Buck Showalter may end up as most significant person to represent both Mets and Yankees

This will have to be a little different for Buck Showalter. Look, he’s been around the block a time or three. This season he’s already managed against two of his former teams, the Mets winning four out of six against the Diamondbacks and two out of three against the Rangers.

(It will take a mirror image of the 1969 season for him to get a crack at the Orioles, and this time it would be the O’s taking part in a profound baseball miracle.)

Still, these are the Yankees. Showalter grew up a Yankee, playing seven years in their farm system after being picked in the fifth round of the ’77 draft, hitting a damn respectable .294 in 2,865 at-bats, managing five years in the minors for them (and winning at a .613 clip), then coaching and managing the Yankees from 1991-95.

He won’t say it, because it would violate the mantra he’s preached to his players all year, that no game and no opponent should be treated any differently.

“Everyone we play merits our respect,” he says.

Fair enough. But the Yankees are unquestionably a permanent part of his baseball heart. And quickly, so too are the Mets. In its own way what Showalter has done across 96 games with the Mets approximates what he did in 313 games with the Yankees: He installed instant credibility where there’d been precious little before he took over.

And once the teams acted professionally, they played that way.

And started to win.

It is just 96 games — No. 97 was Tuesday night at Citi Field, the first game of the first half of this year’s Subway Series — but if Showalter strings together similar seasons across the next few years, it is almost certain that he is bound for a unique place in New York’s baseball pantheon: the most significant figure to represent both organizations.

Yes, Casey Stengel got his number retired by both teams — but even Mets fans tend to be a bit embarrassed by that, since the Mets were cartoonishly bad under Stengel’s watch, losing about a thousand games (actually the record was 175-404).

Yogi Berra? There is no way to refute his record. He led both the 1964 Yankees and the 1973 Mets within a game of world championships, losing in Game 7 both times to the Cardinals and Athletics. When he urged the Mets that “it ain’t over till it’s over” in ’73, he became just the second manager ever — after Joe McCarthy (Yankees and Cubs) to win pennants in both leagues.

Get all the latest live and local coverage from the New York Post as the Yankees and Mets face off for Game 1 of the 2022 Subway Series.

Still, Berra’s tenure with both teams is also remembered for how players on both teams took advantage of his kind nature. And Mets fans of a certain age best remember how he mismanaged the pitching in Games 6 and 7 of the World Series that year, eschewing George Stone and pitching Tom Seaver on short rest in Game 6. Whether that was his own choice or if he’d been bullied into it by Seaver has long been a matter of whom you talk to.

In truth, the man who at this moment probably is the most accomplished YankeeMet is one whose name has sadly been lost to the dueling fogs of history and memory. Johnny Murphy was a terrific Yankees pitcher in the 1930s and ’40s, a way-ahead-of-his-time reliever who went 93-53 with a 3.54 ERA in 12 years in The Bronx, an important part of seven pennant winners and five World Series champs, a three-time All-Star. Years later, he was the GM and primary architect of the ’69 Mets. He died at 61 on Jan. 14, 1970, just 90 days after the Mets completed their mystical run.

Willie Randolph is probably second on that list when you pair his brilliant tenure as a core Yankee for 13 years with a severely underappreciated run as manager of the Mets, leading them to 97 wins in 2006, one of just six first-place finishes in team history.

So the door is clearly open for Showalter to top that list, especially if the Mets continue to play this year as they’ve played so far, certainly if he figures a way to get the Mets to the finish line during the three years in which he’s under contact. And even if they fall shy of the Canyon of Heroes, he may still be destined for the top floor.