It all comes right back, because it always will: What it felt like in those first days and nights after the planes hit the buildings. And how sports mattered as much as they ever had. Not to heal. Nothing was going to do that in the fall of 2001. Just help us, with moments that felt so important at the time, to get us through.
So it is easy to remember, even now, Mike Piazza’s home run at Shea Stadium, the night baseball came back. And then, over a month later, we had those three World Series nights at Yankee Stadium, Games 3 and 4 and 5, the best nights that old place had ever had. Those games, all the way uptown from the hole in the city’s heart downtown, tried to perform a kind of miracle on 161st St., take us back for a few hours to the New York that we had, and world, before terror and madness came out of the sky on the morning of Sept. 11.
We didn’t stop mourning the dead because of baseball games, stop being fearful every time we’d hear a siren. We didn’t pretend that life was already back to normal as the work at Ground Zero continued. But New York was getting back up, as described so eloquently by the great Pete Hamill — First to one knee and then all the way up like a gallant fighter gathering himself. It was like baseball tried to reach out a hand and help.
The Yankees were the ones who kept getting back up against the Diamondbacks. Tino Martinez hit a home run in the bottom of the 9th and so did Scott Brosius, and finally Derek Jeter hit one out in the first moments of November. President George Bush, in a bulletproof vest, threw a perfect first-pitch strike. Ray Charles sang the most beautiful version of “American the Beautiful” he’d ever sung in his life.
I was with a member of the NYPD down at Ground Zero at the end of that week and he said:
President George W. Bush talks with managers Joe Torre #6 of the New York Yankees and Bob Brenly #15 of the Arizona Diamondbacks before game 3 of the World Series at Yankee Stadium in New York. (Al Bello/ALLSPORT)
“We see what we see down here. But then at the end of the day I can go home and put my feet up and have a beer and cheer for the Yankees.”
It was like that. Those three hours or so, Tuesday night and Wednesday and Thursday, allowed us to go uptown.
It was Joe Torre, the Brooklyn kid who became a giant of his sport managing those Yankees, who spoke with such wisdom about what those games had meant as a baseball October unlike any baseball had ever seen finally made its way into November. The Yankees would end up losing that Series, of course, in seven games; losing it in the bottom of the 9th of Game 7.
Torre and I were at a party together a few months later, and he was talking about what his own life had been like since Luis Gonzalez had blooped that Series-winning hit over Derek Jeter’s head. I’ve written of this conversation before.
“People keep coming up and saying how sorry they are that we lost,” Torre said. “And I say, ‘Did we?’”
President George W. Bush throws out the ceremonial first pitch before game three of the World Series. (Doug Pensinger/Allsport/Getty Images)
“You were there,” he continued that night. “You saw Tino’s home run and Scotty’s home run and Derek’s. You know how those games made everybody feel. Even now, it’s like they all run together. We may have lost that Series. But New York City sure didn’t.”
Before that, of course, was Piazza’s home run against the Braves. That was a time when Shea was turned into this amazing clearinghouse for goods, and even a place for out-of-town responders to sleep at night. I remember Bobby Valentine being everywhere one Saturday when my three sons and I had gone down there to pitch in. Not to pretend we were first responders. Just responders.
Cars would pull up and more goods would be unloaded, and then there was another car or truck or fan doing the same, part of an endless parade. It went on all day and into the night.
As you walked through the stadium, you could see cots lined up.
My oldest son, Christopher, had turned 14 six days after the planes had hit. I would ask him later what he remembered best about Shea that day.
New York Yankees’ Derek Jeter celebrates his game-winning home run in the 10th inning as he rounds first base in Game 4 of baseball’s World Series against the Arizona Diamondbacks at Yankee Stadium in New York. (Bill Kostroun/AP)
“I remember cots and firemen,” he said.
There is another moment from the day that I’ve written about before. I was standing on the field at one point with the late Pete Flynn, a bit of a baseball legend by then as the Mets groundskeeper. Pete came out of Country Leitrim in Ireland, and worked for the Mets for nearly a half-century.
“The bastards tried to blow us up,” Pete said. “They brought us together instead.”
Piazza’s home run, and the World Series home runs from the Yankees later, they did nothing to bring back the dead of Sept. 11. They just made us feel a little better about things. They helped get us through. After the almost overwhelming grief we had all been feeling once we began to realize the enormity of our losses, what would end up being nearly 3,000 New Yorkers dead, sports allowed us to be glad.
I asked my friend W.C. Heinz, both a great sportswriter and a great World War II correspondent who’d covered the First Army for the New York Sun, what it was like coming back to sports after the war.
“I just loved watching people do something great,” Bill Heinz said.
Derek Jeter #2 of New York Yankees swings during game six of the World Series. (Harry How/ALLSPORT)
I would fly to Phoenix the morning of Game 7 that year. But that Saturday night, a night when the Diamondbacks blew out the Yankees to even the Series, I was in a car with some first responders and it was like we were kids again, listening to the World Series on a transistor radio.
“We’ve been dealing with all this death,” I remember one of them saying. “Maybe it’s why baseball feels like a lifeline right now.”
It was like that. All of that. It was Scott Brosius getting to second base earlier that week and talking about how he felt the ground shaking. Brosius and Piazza and Tino and Jeter, Mr. November. It was one more thing that Mr. Torre put best.
“You had to be there,” Joe said later.
Yeah. You did. We didn’t ask for great moments from sports, or expect them. But that is exactly what we got.