Holding a 13-game AL East advantage, Joe Torre’s Yankees were already thinking about playoff rotations.
On Sept. 10, 2001, the Mets were off, having flown from Miami to Pittsburgh. In the Bronx, the Yankees were rained out.
And then the world changed.
Those awful scenes. Our personal tragedies. The incomprehensible sense of loss.
What happened here in New York, in Washington, and in the skies above Western Pennsylvania, too devastating to imagine, had altered everything.
If we thought about baseball at all, it was the good deeds at Shea Stadium, transformed into a staging area, helping to supply those amazing first responders.
And the visits by Mets and Yankees players, meant to lift the spirits of men and women working at Ground Zero, assigned a heartbreaking task.
Those ballparks could stay empty for a while; something as trivial as a pennant race could wait.
Wait ‘til next year even.
But soon, there was a need to feel something normal again, to enjoy, to distract, to occupy a few hours away from the non-stop news.
Baseball helped to fill that void. Nowhere did that matter more than here.
Mets and Yankees, 25 years hence
Twenty-five years later, the Mets and Yankees begin a Subway Series on a solemn day, properly remembered with tributes and memorials.At the heart of Friday’s commemoration, there will be a game that matters.
A disappointing but lately surging Mets team will try to disrupt the momentum of another playoff-bound Yankees team, whose oldest player, Paul Goldschmidt, had just turned 14 on Sept. 11, 2001.
Covering the national tragedy from Western Pennsylvania
As The Record’s Mets beat writer in 2001, I’d arrived in Pittsburgh in the early hours of Sept. 11 and stayed there for 11 days.After getting reactions at the Mets’ hotel, soon to be evacuated since it was next to a federal building, the assignment shifted to the crash site at Shanksville, about a 40-minute drive from Pittsburgh.
In the field, you saw only hundreds of small red flag markers, and imagined the lives lost there.
There was a Friday night memorial in the little town, and scores of people gathered, with candles and speeches.
With a story to write, I spoke to a World War II veteran in that crowd who had some inspiring words. Found a bed-and-breakfast hotel with a phone wire and asked to send my file.
Eventually, the Mets came back and played a series. There was talk about going to Atlanta, swapping a series with the Braves, but they decided to play in New York.
On the flight from Pittsburgh to LaGuardia, there were only 10 other passengers.
Nothing else registers a distinct memory from that week, other than the colossal home run by Mike Piazza that lifted a city, and trying to find the right words for that moment.
A moment that validated why it was essential to play on.
Baseball's vital role after 9/11
As theTonight, there is a game to play.
This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com:
