If you play professional baseball in New York City for a living, you might look at your football counterparts and shake your head. The Giants and Jets all but caused a ticker-tape parade to break out by going a combined 3-1 in their first two weeks. 

The Yankees and Mets? If they don’t win the World Series, or at least get there, they will be criticized and scrutinized 24/7, and their fan bases won’t want to hear another word about Aaron Judge’s home run records or Max Scherzer’s 200th career victory. 

At its core, the big city is a baseball town. Though the NFL might be the modern-day national pastime and a runaway ratings machine, baseball remains New Yorkers’ bread and butter. And now that Mets owner Steve Cohen is outspending the ruling Steinbrenners in The Bronx, both teams have become championship-or-bust entities. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. 

The Mets will now be evaluated against those unforgiving Yankee standards over the long haul, and that’s the way they want it. Meanwhile, on the more violent side of the market’s sports landscape, the Giants and Jets have benefited from a double standard of their own design. 

Using the last New York football postseason victory of any kind (non-Buffalo division) as a marker — the Giants’ Super Bowl 46 triumph over the Patriots in February 2012 — the Giants and Jets were a combined 116-206 over the 10 regular seasons preceding 2022, with a grand total of one playoff game between them. Using that singular playoff appearance as a separate marker (the Giants’ blowout loss to Green Bay after the 2016 season) the Giants and Jets were a combined 74 games under .500 in the 162 games they played before this year’s openers. 

Those horror-show memories provide the context for the near-euphoric response to the Giants’ 2-0 start, and to the Jets’ remarkable endgame theatrics in Cleveland that spared them an 0-2 start. Fans conditioned to expect the worst got something more preferable than the worst, and understandably reacted as if they had clinched at least a wild-card berth before the Mets did. 

This is what the Giants and Jets have put their paying customers through for a decade, causing turnover at the GM, head coach, and quarterback positions and leaving the people who support the teams desperate for any sign of life. 

Following three straight two-and-done head coaches, rookie Brian Daboll has given the Giants reason to believe he has a plan and a player-empowering style that could be keepers. Second-year man Robert Saleh hasn’t inspired the same level of faith, at least not yet. But when the Jets came from behind and recovered an onside kick in the closing minutes to win an NFL road game with a backup quarterback, they showed they are willing to fight for Saleh against forbidding odds. 

Now what the Giants and Jets need to do is show some rare staying power and deliver a football season that stays relevant long after the Yankees and Mets are done doing whatever they’ll do in October and, perhaps, early November. The local NFL teams are usually cooked by Halloween. 

How about making it past Thanksgiving this time around, and surviving on the playoff fringe into Hanukkah and maybe even into Christmas? Is that really too much to ask — to be within a couple of games of the last wild-card spot with three or four games to play? 

To finally surprise the students of the game who figured another 4-13 or 5-12 this year was as good as a Joe Namath guarantee? 

Of course, the mission of just being competent is compromised by the fact that neither local team is set at quarterback. Zach Wilson is hurt, again, and nobody knows on return if he will be any better in Year 2 than he was in Year 1. Daniel Jones has made some winning plays — most notably his run for a first down Sunday that sunk Carolina — but has already felt Daboll’s wrath (at Tennessee) and, all in all, hasn’t yet played at a level that would dissuade GM Joe Schoen from scouring America’s campuses for a new quarterback. 

So the Giants and Jets are going to have to make this up on the fly. They will have to be creative, resourceful and aggressive in finding small openings in the narrow margin separating victory and defeat. The Jets might have more dynamic talent, but the Giants might have the softer schedule and an edge in coaching and chemistry (though it’s early).

Meanwhile, there’s a pretty special baseball season in New York barreling toward October. The Mets have a chance to win 100 games and to enter the tournament as a credible threat to win it all. With injured players returning and with Judge being Judge, the Yankees have a chance to make their second-half fade irrelevant by claiming their 28th World Series title. 

Nobody is asking the Giants and Jets to win a championship, or even to compete for one. But it would be awfully nice, at last, if New York’s football teams were still worth a damn around the holidays.