PIAZZA’S GREATEST HIT
One Mike Piazza home run helped bring joy back to the city — at least for one night
THE TELEVISION executiives had gathered the crew and the talent in a room that afternoon of Sept. 21, 2001. They were solemn and seriserious and wanted the men who wowould broadcast the Mets game thatth night to follow a firm, formal plan.p “ThisThis,” they said, one after another, “is unlike any game we’ve ever dodone. Make sure you don’t get too excited about anything. Don’t eemote. This is a night of healing, not of celebration.” Howie Rose didn’t have to be told. NNow the Mets’ longtime radio vovoice, at the time he worked the TV eend for Fox Sports and, to be truthtruthful, the last place he wanted to be was at Shea Stadium. Ten days earlier, havoc had hit lower Manhattan, and only a few days earlier this very ballpark had been a primary staging area for rescue and recovery teams. “ThThe way I felt at the time,” Rose says today, “was that if they’d punted the rest of the season I wouldn’t have had any problem with that. I think a lot of people felt that way.” BBut in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani had urged New Yorkers to resume their daily routines as quickly as possible: Return to work, go to the theater, take in a ballgame. Only then would normalcy be even remotely possible. So after commissioner Bud Selig postponed a week’s worth of games, baseball went back to work on Sept. 17. The Mets were in Pittsburgh, the Yankees in Chicago. That weekend, the NFL would resume after standing down for a week, but the Jets were scheduled to be in Foxborough, the Giants in Kansas City.
So it was that exactly 10 days after the city had its heart broken and its soul turned inside-out, the first professional sporting event in New York’s new normal would take place: Mets-Braves, 7:10 p.m., Friday night, Shea Stadium.
And now, a few hours before the first pitch, the broadcasters were being told to not get too excited. If Rose could’ve mustered a laugh, he would have.
“Not a problem,” he sai d. “Believe me.”
It’s funny, too: Though Shea was almost 15,000 shy of capacity — “Remember,” Rose says, “nobody could say with certainty that a ballpark wasn’t the perfect place for this to happen all over again.” — there has actually been some smiles sprinkled into the proceedings. Liza Minelli’s seventh-inning-stretch version of “New York, New York” turned the old Flushing rockpile into an oversized cabaret for a little while. But those bagpipes … Man. Those bagpipes. “I used to love bagpipes,” Rose said. “Bagpipes, to me, were Paul McCartney’s great song ‘Mull of Kintyre.’ They were instruments of great joy. But after that night …”
It was a feeling shared by so many in the house that day. Including one participant who had spent the previous 10 days in a grief-stricken blur, trying to do his part, trying to help, trying to keep it all together … And then, the bagpipes. “I just lost it,” Mike Piazza would remember. “Totally. Completely. Lost it. Those bagpipes …”
There WAS a baseball game, too, and it was a good one. The Mets, the National League’s
defending champs, had been left in the desert in August, 54-68 and 13 1/2 games out of first, but they’d finally started to click just before Sept. 11, going 17-5, shaving 5 1/2 games off the Braves’ lead. They’d swept their return series in Pittsburgh, were now within five, over .500 for the first time since April 5.
A Brian Jordan double in the top of the eighth had given the Braves a 2-1 lead; in most of Shea’s 45 years of life, that was the kind of thing that would have tortured the 41,235 on hand. This was barely greeted with a grunt. Things were different now. “You want to cry the whole night,” Piazza told me in 2004. “But you’re a pro. You have a job to do. And as an athlete you’re used to blocking things out, focusing on the moment at hand.”
With one out in the eighth, Edgardo Alfonzo drew a walk and was replaced by pinch-runner Desi Relaford.
On TV, Rose said: “Here’s the man the Mets want up in this spot, down a run, late in the game …”
Fifteen years later, Rose says: “Even that seemed to me like it was caring too much about the game when the game was supposed to be secondary.”
Steve Karsay — College Point native, Christ the King graduate — threw strike one, a 94-mph fastball to Piazza, who took the first pitch in all but a handful of the 7,745 plate appearances he made as a major leaguer. Karsay saw catcher Eddie Perez throw down one finger, took
his stretch, peered at Relaford over his right shoulder.
Rose, on TV: “Lopez wants it away …”
Karsay delivered another heater, and it started out tracing for the outside corner but then bled back across the outer quarter of the plate at the very last instant.
Rose: “And it’s hit deep to left center … Andruw Jones on the run … THIS one has a CHANCE … HOME RUN! Mike Piazza! And the Mets lead 3-2!”
The ball disappeared just to the right of the camera towers beyond the center-field fence at Shea, and in that instant the noise that spilled out of the old ballpark was tangible. You could feel it in your chest. You could feel it pour off a TV screen, crash out of a radio speaker.
“Even as the ball’s flying out, we tried to stay to the script,” Rose said, “until you just couldn’t anymore.”
Piazza: “People want to f ind refuge in sports, especially in baseball, want to find comfort in a crowd, being around other people. Maybe that has a tendency to ease the pain even if it’s just a little bit.”
It’s funny: In retrospect, some point to that night and that home run as the moment when New York started to care about sports again; in truth, that probably happened two days later, when Armando Benitez blew a ninth-inning save and was lustily booed off the mound. THAT’S when sports truly returned to the boroughs.
But Piazza’s blast had given the city something much more important. It finally struck Rose maybe a minute after the homer, after Piazza had emerged from the dugout for a bow, after Robin Ventura had taken ball one, when Rose peeked at his TV booth monitor and saw a group of firemen bedecked in their dress uniforms.
Smiling ear to ear. Laughing. Celebrating.
“And I just immediately wondered: ‘What have the last 10 days been like for those guys?’” Rose remembers. “They lost friends, colleagues, God forbid other family members. And now they look like
this. Baseball did that for them.” He pauses. “Mike did that for them.”