How Harrison Bader is moving beyond his Yankees fandom and embracing the Mets

PORT ST. LUCIE — As someone who grew up idolizing Bernie Williams and attending games at Yankee Stadium to receive his baseball fix, Harrison Bader’s childhood memories of the Mets are scant.

There were the three or four games he saw at Shea Stadium — many of the family members on his mother’s side are Mets fans — but Bader, who spent his youth in Bronxville and attended Horace Mann School in Riverdale, was all about the Yankees. More specifically, it was the Yankees’ star players that captivated him.

Now the Mets’ starting center fielder, the 29-year-old Bader is anxious to learn about the organization he says he never hated growing up but largely ignored.

This was the early 2000s, after the Yankees had won the World Series for the fourth time in five years. Bader has vague recollections of the Subway Series in 2000, in which the Yankees beat the Mets to win the fourth of those titles, but it wasn’t until later on that his fandom really developed.