Al Leiter, former Yankee and eternal Met, always did have a way with words. On Friday morning, at a community-minded event tied to the date on the calendar, Leiter assessed why he and others with enduring MLB/NYC ties were at Citi Field doing a little something [1] for others in the spirit of those who had done the absolute most for others:
“There are timestamps in life, right? This is a quarter-century, 25th anniversary. You want to do that timestamp.”
September 11, 2026, was indeed a timestamp, a milestone anniversary in New York. Every September 11 in New York is a milestone anniversary. Look toward Lower Manhattan on any day in any year since September 11, 2001, and you don’t really need an anniversary or a calendar. It’s that day again, at least a little bit. You don’t want it to be. You remember, anyway. The least a person can do once a year is voluntarily never forget.
As on the 20th anniversary, in 2021, the Mets played the Yankees on September 11. Then it was at Citi Field. This time it was at Yankee Stadium. As has been the case since 2021, Major League Baseball has sanctioned the New York teams wearing the caps of the agencies whose first responders gave every bit of themselves on that date in history. It used to be a pointless point of contention. The Mets wanted to keep wearing the caps, the way they had as a form of salute during the final weeks of the 2001 season and then one game a year for a few more years. It was a signficant gesture by a franchise that’s made so many of them [2] across a quarter-century. The authorities within Major League Baseball prohibited the most visible one. Now they allow it. Sometimes those things get resolved to presumably everybody’s satisfaction. Maybe it took a timestamp.
A throughline of baseball reminiscences that rise up every September [3] is that when terrorists hijacked four airplanes, killed nearly 3,000 human beings, and destroyed the World Trade Center, baseball didn’t matter. That tracks with how I remember it. I remember not caring in the least about baseball from the moment I processed the news. I remember not even thinking about baseball or my baseball team. My only substantive Mets thought — in an era when my brain was crammed with substantive Mets thoughts — was not believing there was any purpose to the Mets and their cohort resuming their season. MLB picked up its season September 17. I looked at the first Met road game, from Pittsburgh, because it was on TV. I continued to see no purpose in it.
The first Met home game, September 21, a Friday night at Shea, wasn’t much different from that personal perspective. I was there, because I had a ticket, as I did every Friday night in 2001. I watched the game between the Mets and the Braves without much emotional investment in the outcome. Then, to bring it to the moment that’s grown only larger with every replay and every retelling, Mike Piazza hit a come-from-behind home run in the eighth inning. It was breathtaking in that Mike Piazza just hit a big home run way and then some. I certainly preferred a Mets win to a Braves win, and the Mets went on to win. I was impressed that so many of us showed up and sat/stood/cheered in one place. I still wasn’t sure the outcome on the field mattered.
Keep playing baseball long enough, baseball and my baseball team will matter to me. I was all in by the end of the weekend. The weekend ended with a horrific Sunday loss I also attended. Yes, a Mets loss could feel horrific, even in the shadow of actual horror. That, I suppose, is a side effect of baseball’s vaunted healing power. I don’t know how much healing was inherent in the Mets playing or Mike homering or, for that matter, Armando Benitez blowing a save. I don’t know how much healing a person who was mainly worried and inconvenienced [4] in the immediate aftermath of September 11 needed. All I knew then was the Mets were hanging on in an unlikely divisional race at an interval unlike that in any season in the city they called home and millions like me considered their own. I took my cue from some combination of the standings and habit, and went back to caring about baseball as if it couldn’t have mattered more.
On September 11, 2026, the standings didn’t provide much impetus, but habit is habit, so I tuned in to the Mets playing the Yankees. The Mets have been a far better watch recently than their standing would indicate. Friday night, they weren’t that great. Most games you’ll take your chances with Nolan McLean throwing your first pitch and Juan Soto taking your last swing. Neither of them came through. The Mets, despite some late scrappiness, lost [5], 6-4. It was probably a good night to revert to not being emotionally invested in the outcome on the field. Except for a necessary blip one apparently long ago September, I wouldn’t know how that works.
[6]