Baseball and 9/11: America Overcomes the Silence

It was clear to everyone that the world had changed. Our nation had been attacked, on our own soil, and we would come to learn that almost 3,000 people were killed in the process. There were thousands of heroes that day—and in the days and weeks to come as well—some we would hear of and come to recognize and some whose acts of heroism would never, could never, be told.

From an office building in Midtown Manhattan, and then later from a room in some forgotten hotel somewhere else in the city, I watched the day unfold. As I gathered with coworkers and friends, as well as people I had never encountered before that day or since, we all watched as the Twin Towers burned and ultimately died. In the process, we heard the sounds of our city change.

Where there was once the ever-present din of motors and horns and rumbling trains and people talking, there was now something akin to silence. Police cars, covered in ash, rolled by noiseless, as if already ushering the honored dead to their final destinations. Fighter jets patrolled the sky, traveling above the rooftops at what seemed like several hundred silent miles an hour, as if paying their respects to the memory of America as it was the day before.

It was impossible to comprehend what had happened as it was happening—not the specifics of the thing, really, but the implications of it all. We were now headed towards war, with whom we did not know, but headed to war we were as clearly as if it were Dec. 7, 1941. The war promised to be different than others, at least that's what we thought at the time, as the expectation seemed to be that for ever more we would board our planes and trains not just as passengers but as living, breathing targets as well.

There did not seem to be an escape from this future at the time. As daily commuters into Manhattan in those days, we arrived in Grand Central or Penn Station for the next several years, really, essentially expecting to find ourselves at the center of mayhem. The world was different in so many critical ways, and so the routine, the normal and the expected began to take on greater meaning.

The 2001 baseball season was in the final stretch when the tragedy of 9/11 occurred. The New York Yankees were on their way to 95 wins and another appearance in the World Series, one they would remarkably lose despite the justice that would have been served had they won. America needed to heal, of course, but New York needed to heal first.

It is within these memories, though, and in others related to baseball in September 2001, that we can now recognize the beginnings of a healing of sorts. The wound was far too deep even for baseball to fully heal in so short a time, of course, but baseball was a reminder of the miracle that America was and is simply by being a part of our lives in the aftermath of such chaos and sorrow.

America is an aberration in historical terms, almost the inverse of the conventional constructs of so many dead societies, and as Americans we often take for granted the trappings of our unique identity. When we watched baseball in September that year, though, whether it was a president throwing out a first pitch in Yankee Stadium or a Mets catcher hitting a dramatic home run to win a game, we were part of a living oneness for a moment, and we took nothing for granted. Baseball, so routine in so many ways—so normal and expected—had reminded us of who we were and what we could be.

Above all else, though, baseball broke the silence. We could raise our voices again. We could feel something other than numbness, express something other than grief. We did not heal fully, but we began to think that maybe we could. America's game had begun to restore its host, and in the process the routine, the normal and the expected became transcendent.