We are breaking down all aspects of Yankee baseball.

This is the Bronx Pinstripe Show with your host, Andrew Rotandi and Scott Rhinan.

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What's up everybody?

Welcome to the Bronx Pinstripe Show.

Today we're previewing the Mets as well as the NL East with Tim Britton, senior writer for The Athletic. He covers the New York Mets. Tim, what's up? Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me on. Just a couple days of opening day. Excited about it. The AL and NL East are shaping up to be two of the most exciting divisions in baseball.

They were already last year as well, but not just the most exciting, but also most competitive

with all of the teams specifically for the NAL East, the Mets, the Braves, and the Phillies,

all vying for that top spot.

Yeah, I mean, there's not many divisions.

These are probably the only two in baseball where you can look around and say there are three legitimate World Series contenders in them. In the NL East, you've got Atlanta's won the division five years running. They won 101 games last year. They won the 2021 World Series. You've got Philly who went to the World Series last year and looks like the kind of team that when it gets into the tournament

is pretty dangerous once it gets there. And then you've got the Mets who won 101 games last year

and had very little to show for it come October. You know, Atlanta caught them the last week of the

season to win the division and then the Mets bowed out in the wildcard round against the Padres and then

spent a lot of money in the offseason to bring back many of the same guys but with some replacement pieces in there as well you've got Trey Turner and Sean Murphy joining the division as well it's just going to be I think a a six month long battle among those teams at the top of the NL East is that what Mets fans are grasping on to it's it's going to be our turn this this year. The other two teams have gone to the World Series the past two years, and now it's our turn? I mean, you look at the last three full 162 game seasons. You've had the Nationals win the World Series, Atlanta win the World Series, and Philly go to the World Series. So if you get a full season. The NL. East usually wins out in the end, it seems. I got to be honest with you, the 2019 season seems like a lifetime ago. It is. I mean, ask nationals fans, right? Yeah, for sure. I don't even know if we're going to be spending a minute on them in this pod. But what the Mets did this offseason, you know, obviously as Yankees fans and as a Yankees podcast, we, we like to just keep tabs with the Mets. And I'm not one of those Yankees fans that thinks everything the Mets do is awful, and I'm not like necessarily a Mets hater. I found just Steve Cohen to be fascinating and how he's operating to be fascinating and the fact that they have just

spent so much and so much and so much. And I know the Correa thing didn't work out. I actually

think that might be a blessing in disguise for the Mets. But just like what's your take on how he has

been operating on just we're just going to keep spending and we're not going to care what anyone else is saying.

Yeah, I mean, it was a really interesting conversation kind of before the offseason of what would Steve Cohen do?

Because they had obviously a very good team last year, but to bring back most of the same players was going to take a significant investment above and beyond what last year's payroll was.

So Cohen had told

the New York Post late last season that, you know, I think you can build a pretty good team for $300 million. And he had done that in 2022. But it was not going to be easy to do that for the 2023 Mets. And that's why their payroll is so much higher this year than it was last year in order to to bring back Edwin Diaz, you have to pay him more. In order to bring back Brandon Nimmo,

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