My friend Jessica -- a hearty if somewhat uninformed baseball fan -- was in a Brooklyn tavern this weekend when who walks in but Jerry Springer. They chat. Turns out Jerry, despite growing up in Queens, is a Yankees fan. "There were no Mets," he explains.

	For the next week or two, the world -- okay, maybe just the baseball world -- will revolve around New York City.

The conversation turns to the Subway Series, at the time just a rumbling in the subconscious of Gotham's collective desires. Jerry, free as he is of sentimentality, is squarely for the Yanks. Jessica, trending toward a more egalitarian disposition, admits a fondness for the Mets. "The Yankees always win," she tells Jerry. "The Mets should have their turn. It's only fair."

Now I wasn't there at the time, so I didn't have an opportunity to explain to Jessica what's really going on here. After all, is it fair that Yankee fans used to abuse David Justice and now cheer for him, with no appreciation of the irony? Is it fair that Roger Clemens beaned Mike Piazza in an interleague game earlier this year and never had to bat for himself? Is it fair that Cardinals catcher Mike Matheny sliced his finger with a hunting knife just prior to the postseason, or that Mark McGwire couldn't buy a pitch to hit, or that the Mariners' plane had to circle back to Kennedy Airport because the microwave oven was on the blink? Is it really fair that 26 other cities have just one baseball team, and for the second city with two -- the Second City -- the second team is the Cubs? And is it fair that for the next seven days -- 11 if necessary -- New York City is going to have free rein to strut its cocky, obnoxious, over-inflated sense of self-importance all over every conceivable means of mass communication now known or soon to be invented, with Tim McCarver commentating?

No, it isn't. But I wasn't there to explain all this to the gentle-hearted Jessica. Luckily, Jerry Springer was. Placing a consoling hand on her blissfully innocent shoulder, and shaking his head in that way-of-the-world way of his, he let in her in on the real deal. "You know, dear," he says gently, "it's not about fair."

Brendan O'Connor writes baseball for ESPN The Magazine. He is an unabashed Yankees fan.