The New York Mets have existed since 1962, making 2025 the team’s 63rd season in Major League Baseball. In that time, the Mets have won the National League pennant five times, and the World Series twice.

The New York Yankees have existed since 1903. In fact, the Yankees have been around so long that they were not even originally called the Yankees. For its first 10 years, the team was called the New York Highlanders

The name came from the fact that, in that era, the team that would eventually come to be known as the Bronx Bombers played in New York’s Washington Heights neighborhood, in a wooden stadium built on the tallest hill in Manhattan and known appropriately as Hilltop Park.

In April 1913 they moved to a flatter area of Washington Heights, where they shared a ballpark known as the Polo Grounds with the New York Giants. As a result, they dropped the nickname “Highlanders” and became the New York Yankees.

In 1923 – three years after purchasing the contract of a rambunctious but supremely talented player named George “Babe” Ruth from the Boston Red Sox – the Yankees moved to their current location in the Bronx and into a new, state-of-the art (for the early 1920s) park christened, again quite appropriately, “Yankee Stadium.”

Since then, the Yankees have dominated MLB as the winningest franchise in baseball. The Yankees have won 27 championships in 41 trips to the World Series. The Yankees are the only franchise in MLB history to win four World Series in a row, a feat they have accomplished not once but twice, including when they won five straight starting in 1949.

So, when Juan Soto – who played only one season for the Yankees, in 2024, before switching to the Mets on a 15-year, $765 million free agent contract – declared in December that he chose the Mets because they “have the best chance to win,” there was disbelief across the Triborough Bridge in the Bronx.

In his first public statements of spring training on Monday, Yankees captain Aaron Judge, the reigning American League MVP (he also won the award in 2022) had some words for his ex-teammate.

“That’s his opinion. He can say what he wants, I definitely disagree with it,” Judge said in a video posted to X by SNY. “I wasn’t too surprised by it, I think that’s where he wanted to be.”

Judge, who has a reputation as one of the nicest people in MLB, was quick to add that he held no resentment against Soto, saying, “I’m happy for him.”

The Soto-Judge drama now gets a “To Be Continued” sign – until May 16 when Soto makes his return to Yankee Stadium in the first of six games between the Mets and Yankees in 2025.