On the morning of September 11, 2001, major league baseball had no idea it was about to become something more than a game. The Yankees were scheduled for a doubleheader against the White Sox at Yankee Stadium. The Mets were in Pittsburgh preparing to face the Pirates, and the Phillies were at Turner Field in Atlanta to take on the Braves. Games were set across the country as they had been thousands of times before. Then two hijacked airliners struck the World Trade Center, a third hit the Pentagon, and a fourth crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Within an hour, the sport that prided itself on continuing through wars and depressions had no choice but to stop.
The Morning Everything Stopped
Commissioner Bud Selig initially canceled a quarterly meeting of team owners in Milwaukee but held off on calling off the day’s games. That decision did not last long. At 9:42 a.m., the Federal Aviation Administration grounded all civilian air travel in the country for the first time in history. By 11 a.m., with the World Trade Center’s north tower already collapsed, Selig announced that all games scheduled for that day were postponed. It marked only the third time in the sport’s history that a full slate of games had been wiped out, following the death of President Warren Harding in 1923 and the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944. Both of those decisions had come with hours of advance warning. This one came in real time, as the tragedy was still unfolding.
The news hit players personally, not just professionally. Yankees outfielder David Justice said the attacks changed who they were as people, calling it something that would leave their lives never the same. At NYU Hospital, Yankees catcher Jorge Posada was watching his young son await surgery when the towers appeared on the television screen. He later described nurses scrambling to prepare beds for victims who never arrived, the phone lines so overwhelmed that he could barely reach shortstop Derek Jeter to ask whether the game was still on.
For the Mets, the trip home from Pittsburgh became its own haunting memory. Riding a bus back through the George Washington Bridge that evening, players watched smoke and light hang over the Manhattan skyline. Every man on the left side of the bus crossed to the right just to look. Nobody said a word the rest of the way to Shea Stadium.
The Phillies were stuck in Atlanta for a couple of days once the FAA grounded flights. Larry Bowa said the team did nothing but watch news coverage at the hotel. They eventually bused to Cincinnati for what was supposed to be their next series, only to see those games canceled too. They finally got a charter flight home that weekend, landing back in Philadelphia with a three game series against the Braves looming at the Vet on the 17th, whether anyone felt ready or not.
Six Days of Silence
Selig extended the postponement in stages, first for three days, then for three more, as the country absorbed the scale of the loss. All minor league playoff series still in progress were canceled outright, decided based on where things stood when play stopped. Inside clubhouses, opinions were split. Some players wanted a quick return to normalcy. Others believed any game felt trivial measured against nearly 3,000 dead. Mariano Rivera later said what stayed with him most was how the entire country came together in those days, something he wished had lasted.
While the games waited, some players went looking for a way to help. Members of the Mets, led by manager Bobby Valentine, made an early and unusual choice for professional athletes: they went to Ground Zero. Todd Zeile, John Franco, Al Leiter and Robin Ventura spent time at the Shea Stadium staging area and among rescue workers downtown, handing out supplies and simply being present. Franco, a Brooklyn native, and Valentine, who lived in Connecticut, both felt the tragedy in personal terms. Zeile later said the group was unsure how ballplayers would be received in that setting, but found themselves embraced as a small piece of normal life amid the wreckage.
Baseball Returns
Play resumed on September 17 with six games, none more emotional than the Cardinals hosting the Brewers in St. Louis. Before first pitch, longtime Cardinals broadcaster Jack Buck, his body weakened by Parkinson’s disease but his voice steady, read a poem he had written called “For America.” He asked the crowd directly whether they should even be there, then answered his own question. Yes. It would be Buck’s final public appearance at Busch Stadium.
RELATED: Watch Jack Buck’s reading of For America
When the Phillies hosted Atlanta on September 17, the first game back for the city, 27,910 fans showed up at Veterans Stadium. Bowa, by his own admission a manager who cared about winning above almost everything else in his career, has said that was the one night the score genuinely didn’t matter to him. He was seen crying during the National Anthem, an image several Philadelphia writers who covered that era still point to as the moment that made the tragedy feel real inside a ballpark. Harry Kalas opened the broadcast with a somber, unscripted monologue about sports serving as both a diversion and a unifier.
New York’s turn came four days later. On September 21, the Mets hosted the Braves at Shea Stadium in the first professional sporting event held in the city since the attacks. More than 41,000 fans filled the ballpark as NYPD bagpipers played and first responders carried flags onto the field before Diana Ross sang “God Bless America.” Mike Piazza admitted he spent the ride to the ballpark wondering if it was too soon to play at all. Trailing 2-1 in the bottom of the eighth inning, Piazza drove a fastball from Braves reliever Steve Karsay 425 feet for a go-ahead two-run home run. Shea Stadium erupted in a release of emotion that had been building for ten days, and the Mets held on for a 3-2 win that meant far more than the standings.
Carrying It Forward
The season eventually made up all 91 postponed games, pushing the World Series into November for the first time. President George W. Bush threw out the ceremonial first pitch before Game 3 at Yankee Stadium, wearing an FDNY jacket and delivering a strike from the mound. Baseball adopted lasting tributes from that fall forward, singing “God Bless America” during the seventh inning stretch and wearing flag patches that became permanent fixtures of the game.
Members of that 2001 Mets team still return to New York firehouses every September, a tradition now a quarter century old. What started as a handful of players unsure whether they belonged at Ground Zero became one of baseball’s most enduring answers to a question the whole country was asking that September: how do you go on? The game did not heal anything on its own. But for a few hours at a time, it gave people somewhere to put their grief, and somewhere to stand together while they carried it.
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