Lidle's Crash, Death Defies Comprehension

NEW YORK, Oct. 12, 2006 — -- He left for work at 2 p.m. Just another day at the office.

Except it wasn't.

Who leaves for work, goes to a ballpark for a National League playoff game, only to get a phone call, one of the strangest phone calls of his life?

An airplane had flown into Manny Acta's apartment building? How could that be?

But that was the call the Mets' third-base coach got at Shea Stadium on Wednesday afternoon, barely more than an hour after he'd closed his apartment door.

His realtor was on the phone, along with the owner of his building. Had he heard the awful news? Where was he? Was he in the building? Was he OK?

"I'm at work," said Acta.

But this would turn into a very eerie, very bizarre day at "work" -- for Manny Acta, for all these men who are members of what Mets first baseman Carlos Delgado called "the baseball family."

Just when they thought there was nothing more important than these defining playoff games they were about to play, they were reminded how wrong they were.

"I think it just goes to show how insignificant some of the things that we think are significant really are," said Mets pitching coach Rick Peterson, a man who had once been Cory Lidle's pitching coach in Oakland. "We're about to play a baseball game, and how important is that, really?"

That was the question they all were having to grope with Wednesday, at a time they least expected to be groping with any question more basic than how to attack Tom Glavine's changeup or Jeff Weaver's sweeping breaking ball.

How important were these baseball games? Who could have expected that, on the day of what was supposed to be Game 1 of the National League Championship Series, anyone could possibly answer: Not very important at all?

After he assured his realtor and his building owner he was fine, after they made sure to tell him his apartment was fine, Acta wandered over to one of the clubhouse televisions. The scene was the skyline of the Upper East Side of Manhattan, smoke rising into the gray October sky.

But not on this day.

On this day, said Delgado, there was nothing else they could have watched, nothing else they wanted to watch.

"I mean, this doesn't happen every day," he said.

At first, these men, these baseball men, were like everyone else, asking themselves a question no one wanted to contemplate. Was this terrorism? Was it just a horrible accident? Was it just another random tragedy, out there in the world beyond their world? Or was it more?

It wouldn't be long before they would know the shocking answer.

As Acta watched the reports on TV, the news filtered in, in dribs and drabs, information mixed with misinformation. At first, they placed the crash a block from his building. Then on his street. Then at his very address.