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Lidle tragedy puts game in perspective

Wallace Matthews

10:56 PM EDT, October 11, 2006

Wednesday was supposed to have been one of the great days in the history of baseball in this town, which covers a lot of great days and a lot of great history.

Instead, if Oct. 11, 2006 is remembered at all, it will as a day in which great baseball history was shoved aside for a dreadful New York tragedy.

The death of Cory Lidle in a plane crash Wednesday capped a bizarre week in which a potential Subway Series was derailed, one of the winningest managers in New York history had to beg for his job, and the prospect that for the first time in it history, the city would play host to two League Championship Series games on the same day, was set aside for at least another year.

Most of all, it was a week in which the triviality of a baseball game rubbed up against the sharp edges of what we like to call real life.

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Last week at this time, the Yankees and Mets were on track for their second World Series meeting in six years, only with a twist. This time, the Mets would have been considered a live contender for the crown, if not the favorite.

But those plans fell apart when the Yankees fell apart in Detroit. The fallout from that was immediate and profound. All of a sudden, Joe Torre was on the hot seat, and the Mets were the only game in town.

Then came Wednesday, and the alarming news of another airplane-high rise building collision, all too close and far too reminiscent of the terrorist attacks that brought down the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

But as the facts trickled in, it soon became clear that the reality was nowhere near as catastrophic but in its own way, nearly as bizarre. Almost as much as the human tragedy of a husband and father of a 6-year-old boy losing his life at age 34, you were struck by the incredible coincidences involved in Lidle's death on a day in which baseball had already preoccupied the city's collective mind.

What were the odds that on the same day the Mets were to open their LCS against the St. Louis Cardinals at Shea Stadium, a member of the Yankees would meet his death in the crash of a private plane into a building that was home to the Mets' third-base coach?

Lidle's death touched people in both clubhouses. He had former teammates on the Mets and Cardinals. Rick Peterson had been his pitching coach in Oakland, Mark Mulder, now a Cardinal, one of his stablemates in the A's rotation. Billy Wagner had been a teammate in Philadelphia. Chris Woodward grew up in the same town, Covina, Calif. And Manny Acta had only left the building at 524 East 72nd Street 40 minutes before Lidle's plane veered into it.

The rainstorm that eventually postponed the game about an hour before it was to have begun may well have saved baseball from some tough questions, although it had already made its call. Cory Lidle's death would not have stopped the game, and most of the Mets who weighed in on the subject agreed it should not have.

But there were a few, notably Woodward and David Wright, who thought it would have been difficult at the very least to continue under the circumstances. As Woodward said, "This was God's way of saying we shouldn't play."

But there would have been powerful reasons for baseball and the TV network to insist that the game be played, namely money, and in truth, people die in tragic accidents in New York every day. We simply can't stop what we're doing out of respect for them, even if on one day, a victim is well-known or happens to play baseball for a living. Still, plenty of people would have argued, and persuasively, that it would have been right for baseball to pause for the night.

The rain washed away that sticky question, but it raised other, more mundane issues. How would the new schedule affect the performance of the teams, and especially the Mets, who thought they caught a break for their beleaguered starting staff after they swept the Dodgers, but now found themselves faced with having to play five games in five days.

The advantage they had gained by finishing off the Dodgers early, affording Tom Glavine, their 40-year-old Game 1 starter, a few extra days of rest they now found wiped out; if the series goes five games, Glavine -- and Cardinals starter Jeff Weaver -- will have to come back on three days' rest.

The extra day of healing for Achilles-hobbled Cliff Floyd on this end means one fewer day of rest on the other end, and perhaps more playing time for Endy Chavez. And no matter how long this series goes or who comes out on top, there will be a pall hanging over what just two days ago was shaping up as a baseball October for New York to remember, even without the participation of the Yankees.

Now, it will not be so much an October to remember as an October that will be difficult to forget, for all the wrong reasons.