Mets rotation vs. Yankees starting five: A baseball argument nobody can win

Two of the best baseball teams right now play in the same city. That’s right. I’m talking about the Los Angeles Dodgers and Los Angeles Angels. The two teams closest to the glitz and glamour of Hollywood are playing remarkably well. Out east, the New York Mets and New York Yankees are playing fine, too.

In fact, New York and Los Angeles are absolutely dominating Major League Baseball. The two major markets easily have four of the top five teams in the sport. In New York, there’s one specific debate going on.

Both the Mets and Yankees have found themselves succeeding in large part because of their starting rotations. Each began the year with some questions because of injuries. Both have had their aces shine and many doubts brushed aside. Mets fans are arguing that their rotation is better while Yankees followers are pumping out their chests in favor of their club. It’s a raging debate on social media and not exactly winnable.

Mets vs. Yankees rotation debate is an ongoing battle of New York sports fans

There are some similarities between the rotations but also some major differences. Aces Max Scherzer and Gerrit Cole have pitched well this year. Surprising studs Tylor Megill and Nestor Cortes have also caught people’s attention. Megill was the starter in the Mets no-hitter and this past Monday featured a start from Cortes where he carried a no-hitter into the eighth inning.

Apart from those two comparisons, there are a lot of differences although we can try to make a few connections.

Carlos Carrasco and Jameson Taillon are the pair of pitchers each team brought in via trade. Both struggled in their first season with their respective New York baseball club—Carrasco far more so in 2021.

The other pitchers in each rotation, Chris Bassitt and Taijuan Walker for the Mets and Jordan Montgomery and Luis Severino for the Yankees, don’t have too much in common other than some early success—Bassitt and Montgomery pitching the best of the four.

Through five or six starts for most of these arms, it’s way too early to begin measuring what is next. They can be ranked until our fingertips bleed. Numbers can be sifted through until our eyes sting. It’s not fair to measure any one single statistic and say a particular stat makes one rotation better than the other. We’re at the stage of the season where our gut instinct answers the question about which Big Apple baseball team has the better rotation.

How you think probably depends on which team you watch more.

The old debate of Jacob deGrom vs. Gerrit Cole now has arms and legs. It’s not just a battle of aces. It’s a war of starting staffs. Winning baseball in New York is a good thing.