NEW YORK, NY — In a bold new effort to address what he referred to as "run inequality," Mayor Zohran Mamdani ordered that a percentage of runs scored by each visiting MLB team be redistributed to the struggling New York Mets.
In order to achieve equity on the baseball diamond, Mamdani stated that city officials would seize 40% of all runs scored by visiting teams and give them to the Mets, who are currently on an 11-game losing streak.
"It's time to even the playing field for our less-fortunate teams," Mamdani said at a press conference held outside Citi Field. "Baseball has for too long been a system where a small number of teams hoard runs while others, specifically the Mets, are left struggling to meet even their most basic scoring needs. It's not fair that some teams can collect lots of wins while some teams — again, we're talking about the Mets — can't collect any."
While many baseball fans criticized run redistribution as antithetical to sports competition, Mamdani stated that the old method of teams earning runs themselves is broken. "Some teams just are not capable of earning their own runs. And by some teams, I mean the New York Mets," said Mamdani. "For decades now, people have tried to tell the Mets to just 'play better' to score runs. But that kind of thinking ignores the structural barriers preventing them from scoring runs — like the other team's pitching, defense, and overall competence. These barriers cannot be overcome, at least not by the Mets."
At publishing time, the Kansas City Royals had petitioned the mayor of their city to adopt the same run redistribution policy.
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