Road to Nowhere is the story of New York City baseball from 1990 to 1996, describing in intimate detail the collapse of both the Mets and the Yankees in the early nineties, the Yankees' then reclaiming of the city, and the Mets attempts to rebuild from the ashes. After the chaos of the 1980s, the New York Yankees finally bottomed out in 1990. It looked like New York would remain a Mets town well into the twenty-first century.A
Without their manic, meddling owner, the Yankees fell into the hands of Gene Michael. Michael made shrewd trades and free agent signings, and he allowed the team's prospects to develop in the Minor Leagues before getting to the Bronx.
Meanwhile, the Mets, beloved for their intensity and hard-partying ways in the 1980s, became everything that had driven fans away from the Yankees. They made bad trades and questionable signings, fired managers seemingly every year, and were a powder keg of controversy. By 1996, despite their record, the Mets were already making moves that would set them on a path to the ultimate showdown with the Yankees.
Road to Nowhere tells the story of how two teams that had swapped roles in the 1980s swapped them right back in the early 1990s.
Never before had both the Yankees and the Mets been in contention for the playoffs so late in the same season. For months New York fans dreamed of the first Subway Series in nearly thirty years, and the Mets and the Yankees vied for their hearts.
Despite their nearly identical records, the two teams were drastically different in performance and clubhouse atmosphere. The Mets were a team filled with hard-nosed players who won over New York with their dirty uniforms, curtain calls, after-hours activities, and because, well, they weren't the Yankees.
Meanwhile the Yankees featured some of the game's greatest talent. But the Yankees' abundance of talent was easily overshadowed by their dominating owner, George Steinbrenner, whose daily intrusiveness made the 1985 Yankees appear more like a soap opera than a baseball team.
While the drama inside the Mets' clubhouse only made the team more endearing to fans, the drama inside the Yankees' clubhouse had the opposite effect. The result was the most attention-grabbing and exciting season New York would see in generations.
