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Jorge Castillo
NEW YORK — The first sustained jeers of the 2025 Subway Series, a raucous and crude chorus of pent-up resentment, were unleashed 20 minutes before first pitch of Game 1 on Friday, when Juan Soto emerged to stretch in center field in his New York Mets grays.
“F— Juan Soto!” reverberated from the bleachers beyond the right-field wall amid boos all around Yankee Stadium. Soto, ever the showman, did not directly acknowledge the greeting. But he subtly tugged at the bill of his cap toward the bleachers, surely in the direction of at least some people who had showered him with love last summer into autumn as the New York Yankees rode Soto and Aaron Judge‘s historic tandem production to the franchise’s first World Series appearance in 15 years before Soto ditched them during the winter.
This was a battle between first-place teams 10 miles apart, a fact that alone would have provided more juice than usual to the weekend series. The addition of Soto’s perceived betrayal, one of the sport’s biggest storylines, made it perhaps the most anticipated meeting between the clubs since the 2000 World Series.
Marc Chalpin took his usual bleacher seat in Section 203 behind right field, surrounded by his Bleacher Creature brethren, at approximately 6:30 p.m., anticipating the inevitable. If he had it his way, fans wouldn’t have greeted Soto in his return to Yankee Stadium with vulgarity. “F— Juan Soto!” was, to Chalpin, both over-the-top in its obscenity and underwhelming in its creativity.
Chalpin, tasked to initiate the Bleacher Creatures’ famous Roll Call since 2016, didn’t believe Soto warranted the vitriol, because he was a Yankee for only one season and, above all, didn’t win a championship. But he knew the three-word melody was coming for the man who spurned the home team for the — gulp — Mets.
“You’ll hear it from non-regulars,” Chalpin said, “but it won’t be us.”
Daniel Cagan was one of the non-regulars in attendance Friday. A die-hard Yankees fan from Los Angeles, Cagan happened to be in town for work, bought a ticket and attended the sold-out group therapy session by himself. Wearing a No. 68 Dellin Betances jersey, with a beer in hand before getting to his seat in Section 204, he predicted what he expected to ensue.
“Mayhem.”
With Soto’s decision to spurn the Yankees for the Mets over the offseason, the “Re-sign Soto!” pleas he heard from the bleachers in 2024 morphed into the crude taunt repeated dozens of times over the next three-plus hours. They were interspersed with rounds of boos and occasional fresh, less crass chants. It was a reaction stemming from Yankees fans’ introduction into how other fan bases have often felt about their ballclub.
For years, the big, bad, richer-than-everybody-else Yankees snatched stars, via free agency or trade, from other teams. This time — and probably for not the last time — the roles flipped: Mets billionaire owner Steve Cohen, refusing to be outbid, lured Soto from the Bronx to Queens after the Yankees offered a 16-year, $760 million contract. Soto opted for the Mets’ 15-year, $765 million deal, which includes an option to increase the total value to $805 million, free use of a luxury suite at Citi Field, up to four tickets behind home plate for all home games, and personal security for him and his family for both home and away games.
“Seeing him go to the Mets, it’s just, like, it rubs you the wrong way,” said James Roina, a 22-year-old Yankees fan who was sitting in Section 204.
Roina wore a white pinstriped Soto No. 22 Yankees jersey that he customized to read “SELLOUT” on the back using packing tape and a marker. A few brave Mets fans were sprinkled throughout Sections 203 and 204 behind Soto, proudly wearing his No. 22 in blue and orange. Fans of both teams wore Dominican-flavored caps and jerseys.
“F— Juan Soto” chants and middle fingers flew every few minutes as fans from the two sides sporadically exchanged pleasantries over the nine innings. It was so boisterous during the first inning that the Bleacher Creatures were drowned out for some of the Roll Call. Most interactions were light-hearted. On occasion, a security guard intervened to defuse a situation. Nothing escalated to a physical altercation.
“[Soto] was only here for one year,” Chalpin said. “It was a very, very good year, but it was just one year. So he’s not an all-time Yankee great or anything like that. This isn’t Paul O’Neill. He never won here. He had a great year. But there is a distinction between a guy who won here and a guy who didn’t.”
In the days leading up to the game, Chalpin knew how he wanted the Bleacher Creatures to welcome Soto.
“You know, he turned his back on us,” Chalpin said. “My attitude is we should turn our backs on him. I don’t wish him harm, but I don’t wish him success either.”
So Chalpin and dozens of Bleacher Creatures in Section 203 turned their backs on Soto when he ran out to take his spot in right field for the first time. After the game, Soto said he didn’t notice the gesture.
Joe Lopez, a Bronx native and Bleacher Creature regular since 1987, joined in on the silent treatment.
“I knew he wasn’t coming back,” Lopez said. “Because the idea is to make as much money as you can. So how are you gonna dog Soto for going after the money? I mean, come on. He got everything he wants. He got the money. He got the suite. So you’re going to hate him for that? He’s not Aaron Judge. Aaron Judge could’ve gone home to San Francisco for more money. But he wanted to be here.”
Other chants occasionally surfaced. “MVP” chants for Judge were louder than usual, an effort made to remind Soto he wasn’t even the best player on the Yankees anyway.
Another favorite was “We got Grisham!” in reference to Trent Grishamthe other player the Yankees received with Soto from the San Diego Padres and who was buried on the Yankees’ bench last season but is now enjoying a breakout campaign. Fittingly, the praise came almost a year after they chanted “We want Soto!” when Grisham replaced an injured Soto in a weekend series against the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Yankees fans yelled, “You can’t field!” at Soto in the first inning. They called him, in rhythmic unison, an “a–hole”. With his monster contract in mind, they chanted, “Soto, greedy!” Later on, they unearthed the classic “Overrated” chorus.
All along, Soto did his best to ignore them. He jokingly acknowledged the sentiment at-large before his first plate appearance when, smiling, he took off his batting helmet, tipped it to the crowd, tapped his chest twice and mouthed, “Thank you.”
The bleachers, however, did not get that level of acknowledgement — until the eighth inning, when a “you miss Judge!” taunt erupted and Soto appeared to outline a heart toward the bleachers. Moments later, Soto caught the inning’s final out and threw the ball into the bleachers behind him without looking. A fan, after some peer pressure, threw the ball back, igniting another roar from the crowd.
“We finally got to him,” said Milton Ousland, another Bleacher Creature staple. “He knew the F-him chants were coming. We had to do something different.”
Ousland has been sitting in the bleachers since the 1980s, back when home games were at the old Yankee Stadium and the Mets were, in a blip in the franchise’s 63-year history, the best team in town. He became the section’s cowbell man in 1996, in time for the first of four Yankees championships in five seasons. Back then, Ousland insisted, Friday’s reaction to Soto would’ve been G-rated.
“This is nothing,” Ousland said. “We used to be so bad that [opposing right fielder Jose] Canseco used to DH. We used to look up bad words in Japanese. We used to chant curse words at Ichiro [Suzuki] the whole game in Japanese. We would look it up and hand out a paper to everybody, as they walked in, that had all the curse words in Japanese.
“We’ve really been on top of players before. This is nothing new. The only thing that’s new is that a guy chose the Mets over us.”
There was a point late in Friday’s game, with the Yankees holding a five-run lead, when the two fan bases momentarily coalesced to become one. It happened when the score of Game 6 of the Eastern Conference semifinals, played at Madison Square Garden, was shown on the video board. The hometown New York Knicks were thrashing the Boston Celtics 46-27 en route to an easy series-clinching win.
Ousland, who wore a Knicks cap, banged his cowbell in celebration as the bleachers went wild around him. Pinstriped people high-fived the brave blue-and-orange souls. A light “Jalen Brunson!” chant broke out. But the truce was fleeting. It was quickly back to business until Soto, who finished 0-for-2 with three walks in a 6-2 Yankees win, made the game’s final out.
