Photo: Rich Storry/Getty Images
Peligro Sports employee Randy Rodriguez was smiling sheepishly. Standing in front of an array of caps at a Washington Heights sporting-goods store one day last month, he admitted he was abandoning the Yankees. Never mind that the team has won 27 championships, made it to the World Series last year, and are betting-odds favorites to return this season (despite a raft of injuries), Rodriguez was terminating his fandom. With the aid of a fellow employee translating, he said he was making a switch long unthinkable in New York: to the Mets.
Or at least he was very likely to do so. “Ochenta y cinco por ciento, que sí,” he said — meaning he was 85 percent sure. Hey, commitment is hard, especially when your co-workers keep insisting you’re going to bring your (alleged) bad luck to your new team. But across Washington Heights and beyond, legions of the area’s more than 1.2 million residents with Dominican roots are making the same choice, dropping pinstripes for orange and blue.
The singular reason for this fandom exodus: Juan Soto and his record-breaking 15-year, $765 million contract. The greatest of Major League Baseball’s current Dominican stars, Soto spent 2024 in the Bronx before deciding in December to take his talents to Flushing.
At Peligro, a local baseball institution known for catering to both MLB and Dominican Professional Baseball League diehards, Yankees gear outsold Mets paraphernalia last season at an 80-20 clip, said Freddy Peña, a longtime store manager. Since Soto’s signing, it has flipped to 70-30 Mets. “It was like a complete stop from, Oh, we were selling Yankees gear, and now it’s Mets, Mets, Mets,” Peña said.
Across the store from Rodriguez, two full racks of Yankees jerseys were hanging alongside a depleted supply of blue Mets Soto jerseys. Previously, Peligro offered more than a dozen varieties of Yankees hats and just a couple of Mets lids. But store owner Jose Mateo said his Mets-cap display will soon match the Yankees one, including a hat with the Dominican flag plus Soto’s name and No. 22 stitched beside the Mets’ curlicued “NY.”
Dominican fans in the U.S. tend to follow home-island heroes more than teams, switching clubs when their favorite players do. Mateo, who emigrated from the D.R. when he was 17, explained that while some Dominican fans in New York “die with the Yankees” and others “die with the Mets,” most will go with a player. The bigger the star, the stronger the pull. “A guy like Soto brings the fans,” Mateo said.
Rodriguez, for example, used to root for the St. Louis Cardinals, back when Santo Domingo native Albert Pujols played for the team. After Pujols decamped for the lowly Angels, Rodriguez drifted from team to team depending on his preferred Dominican player of the moment. When the Yankees traded for Soto, that finally meant the Bombers. “Last year, Soto made it huge for Dominican fans, for Yankee Stadium,” Mateo said.
It was a major moment. For all their vaunted rings, the club has never locked down control of New York’s most baseball-obsessed population — one centered, no less, in the Bronx, the home of Yankee Stadium, and uptown Manhattan, just an errant Chuck Knoblauch toss away. Until Soto arrived, the Yankees had simply never had a Dominican megastar capable of drawing fans en masse. (Alex Rodriguez might have qualified had he not been widely disowned by Dominican fans after choosing to represent the U.S. over the Dominican Republic in the 2006 World Baseball Classic.)
“A lot of Dominicans, they’ve never been such good fans of the Yankees,” Mateo said.
When City Councilmember Carmen De La Rosa took office in 2022, she became the first Dominican woman to represent Washington Heights and Inwood. She has seen the impact of Soto’s signing around her district — though she wants it on record that she has always been a staunch Mets devotee, even when her father peeled off several years ago to support Boston and its fleet of Dominican stars led by star pitcher Pedro Martínez. (“That’s where I drew the line,” she said.) De La Rosa believes that, by not holding on to Soto, the Yankees missed an opportunity to finally secure widespread support in New York’s Dominican community.
“While maybe it’s not part of the Yankees’ grand scheme in their calculations, it should be,” she said. “Dominicans, we bring that energy and that excitement.”
After the Red Sox traded for Martínez ahead of the 1998 season, Dominican fans flocked to Fenway Park on days he pitched, turning the old bandbox into a raucous fiesta. With Soto onboard, many, like De La Rosa, expect the atmosphere at Citi Field to be turned up, too.
“Absolutely, it’ll get festive and loud and celebratory,” she said.
It will be “real, real loud,” echoed Mateo.
Last year, the Mets rode a tide of uncharacteristic good feeling to a surprise appearance in the National League Championship Series, spurred on by Grimace and the vocal and fielding talents of Jose Iglesias, a journeyman shortstop and pop star whose anthem, “OMG,” captured the Mets faithful and the Latin-pop world alike. But the team did not bring back Iglesias for this season, and everyone knows the risks of going back to McDonald’s too quickly. The infusion of fans and excitement caused by Soto’s arrival ought to give the ’25 squad a chance to forge its own identity — one no less vibrant, though perhaps less purple.
It is, of course, common for fans to take a shine to pro athletes with whom they share a background. But given that practically every Major League roster now includes Dominican players — many of them stars — the extent to which Dominican fans jump team to team along with their favorite players is unique. When the Mets traded for Mike Piazza, for example, he did not come packaged with Little Italy.
Ramona Hernández, a professor of sociology and the director of the Dominican Studies Institute at the City University of New York, said la pelota has long been a dominant part of Dominican culture and is all the more so today as it is often viewed as a way out of poverty. Some fans see themselves — or perhaps someone they know — in the stars who make it; others just feel pride.
“No matter how large we are, we are still a very small group in the country,” Hernández said. “I think that feeling of being a small group makes you click and connect to that which is familiar and that shares this historical legacy.”
Soto’s signing the largest contract in baseball history has been a particular point of pride. “It is something that I think resonated with Dominicans,” she said. “This humble young person put the name of the Dominican people way up there in the right way.”
Last season, 142 players born in the D.R. played in MLB, according to the Baseball Almanac, the most by far from any country besides the United States. As recently as 1980, though, the number was just 30. In 1990 it grew to 52, by 2000 it was 104, and by 2010 it was 126. Until then, there was only a single Dominican Hall of Famer, Juan Marichal, who played from 1960 to 1975. Marichal had a loyal following, but it was during the player boom of the late ’90s and early aughts that the next wave of all-time greats arrived — and that Dominican fans’ penchant for following players became most pronounced.
Hernández said she recently happened to look at an old picture of herself from 1978, when she was studying at Lehman College in the Bronx, and noticed she was wearing a Yankees cap. But when the Red Sox traded for Martínez, that “NY” on her head turned to a red “B.”
“Martínez was there, are you kidding me? Forget it,” she said.
Similarly, Led Black, a Washington Heights community activist and the founder of The Uptown Collective blog, recalled that his father was a lifelong Yankees fan until the rival Red Sox became loaded with Dominican superstars: not just Martínez but also David Ortiz and Washington Heights’s own Manny Ramírez.
During that period, at the height of the Red Sox–Yankees holy war, Washington Heights became known as a hotbed of Red Sox resistance in the city. “There was some pushback. You would definitely see it at the barbershop,” Black said. “I think the loyalty to Dominicanness trumped a lot of it.”
Over time, Boston’s stars retired and most Dominican fans in New York moved on, though a lingering corps of Red Sox partisans remains. Mateo said many former Sox fans, who could never quite stomach joining the Yankees’ Evil Empire — even with Soto — are now “going to feel more free to be with the Mets.”
Inside his store, he pointed out one such employee who recently switched from the Red Sox to the Mets after refusing to touch the hated Yankees.
The Mets are no more guaranteed Dominican fans’ continued allegiance than any other team is. But If Soto performs well and plays out his full 15-year contract in Queens, that’s certainly plenty of time to build up loyalty. And perhaps some fans will stick with the Mets even after the masses move on to a new superstar, as happened with the Red Sox. The Mets may also come to see value in continuing to acquire Dominican stars — and attract Dominican fans — based as they are in the Dominican Republic’s unofficial U.S. capital.
Even as Dominicans have become a more established part of both the United States and Major League Baseball, there is little sign that such intense loyalty to individual players will fade. Hernández said that, as the second and third generations of Dominicans in the U.S. have overtaken the number of immigrants, she has observed a greater emphasis on preserving Dominican culture.
“There is this understanding, this realization, this developing of consciousness about, If we don’t emphasize who we are, if we don’t pass it on, it can die,” she said. “That, I think, creates the need for expressing the culture even more than in the past.”
And, as she pointed out, Dominican culture is baseball.
As a sociologist and baseball fan, Hernández said she will not miss the chance to observe the Juan Soto phenomenon firsthand at Citi Field.
“People are going to go simply to see him,” she said. “I am one of those!”
