Mets healed New York City
Ten days after the smoke had cleared and the layers of ash were swept from streets, a warm autumn night in Flushing, Queens, offered the perfect escape. The Mets were hosting their arch-nemesis Atlanta Braves, the first professional sporting event in New York since Sept. 11.
I had spent the first days of my freshman year in high school in a post-traumatic haze: the crippling fear the morning of the attacks knowing my dad, a reporter on the scene, could end up crushed under mountains of debris, the terrifying fireball produced by the second plane hitting the south tower playing in an endless loop on TV, the funereal candlelight vigils outside of local firehouses, the abrupt ubiquity of American iconography — flags, ribbons, T-shirts — on every street corner from here to Texas.
This sudden swell of patriotism gnawed at me. How could people thousands of miles away in Los Angeles or Houston comprehend the gravity of this attack? They knew the twin towers from postcard photos. New Yorkers inhaled the toxic plumes that wafted across the river to my Brooklyn neighborhood when the rubble was still smoldering. Their post-9/11 fear was abstract — reinforced by cable news pundits and a Cabinet of Washington war hawks out for blood. In my daily subway commute to school, I carried a gas mask in my backpack.
I didn’t need or want my fellow Americans’ sympathies and chest-beating pride. I just wanted my city back.
The Mets stormed the field that night wearing NYPD, FDNY, and Port Authority hats in tribute to the hundreds of firstresponders who were killed. Dad and I, normally enthusiastic spectators, were subdued, the weight of grief and trauma left us leaden in our seats. The game was a sleepy pitchers’ duel until the eighth inning. The Mets’ star catcher, Mike Piazza, strutted to the plate with a man on base
and the team down 2-1. With a sweeping uppercut, Piazza crushed a home run 400 feet to center field, giving the Mets a lead they would hold and unleashing a primal, cathartic scream from 45,000 fans.
In the euphoria, I grabbed my dad. We hugged strangers sitting around us. Tears melted down our faces. Out of a mundane September baseball game I discovered a version of patriotism that felt real. There was something organic and genuine about a low-stakes baseball game that would never appear in any history books but that shook a stadium full of strangers from our solemn daze, made us feel connected again, human again, American again, and capable of healing.
Through the past 20 years of endless war, surveillance, paranoia and xenophobic fear-mongering spawned from Sept. 11, I recall that night at Shea Stadium. For me, it was the night that Mike Piazza brought our wounded city home.
Nick Powell, editorial writer