There were pennant races to follow, pitching matchups to dissect and box scores that would be printed in newspapers the next morning. Barry Bonds was chasing Mark McGwire’s single-season home-run record. The Seattle Mariners were chasing history. Across the country, players woke in hotel rooms or drove toward ballparks expecting another Tuesday night in September.
Then the second plane struck the South Tower.
By afternoon, Commissioner Bud Selig had postponed the entire major-league schedule, citing security concerns and a nation suddenly plunged into mourning. Baseball would remain dark for six days.
Canceling the games was obvious.
Determining when it would be appropriate to play them again was not.
That question — what possible purpose could a baseball game serve after thousands of people had just been killed? — became one of the defining questions of Selig’s tenure and, in retrospect, one of the clearest examples of the complicated place sports occupy in American life.
Baseball could not heal the country. It could not return the people who had been killed, rebuild Lower Manhattan or remove the fear that gripped millions of Americans. What it could eventually offer was considerably smaller, but not insignificant: the return of something familiar at a moment when almost nothing felt familiar anymore.
It would take 10 days for that idea to crystallize inside a ballpark in Queens.
And perhaps nobody can explain it better 25 years later than Steve Karsay, the pitcher who surrendered the most famous home run of that autumn.
“As a pitcher you never want to give up a home run,” Karsay told the Philadelphia Baseball Review. “But in that instance, looking back on the situation, that was the home run over my career I was most okay in giving up. It meant something more.”
Before baseball could arrive at that moment, however, it first had to figure out whether playing mattered at all.
When the games disappeared
Baseball's calendar had been overflowing with significance on the morning of Sept. 11.
Bonds had hit three home runs in Colorado two days earlier, pushing his season total to 63. Seattle had already won more than 100 games. September races were narrowing, players were chasing milestones and contenders were counting games remaining.
Within hours, none of it carried much weight.
When Bonds was later asked whether his pursuit of the home-run record might somehow lift the spirits of a grieving country, he rejected the premise. He did not possess, he said, “the power to bring life back.”
The games stopped. The routines surrounding them stopped, too.
In New York, the Mets returned to find Shea Stadium functioning less like a baseball park than a relief center. Its parking areas became staging grounds for food, water, clothing and supplies headed toward Ground Zero. Players and employees who ordinarily would have been preparing for games instead helped load trucks. The Yankees visited hospitals, armories and families waiting desperately for word about missing relatives.
Baseball players weren't being asked to entertain anybody.
They were simply trying to be useful.
That distinction mattered because the debate over baseball's return was never really about whether a baseball game was important compared with what had happened.
It plainly wasn't.
The question was whether something unimportant might still have value.
Selig wrestled with that throughout the week. Travel remained uncertain. Security was an obvious concern. Ballparks brought tens of thousands of people together at a moment when nobody knew whether another attack might come. Beyond that was the emotional question: How soon was too soon to ask players to compete and fans to cheer?
Major League Baseball ultimately announced that play would resume Monday, Sept. 17.
Six days after America watched the towers fall, the lights would come back on.
An old question in a different America
Baseball had confronted a version of the same dilemma once before.
Five weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis wrote President Franklin D. Roosevelt asking whether professional baseball should continue while the United States mobilized for World War II.
Roosevelt replied the next day.
“I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going,” he wrote.
His reasoning was revealing. Americans would be working longer hours under extraordinary pressure, and Roosevelt believed they still needed inexpensive recreation — something that could briefly take their minds away from everything else. More than 500 major leaguers ultimately served in the armed forces, but the game continued.
Roosevelt wasn't suggesting baseball rivaled the importance of war. His argument was almost the opposite: ordinary life retained value precisely because circumstances had become so extraordinary.
Nearly 60 years later, baseball was preparing to test that proposition again.
Sept. 17: Nobody knew what normal should look like
When games resumed, ballparks looked familiar and completely different at the same time.
Pregame ceremonies stretched beyond their customary few minutes. American flags covered uniforms, scoreboards and grandstands. Police officers, firefighters and military personnel stood alongside players. Moments of silence replaced the usual pregame noise.
In St. Louis, legendary broadcaster Jack Buck stood before the crowd and directly confronted the debate over whether baseball should already be playing. His answer was yes. At Dodger Stadium, Vin Scully tried to put into words the shock, grief and anger Americans had experienced before turning back toward the game. In Philadelphia, Harry Kalas addressed viewers before the Phillies hosted Atlanta.
The broadcasts sounded different because baseball felt different.
So did the players.
Pitcher Steve Sparks later remembered returning to a major-league mound with a sense of emptiness, struggling to attach normal importance to the competition in front of him. Other players expressed similar uncertainty.
That discomfort was not evidence that baseball had returned too soon. It was evidence that there was no clean way to do this.
Nobody crossed through a turnstile on Sept. 17 and suddenly stopped grieving. Nobody heard “Play ball” and forgot the previous six days. Baseball was feeling its way back toward ordinary life at exactly the same time as everybody else.
For a few hours, that was enough.
Fans could sit in familiar seats. They could keep score. They could disagree with an umpire. They could watch a pitcher work through a lineup and talk to the person sitting beside them.
The game did not need to solve anything.
It needed only to be recognizable.
New York would have to wait a little longer.
Shea Stadium was still entwined with the relief effort, so the Mets resumed their season in Pittsburgh. The Yankees returned the following night in Chicago.
Not until Friday, Sept. 21, would major professional sports return to New York City.
The Atlanta Braves were coming to Shea.
Coming back to New York
The Braves had spent the first four days after baseball resumed playing the Phillies at Veterans Stadium. From there, they traveled north toward a city whose altered skyline had become a visible reminder of what had happened.
Greg Maddux would remember those trips into New York long after he stopped pitching.
“I will always remember on the bus coming into New York just not seeing those towers in the skyline and they simply had the lights,” Maddux recalled. “That will always stick with me.”
The chronology of that memory matters. The Tribute in Light would not first illuminate the Manhattan sky until 2002, so Maddux's recollection encompasses later trips back into the city rather than simply the Braves' Sept. 21 bus ride.
But the image remained with him for a reason.
For anyone accustomed to approaching Manhattan and seeing the Twin Towers anchoring the skyline, their absence became something you could see.
For Karsay, the trip was even more personal.
He had grown up in College Point, Queens, only minutes from Shea Stadium. As a teenager during the 1986 World Series, he and friends listened to the radio from a nearby rooftop and could hear the roar coming from Shea after the ball rolled through Bill Buckner's legs.
From his childhood apartment, Karsay could see both Shea Stadium and the World Trade Center.
Now he was returning as a relief pitcher for the Atlanta Braves, and one of those landmarks was gone.
Some members of the Braves visited Ground Zero before the game. Karsay declined. He later explained that he had already seen more than enough devastation on television and wasn't emotionally ready to confront it in person.
Even the trip to the ballpark felt different.
“It was a quiet drive in on the first day,” Karsay recalled years later.
Shea itself still bore evidence of the relief operation. Rescue vehicles and tents had occupied areas surrounding the stadium. First responders were everywhere. A building designed to contain baseball suddenly carried the emotional weight of everything happening outside it.
And yet more than 41,000 people came.
They came to watch baseball.
The first game back
Before the first pitch, many of the normal lines separating opponents disappeared.
Mets players wore caps honoring the NYPD, FDNY and other emergency agencies. Firefighters and police officers joined the ceremonies. Braves and Mets players — division rivals involved in a September race — embraced one another.
Jason Marquis started for Atlanta. Bruce Chen started for New York.
Then, after days of discussion about what sports could possibly mean, somebody finally threw a baseball toward home plate.
For much of the evening, the atmosphere remained restrained.
That made sense.
There was no established etiquette for this. Nobody knew how loudly to cheer or how quickly people were supposed to permit themselves to become absorbed by a game again. The tragedy was only 10 days old.
Atlanta eventually carried a 2-1 lead into the bottom of the eighth inning.
Braves manager Bobby Cox called for Karsay.
He retired Matt Lawton before walking Edgardo Alfonzo.
Then Mike Piazza walked to the plate.
Karsay got ahead with a fastball. He came back with another, and this one leaked over the plate.
Piazza drove it toward left-center field.
For most of the night, Shea Stadium had sounded unlike itself. Now 41,235 people reacted at once.
The ball cleared the wall for a two-run homer. Piazza circled the bases as the crowd erupted, transforming a 2-1 Braves lead into a 3-2 Mets advantage that would become the final score.
People jumped from their seats, embraced and waved American flags. Some cried. Others simply screamed.
For a few seconds, Shea sounded like a ballpark again.
Piazza would eventually enter the Hall of Fame with 427 career home runs. None would be remembered like that one.
And the most revealing perspective on it may belong to the man who threw the pitch.
Karsay's home run
Karsay was furious that night.
He was a major-league pitcher competing for a division-leading team in September. His job was to get Piazza out, preserve the lead and win the game. The fact that the country was grieving did not somehow remove the competitive instinct that had carried him to the major leagues.
Years later, Karsay acknowledged that tension. He had wanted desperately to win, yet he came to understand that the home run had given people in the stadium a brief emotional release from everything surrounding them.
Time changed the way he viewed the pitch.
“As a pitcher you never want to give up a home run,” Karsay told the Philadelphia Baseball Review. “But in that instance, looking back on the situation, that was the home run over my career I was most okay in giving up. It meant something more.”
There is little reason to improve upon that explanation.
For Karsay, the box score recorded a blown lead.
For New York, the moment occupied an entirely different category.
That distinction explains baseball's role after Sept. 11 better than any grand declaration about sports healing a nation.
They didn't.
No baseball game could restore what had been lost. Piazza's swing did not repair Lower Manhattan. The cheers at Shea did not diminish the grief of families awaiting funerals or rescue workers continuing to search through wreckage.
What baseball provided was communal experience at a time when Americans were desperately seeking one.
People could gather around the same symbols, participate in the same rituals and, eventually, allow themselves to respond instinctively to something ordinary again.
The national anthem.
A first pitch.
Three outs.
Nine innings.
A ball clearing a fence.
The sociology behind that response is well established. Émile Durkheim wrote about the power of collective ritual and shared experience. Randall Collins later examined how societies move through periods of shock, heightened solidarity and eventual return toward everyday life following traumatic events.
Baseball became one of those rituals after Sept. 11.
But nobody inside Shea needed the terminology to understand what was happening.
They felt it.
More than the toy department
Sports journalism changed during those days, too.
The old newspaper insult describes the sports section as the “toy department,” a place devoted to games while more serious matters occupy the front page.
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.
For most of the evening, baseball remained secondary.
Then Mike Piazza hit a fastball over the fence.
The crowd rose almost as one, and for a few seconds a ballpark in Queens sounded like a ballpark again.
Steve Karsay lost the game that night.
Years later, he remembers the home run differently.
“It meant something more.”
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