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| This here is Mr. Trea Turner he hits for the Phillies. |
After Sept. 11, those borders largely disappeared.
Baseball writers found themselves writing about firefighters, grief, security, missing relatives and national identity. A story ostensibly about the Mets returning home was really about New Yorkers returning to a public gathering. A column about uniforms became a story about players refusing to remove NYPD and FDNY caps. A home run became inseparable from the emotional circumstances in which it was hit.
The games supplied the framework.
People supplied the story.
That was important because the real contribution of baseball after Sept. 11 was meaningful precisely because it was limited. Nobody needed a baseball game to save the country. They needed someplace where the familiar and unfamiliar could occupy the same space for a while.
Eventually, even that changed.
Pennant races resumed. Bonds resumed chasing history. Seattle resumed piling up victories. The Yankees reached the World Series, where President George W. Bush stood on the mound at Yankee Stadium before Game 3 and threw one of the most memorable ceremonial first pitches in American sports history.
Arizona eventually won the championship in seven games.
By then, baseball had gradually recovered its ordinary vocabulary. Wins mattered. Losses hurt. Fans complained about managers and umpires again. Box scores were important enough to argue about.
That was not evidence that Americans had forgotten Sept. 11.
It was evidence that ordinary life was returning alongside the grief.
Twenty-five years later, perhaps that is the most useful way to understand what baseball actually accomplished.
The sport stopped because playing on Sept. 11 would have been unthinkable.
It returned six days later because remaining frozen forever was unthinkable, too.
And four nights after that, 41,235 people walked into Shea Stadium carrying everything the previous 10 days had done to them.
