A perfect Mets-Phils trade: Insults

It's only February. This will likely come as news to the Phillies and Mets.

Things have been so heated between the two sides that you'd think it's midsummer instead of late winter. It's as if everybody skipped their off-season vacations in favor of brushing each other back with insults.

Jimmy Rollins and Cole Hamels got their digs in early; Ryan Church, Francisco Rodriguez and Carlos Beltran waited until they arrived in Florida. And the respective fan bases? They haven't stopped attacking each other.

I've received some interesting e-mails from Mets and Phils supporters. The missives have been strikingly similar - lots of cursing and not-so-nice things to say about the other team's mothers. Last week, I got one message from an Amazin's fan and another from a Fightin's fan, both of which instructed the enemy to "shut up and play" even though the games don't count right now and the season is still more than a month away.

At first, I was blinded by the venom. But as I built a tolerance, I began to see the truth: Phillies-Mets is the best rivalry going in either city right now.

Eagles fans will surely balk. Since I was a kid, the Cowboys have been perched atop Philly's To-Hate list. But, lately, it's been easier to mock Dallas than detest it. The Cowboys haven't won a postseason game since 1996. They've become a huge caricature - a crew of overdramatic, underproductive, me-first attention sponges more likely to turn up in the gossip pages or the police blotters than the playoffs. We still hate them. But, more than that, we laugh at them, which is something different.

New Yorkers will predictably claim that the ongoing Yankees-Red Sox war is the biggest deal in town. But like the long-standing Eagles-Cowboys clash, Yanks-Sox is a reflexive rivalry nourished more by history than current events.

Traditionally, Dallas has never cared about Philly as much as Philly has cared about Dallas (because Dallas doesn't care about anything). We're the ones who have always handled the heavy hating. The same thing is true to our north. When Gotham spends more time tearing A-Rod apart than it does bashing the Red Sox, how can anyone pretend that the rivalry between the two teams remains of paramount importance to New Yorkers?