Monday, 11 September: Baltimore Orioles vs St Louis Cardinals, Camden Yards, Baltimore MD.
On this day of all days, I always try to go to a ballgame for everyone who can’t, and we picked a good one today as the Orioles continued their best season since 2014 with a convincing 11-5 win over the Cardinals, powered by a Cedric Mullins Grand Slam.
The O’s have scored double-digit runs in 4 of their last 5 games and, because of the restructured schedules this year, became the first American team to beat every other team at least once in a single season.
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As a former citizen of New York, remembering September 11 and all those whose lives were forever altered that day will always be important to me, and baseball has been how I’ve tried to do that – a way of reaching beyond complexity for things that are simple and represent what America’s pastime is supposed to mean to us as people.
When I lived there, I used to alternate between Shea and Yankee Stadiums each weekend, depending on who was playing at home, before going into the newspaper’s office in midtown Manhattan for the nightshift. I’ll have to count tickets, but I’m pretty sure I’ve still seen more games at Shea/Citifield than any other ballpark.
I was working on the newsdesk the night Mike Piazza hit that famous home run against the Braves in the first game back after 9/11 that let the entire city exhale; and I was at Yankee Stadium for one of the first two games – I’ll have to check the ticket to remember exactly which one – of the ALDS when the Yankees fell behind to the A’s before winning the next three to further push the “team of destiny” notion that, by then, New Yorkers were all too keen to embrace.
I was also at Shea for a Sunday afternoon game in October between the Mets and the Expos when the bombing campaign in Afghanistan began. I had to leave early to go into the office as an already chaotic world took another dramatic turn.
The unifying effect of baseball in the aftermath of the attacks has been documented often, perhaps most effectively in the 2004 HBO film Nine Innings From Ground Zero.
Beyond showing the importance of baseball to the city, watching it now the most jarring takeaway is the sheer extent of the fall of Rudy Giuliani from “America’s Mayor” – and undoubtedly the leader we needed at that precise moment – to a figure of widespread ridicule and self-destroyed integrity. It’s really desperately sad.
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One thing has always bugged me – in this era of increasingly ubiquitous interleague play, why can’t MLB schedulers make sure the Mets and Yankees always play a series over Sept 11, including some kind of fundraising event benefitting first-responders and alternating between Queens and The Bronx with each season?
That seems like the most obvious of no-brainers.
States of Play 