Before first pitch Friday night in the Bronx, the game waited. The Yankees 9/11 tribute brought Derek Jeter and members of the 2001 Yankees back onto the grass to honor the victims of Sept. 11, 2001, and the ceremony closed the way these things should close: with the families, not the famous.
The last act was two first pitches, thrown by Brielle Saracini and Sean Maguire, a married couple whose fathers were both killed that day. Two people who found each other out of the same loss, standing on a pitcher's mound in front of 40-some thousand people on a September night. The reporting out of the Stadium framed Jeter's part in it as a reunion, and I'll leave the details of that to the people who lived it, because I don't have the whole story of when they first met and I'm not going to guess at it.
The reason the 2001 group is the group that gets called for this, every year, is that they were the team that played through the worst autumn New York ever had. They did not fix anything. Nobody thought they did. But for a few weeks that October the city had somewhere to put its hands, and those players have carried that assignment ever since, long after the legs went.
checked the almanac: the first major pro sporting event in New York after the attacks came on Sept. 21, 2001, at Shea, when Mike Piazza put a two-run homer into the night against the Braves and 41,000 people found out they could still make that noise. baseball did not heal anything either. it just held the door open.
What comes next is the most New York thing available: the Mets and the Yankees again, Saturday at 1:36 PM ET in the Bronx, the Subway Series in the middle of a September that actually matters to both clubs. The ceremony ends, the tarp comes off, the lineup card goes up. That's not disrespect. That's the whole point of playing the next day.
I'll be watching the same thing I watch every year on this weekend: whether the Stadium sounds different in the first inning. It usually does.