's perhaps too early to flip-flop the Yankees and Mets in the race for New York's first World Series apperance since 2015, much less the city's first championship since 2009. Or rather, definitely too early according to FanGraphs' World Series title chances. The Yankees are at 10.1 percent, compared to 8.8 percent for the Mets.

And yet, it's hard not to feel like the winds of reality are blowing squarely in the latter's favor.

What's Going Right for the Mets

Honestly, so much is going right for the Mets that this section could simply read, "Good job, Mets. No notes."

Even setting aside how they've actually played so far, they're to be applauded for what they did to get ready for this season. After recording a disappointing 77-85 in 2021, the Mets deliberately pointed themselves toward better days by hiring a competent general manager in Billy Eppler and an eminently qualified manager in Buck Showalter.

The latter hiring might not have happened without three-time Cy Young Award winner Max Scherzer, who reportedly lobbied for Showalter after signing a record-breaking three-year, $130 million contract. The Mets spent nearly another $130 million to sign outfielders Starling Marte and Mark Canha and infielder Eduardo Escobar and later worked the trade market to bring in All-Star right-hander Chris Bassitt.