Al Leiter, 2001 Mets remember 9/11 and the days that followed in New York

To this day, the horrifying and stunning image remains in Al Leiter’s mind. He describes it with a tone of disbelief, as if he saw it hours earlier and not 19 years ago. 

He was in a taxi. As it drove over the Triborough Bridge, Leiter looked left and saw the iconic twin towers of the World Trade Center on fire, the smoke and flames marring what had been a beautiful day. 

“That’s something I'll never get out of my brain," Leiter said. 

At that moment, he felt every emotion — fear, sadness, anger. Every radio station began reporting the same thing: The United States, specifically New York City, had been attacked by terrorists. 

“Terrible,” Leiter recalled during a phone interview with The Record and NorthJersey.com. “Terrible time in our history.”

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'Hang tight' 

On Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, the Mets were scheduled to play in Pittsburgh, with Leiter on the mound. 

Leiter was in New York, though. 

A veteran starter, Leiter valued his regimented pre-start routine. He stuck to it. In any other situation, he would have been with his teammates as they flew to Pittsburgh the day before. 

But these were unique circumstances. 

Leiter and his wife had moved their family from Florida to New York. They put their oldest daughter in school in Manhattan. 

“She was nervous and scared, she was just this little girl, first grade,” Leiter said. “I said, ‘Even though I’m pitching, I’m going to do this.’” 

He figured he would drop her off at school on the Upper East Side at 8 a.m., shoot over to LaGuardia Airport and take one of the many flights to Pittsburgh. 

His plan seemed to be working flawlessly, too. He took his daughter to school, made it to the airport and boarded the plane. 

As the plane was taxiing, Leiter noticed the process was taking longer than usual. He did not think much of it, though. It was LaGuardia.  

Then, someone came over the plane’s public address system. 

“Air traffic tells us that there may have been some sort of news helicopter or something that hit the World Trade Center,” they said. “We’re not sure. Hang tight.”

Some time passed before the next announcement. 

“We’re going back to the gate,” they said. “Get your belongings. LaGuardia and New York airspace is shut down and closed.”

Leiter got off the plane and hurried toward an exit because he knew there would be a shortage of taxis. That's when he saw everyone gathered watching different televisions.

He can recall seeing the second plane crashing into the World Trade Center. 

“I looked to people looking at it like, ‘What was that? Did that just happen?’ Like, ‘Oh my God, yeah, two planes just went into the World Trade Center!’ Like, ‘No way!’” Leiter said. “That was a bizarre, to say the least, and crazy visual.”

But at that time, no one understood the situation’s magnitude. 

So, at this point, Leiter also thought: “Holy s---, I’ve got to pitch tonight.” He hopped in a cab and told the driver: “Listen, this is going to sound crazy but I need to get to Philadelphia. There’s a flight I need to take to get to Pittsburgh. Would you drive me and I’ll pay you whatever?”

The driver said yes. Off they went. 

“Bizzaro, never did it in my baseball life — traveled the day I pitched,” Leiter said. 

Leiter could not have anticipated what would occur in the coming hours. 

‘We’re not playing baseball tonight’

As the taxi headed north through the Bronx, Leiter heard on the radio that another plane had crashed into the Pentagon. 

Leiter called Jay Horwitz, the Mets’ public relations director at the time. 

“Jay, we’re not playing baseball tonight,” Leiter told Horwitz. “This is beyond some accident. We’re being attacked.” 

Leiter, who began and ended his career with the Yankees, called Yankees play-by-play man Michael Kay. Kay lived in Westchester County, and Leiter wanted to know if he could stay there for a few hours because Manhattan was shut down. Later in the day, when everything reopened, Leiter took a train on the Metro-North Railroad to Grand Central. 

Throughout the day, Leiter worried about his family. He had reached his wife once in the morning and knew her and the kids were safe at the apartment, but cellphone service was spotty as everyone frantically called loved ones. 

“At that time, there were a lot of rumors that there were car bombs,” Leiter said. “At that moment, you don’t have a crystal ball and you don’t know how it plays out, but you’re thinking: ‘This is just the tip of the iceberg of attacks.’ There definitely was that concern, thinking of the tunnels and the bridges being blown up and all that stuff. There was a lot out there. The speculation, at that time, was, ‘Heck yeah that could actually happen. They just flew two planes into the World Trade Center.’”

‘It was a tough time ... it still is'

As Sept. 11 approaches each year, Lenny Harris avoids turning on his television. He can’t keep reliving that day and the many painful moments that followed. 

He can’t seem to escape it. 

“It just won’t leave me alone,” said Lenny Harris, a Met during that 2001 season. “It just keeps coming back to me. It’s dead to me. I’m trying to blank it out of my mind because it just was a sad moment. If you’ve ever been through a situation like that and just seeing aftershocks and stuff and sick people, and people are hurt, people are getting burned, people are jumping through windows through the World Trade Center and know that they're jumping into death. 

“It’ll ride with you. It’ll ride with you for a minute because it’s hard to forget about situations like that when you’re seeing it.”

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Mets owners Fred and Jeff Wilpon organized many ways to aid the relief effort. 

They transformed Shea Stadium's parking lot into a supply depot. They welcomed the families of those affected by the tragedy to Mets games, allowing them to meet players in the clubhouse and walk onto the field. They helped set up trips to ground zero for groups of players. 

The Mets understood their responsibility in helping the city heal, but players often found it difficult to speak to kids who lost loved ones.

How could they remotely relate to people who experienced indescribable pain? 

“It’s one of those things where there’s really no words you can ever say to somebody that’s lost a loved one," said Jay Payton, another 2001 Met. "All you can do is kind of be there, comfort them, give a handshake or a hug. Just letting them know that you’re there for them and you care about them. When you go through something like that, I’m kind of one of those people: If you haven’t walked in somebody’s shoes, you really don’t know what they’re going through or what they’re thinking. For people that lost loved ones in 9/11, I’ll never be able to understand what they went through. I can only have empathy and condolences for them.”

Harris knew he didn't have the answers.

“I wish I did have answers. I didn’t have any answers because I would’ve felt just like them. I would’ve been empty. I just can’t say, ‘Hey man, be positive. God is going to take care of this and that.’ I couldn’t even tell them that because, at that moment when you’re that age and you’re losing your parents on a situation like that, it’s hard to talk about. It’s really just hard to talk about." 

Leiter felt it, too.

“What do you say? My condolences and I’m sorry, and give them a hug. What can you say, right? It was a tough time. It was. It still is.”

Ground zero

Leiter doesn’t remember exactly how many days it had been since 9/11 when he and his teammates first visited ground zero, but it couldn’t have been long since the attacks. 

“The site was still smoldering; the site was still hot, it was still burning,” Leiter said. 

Manager Bobby Valentine took a group of players, including Mike Piazza, John Franco, Robin Ventura and Todd Zeile.

Harris said a lot of people thought they saw him on that trip. He never went. 

“I never went to ground zero to watch that,” Harris said, “because I didn’t want to be around it.”

Leiter remembers it as being “surreal, to say the least, because literally thousands of people had perished there. It was still a rescue site as well as a clean-up site.”

That last part is what struck Leiter. As rescue crews tried to find those buried in the debris, clean-up crews worked in other parts. 

It was a sad divide between the past and future. 

“I almost felt like I didn’t want to be in their way,” Leiter said. “But then, going in the different tents of rescue workers that were doing what they had to do, they were so happy that we were there. Then I realized: This is a good thing. We’re not in the way. Our presence was lifting those that were there." 

Baseball returns to New York

The defining scene: Mike Piazza, with the Mets trailing, blasted a go-ahead home run to power the Mets to victory on Sept. 21, 2001, the night baseball returned to New York after the worst acts of terrorism in our country’s history. 

“I think it kind of hits you right there," Payton said. "I know it was a baseball game, but it was New York, it was where it happened. Him hitting that home run, I think it was just kind of like a, ‘Hey, this is New York and we’re going to be all right’ kind of feeling. I think it was the start of healing for a lot of people and for a lot of us, even.”

“The fact that our superstar player was the one who heroically won a game that night, with all of the attention of the world that was there at Shea Stadium, against our nemesis the Braves, the moons aligned for us thankfully,” Leiter said. “With Mike Piazza hitting the home run and being the hero, it was kind of Hollywood scripted for something that was so sad that ended up being a happy baseball night for Mets fans.”

There had been debate about whether the Mets should be playing. As performers, they understood that. They even felt it at first. 

How could they play a baseball game after thousands had tragically died in their own city? What place did baseball possess in that situation? Was it even important?

After that first game back, they got answers. 

“In hindsight, playing that game was probably the best thing we could’ve done,” Payton said. 

It proved to be an emotionally straining day. The Mets were happy to represent their city and help in the healing process. They understood the severity of what had occurred and the pain it caused. 

In that iconic game at Shea Stadium, Harris did not receive an at-bat. He didn’t mind that. 

“I just was going with the motions,” he said of that day. “If I went out there, I probably wouldn’t have swung the bat. I was just out of air. I didn’t feel like playing, I didn’t want to be there. I just had to continue because I was a Met and I had to follow policy. But if I had a chance, I wouldn’t have even shown up that day.”

'New York, New York'

Before the bottom of the seventh inning during the first game at Shea Stadium after 9/11, Payton stood in the on-deck circle as Liza Minnelli sang “New York, New York.” Once she completed it, she walked over to Payton and gave him a hug and kiss. 

“It’s one of those kinds of goosebump moments,” Payton said. “It’s a little bit bigger than life itself, just with everything going on.”

Payton’s mother sent Minnelli a picture of that moment. She signed it and sent it back. 

“I have that memorabilia for myself,” Payton said. 

'Let's have hope'

“Holy s----. They’re gone. They’re gone.” 

Leiter had this same thought for years after 9/11. As a kid who grew up in New Jersey, he always viewed the twin towers as the defining characteristic of New York’s skyline. They stood out. 

Then, one day, they were no more. 

“That in itself was bizarrely hard to fathom,” Leiter said. “Like, these things just melted and pancaked down — these mammoth, amazing buildings.” 

On the day they fell, Payton woke up in his Pittsburgh hotel room. At around 10 a.m., he turned on the television and saw the same story on every channel. Groggy from his slumber, he did not realize what had actually occurred. 

“Once I kind of came to the realization of what was going on,” Payton said, “it just hit you like a ton of bricks.”

The Mets, like everyone else, were shocked. When they returned to New York, they empathized with those in pain as they helped the city heal. The memories have remained with them throughout the years. 

In the Upper East Side, Leiter remembers seeing thousands of faces on billboards, walls and poles. Their pictures were often accompanied by a short bio or description of the person. 

Family members were holding out hope that loved ones were still alive.

“Daddy, are they missing?” Leiter’s kids would ask. 

“Maybe. Let’s have hope,” Leiter would respond. 

It accelerated a conversation no parent wants to have — one about life and death. Leiter had to explain that “bad guys didn’t like us.” It hurt him because his kids were innocent. 

When Leiter would hit the road in the future, he always received one question on his way out the door. 

“Daddy, you’re coming back, right?”

Justin Toscano is the Mets beat writer for NorthJersey.com. For unlimited access to all Mets analysis, news, trades and more, please subscribe today and download our app.

Email: toscanoj@northjersey.com Twitter: @justinctoscano