The Night Baseball Came Back: How Mike Piazza and the Mets Helped New York Believe Again

There are moments when sports feel like the most important thing in the world. A championship. A final out. A game-winning shot. A goal with seconds remaining. Then there are moments when life reminds us, with devastating force, that sports are only games.

September 11, 2001 was one of those moments.

Nobody cared about standings that morning. Nobody cared who was pitching that night, who was favored on Sunday or what team sat atop a division. Games were postponed. Stadiums went dark. Scoreboards went silent. The sports world stopped because the world itself seemed to have stopped.

And for a while, the idea of playing again almost felt wrong.

How could anyone cheer when thousands of families were grieving? How could somebody worry about winning and losing when firefighters, police officers, construction workers and volunteers were digging through the ruins of the World Trade Center? In New York, missing-person posters covered neighborhoods. Firehouses mourned members who never came home. Families waited for phone calls that would never arrive.

A baseball game could not fix any of that.

But eventually, America began discovering something important about sports: their value wasn't necessarily in making tragedy disappear. Their value was in bringing people back together.

Major League Baseball resumed play on September 17 after a six-day stoppage. Other sports began returning as well. The games looked familiar, but everything surrounding them was different. American flags appeared everywhere. National anthems carried a different weight. Players who were normally identified by the logo on their uniforms suddenly became representatives of their cities and communities.

There were powerful scenes across the sports world. NASCAR returned at Dover on September 23, where the grandstands were filled with American flags before Dale Earnhardt Jr. won and carried a massive American flag around the track during his victory celebration. Weeks later, the Yankees would make an emotional run through the postseason, bringing World Series baseball back to a wounded New York and creating unforgettable nights in the Bronx.

But before all of that, there was Shea Stadium.

September 21, 2001.

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Ten days after the attacks, professional sports returned to New York City.

The Mets were hosting the Atlanta Braves, ordinarily one of the fiercest rivalry games on the National League calendar. There was a pennant race happening. There were standings to worry about. Atlanta and New York had spent years battling for control of the National League East.

Nobody walking into Shea Stadium that night seemed particularly concerned about any of it.

More than 41,000 people filled the ballpark. First responders and their families were among them. Members of the Mets had spent the days after the attacks visiting firehouses, relief centers and families throughout the city. Now they took the field wearing caps representing organizations including the NYPD and FDNY instead of simply wearing their normal Mets hats.

For perhaps the first time in its history, Shea Stadium didn't initially feel like a baseball stadium.

It felt like a gathering place.

There was sadness. There was uncertainty. There was patriotism. There was the strange feeling of thousands of people wondering whether it was okay to enjoy themselves again.

Then the game started.

And slowly, almost cautiously, baseball began doing what baseball has always done. A pitcher delivered. A batter stepped into the box. A ball popped into a glove. An umpire made a call. Fans reacted.

For a few seconds at a time, normal life returned.

Atlanta eventually took a 2-1 lead into the bottom of the eighth inning. With a runner aboard, Mike Piazza stepped to the plate against Braves reliever Steve Karsay.

Piazza was already one of baseball's biggest stars. His career would eventually take him to Cooperstown. He would hit 427 home runs in the major leagues.

None would matter quite like this one.

Piazza connected.

The baseball climbed into the New York night and cleared the wall in center field.

Mets 3. Braves 2.

And Shea Stadium exploded.

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It wasn't simply the roar of fans celebrating a go-ahead home run. It sounded—and felt—like emotion that had been trapped inside an entire city finally being released. People jumped from their seats. They hugged strangers. They screamed. They cried.

For just a moment, New York wasn't watching smoke rise from Lower Manhattan.

New York was watching a baseball fly over a fence.

The Mets held on for the 3-2 victory, but nobody remembers that night because New York moved a little closer in the standings. They remember it because of what happened emotionally when Piazza's baseball disappeared beyond the wall.

It would be easy, especially 25 years later, to describe that home run by saying it "healed" New York.

But that gives a baseball game a responsibility it could never carry.

New York wasn't healed on September 21, 2001.

Families still went home without loved ones. Firehouses still had empty lockers. Ground Zero was still burning. Funerals continued. The pain wasn't going anywhere.

What Piazza gave the city was something smaller—and perhaps more meaningful.

Permission to smile.

Permission to cheer.

Permission to feel something other than fear, anger and grief for a few minutes.

Piazza later reflected that people were looking for refuge in baseball and in simply being around other people. That may be the best explanation of what sports offered after September 11. They weren't an escape because everyone suddenly forgot what had happened. Nobody inside Shea Stadium had forgotten anything.

They were an escape because everyone remembered—and chose to sit beside one another anyway.

That is the power sports possess when they are at their very best.

Sports create common ground where very little may otherwise exist. The person sitting next to you may vote differently. Pray differently. Come from another neighborhood. Make more money or less money. You may disagree about nearly everything outside those stadium gates.

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But when that ball leaves Piazza's bat, you both stand.

You both scream.

You both hug.

For a moment, you're simply New Yorkers.

Twenty-five years later, that part of the story may matter more than ever.

We live in a sports culture consumed by debate. Every player becomes an argument. Every game becomes content. Every decision becomes something to fight about online. Sports are analyzed, monetized and dissected every hour of every day.

September 2001 reminded us that underneath all of it, sports can still be remarkably simple.

• They give people somewhere to gather.
• They give children heroes.
• They give families traditions.
• They give strangers something to talk about.

And occasionally, when circumstances become larger than anything happening on a field, they give communities a reason to believe that normal life can eventually return.

Mike Piazza didn't know what would happen when he walked toward home plate that night. Steve Karsay didn't know he was about to throw one of the most remembered pitches in baseball history. Nobody could have scripted it.

Maybe that's why it remains so powerful.

There was no championship trophy waiting at the end of the night. No parade. No postseason series victory.

Just one swing.

One baseball disappearing into the darkness.

And more than 41,000 people rising together.

For generations, baseball has been called America's pastime. On September 21, 2001, it became something more.

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It became a meeting place for a wounded city.

It became three hours when New Yorkers could sit beside each other again.

And when Mike Piazza sent that ball over the wall at Shea Stadium, he didn't erase the pain of September 11.

He simply reminded New York that even in the middle of unimaginable darkness, someday it would be okay to cheer again.

Sometimes, that is all sports need to do.