Tim Benz: Remembering how PNC Park helped baseball return after 9/11. And how an ex-Pirate played the hero

By his sixth year of Major League Baseball, Pirates catcher Jason Kendall knew how to massage a relationship with a home plate umpire.

Build a rapport. Manage a mood. Gauge a personality. Maybe buy a call on the corner.

That’s not what this was. This was one guy worried about another’s well-being. This was a person worried about another person’s state of mind.

“Eddie, get out of here, dude. You don’t need to be doing this,” Kendall said.

Eddie was home plate umpire Ed Rapuano. He was calling balls and strikes behind Kendall at PNC Park on Sept. 17, 2001 — the first night back for Major League Baseball after the sport had been halted by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.

A native of New Haven, Conn., Rapuano lost loved ones in the collapse of the World Trade Center Towers and was trying to block his emotions to do his job.

But like many others on the North Shore that night, that was impossible, as Kendall could hear Rapuano crying at times during the game.

“I was telling him, ‘The people you lost, they’ll be looking down over you,’ ” Kendall said during a phone conversation last April. “Basically, being a shrink to an umpire.”

It was a game that wasn’t even supposed to be played in Pittsburgh. The visiting New York Mets were supposed to be the home team. But that couldn’t happen because Shea Stadium was being used as a staging area for relief efforts in New York. So the venue was shifted to Pittsburgh.

It was a game that — at the time — Kendall wondered should be played at all.

“Probably 90% of the players were saying we don’t need to be out here (playing) right now because of everything that happened,” Kendall said.

For his part, former Pirates first baseman Kevin Young described himself as being “in a fog” during the game.

“I remember running off the field after two outs. I got all the way to the third-base line before I realized there were two outs. It was one of those days,” Young said. “I was happy to be on the field. … But my own head wasn’t in it to the magnitude that it should be.”

Just six days removed from the worst event in our nation’s history, it was fair to wonder if our national pastime was coming back too soon. Big crowds gathering in big buildings. That felt like voluntarily creating big targets.

Even for a Monday night watching a team en route to 100 losses, more than 25,000 showed up at PNC Park.

Then again, 13,000 didn’t — on the first day life may have felt like it was supposed to return to normal.

Some people probably were just too scared. Others likely needed to watch something — anything — besides the nightly horror stream of video from Manhattan, the Pentagon and Somerset County.

“We need to do what we do in the country. This is our life. We need to somehow find a way to carry on,” Mets catcher Mike Piazza said the day of the game.

For as memorable and abnormal as the night was, the game itself was as mundane and forgettable as it gets. A 1-1 tie heading into the ninth inning. Just nine total hits on the night.

But it wasn’t possible for this night to end without something special in terms of a storyline. This game couldn’t have been played without something meaningful happening.

A timely return

Mark Johnson was in Pittsburgh for three years. At 6-foot-3, 230 pounds, the Dartmouth College first baseman had long-ball potential in his swing whenever he stepped to the plate.

He did manage 30 home runs in 284 games as a Pirate before being displaced by Young in 1997. From there, he bounced between the Reds, Angels and Mets. The 2001 season was Johnson’s second of three in Queens before retiring and eventually getting into the Wall Street game — a vocation that has been in his family for years.

Knowing many people in that field of work was part of the reason Johnson and his relatives — like Rapuano’s — had friends in the collapse of the Twin Towers.

A family friend of Johnson’s wife was working at Cantor Fitzgerald, six floors above the impact zone of One World Trade Center.

During the downtime with games canceled by MLB, Johnson and other Mets put aside whatever personal loss they endured and thrust themselves into volunteer relief work as much as they could.

“It was tough. We were meeting people that had lost families,” Johnson said. “We were trying to do as much as we could do with people that were affected.”

For those reasons, from what Johnson could tell from those interactions, he felt playing in Pittsburgh was necessary for the fans back in New York.

“We knew how important it was to the city,” Johnson continued. “We were just trying to give people a distraction at that point. And hopefully give them something to get their minds off of what was going on and get life back to what it was like pre-9/11.”

And if fate should have it that Johnson could play a role in victory for the Mets in his former city, all the better.

Only fitting

In the top of the ninth, the Mets managed to scratch out a run on a Rey Ordonez single off Mike Fetters to take a 2-1 lead. With Ordonez and Jay Payton on base, Johnson was called upon to pinch-hit for his first at-bat in his former team’s brand-new stadium.

“I don’t remember the count. Or the pitch. I just remember hitting a double off that right field wall,” Johnson said. “This was where I got my shot with Jim Leyland. It was always a town that meant a lot to me. It was a big day for me. It was good to get back there.”

Those insurance runs driven in by Johnson would help the Mets secure a 4-1 win. A night when New Jersey’s Al Leiter got the start. A night when Brooklyn’s John Franco got the win.

“Once the game was over and we had won, my thoughts moved back to what was happening there,” Johnson said. “I just was hoping I brought some joy for people who needed a distraction that night. I was just happy to do something for New York.”

I went into the Mets visiting locker room that night to interview Johnson after his big hit. He was struggling to talk through tears, choking out exactly the same quote to punctuate multiple answers.

“I was just happy to do something for New York.”

One question. Two questions. A third. All with the same answer. Johnson attentively looked around at the pack of six or seven reporters, patiently waiting for us to ask anything else.

Silence. What else could we ask? What else could he say?

Johnson gave a friendly nod and walked toward the showers. His hand to his face, comforted by a team P.R. rep.

It was the right thing to do

Now, Kendall sees the value in playing that game, even if he didn’t at the time.

“Once we got out there and played, it was the right thing to do,” Kendall said. “Just to give people the chance to step back and for three hours put your mind somewhere else.”

It wasn’t just good for New York. Or Washington. Or Somerset County. It was good for Pittsburgh, too.

It was good for us to see our beautiful new stadium be part of such a healing effort. As George Vecsey would write for The New York Times after the game, “One of the lesser-known aspects of the Declaration of Independence is the unalienable right to cross a golden bridge on a soft late summer night and pay your way into a ballpark and buy a beer and a hot dog — or a tray of sushi, for that matter — and take a seat with a great view of an old American city.”

A city whose affinity for sports is as recognizable as those bridges themselves. And a city that was there for baseball when a visiting team and the entire sport needed a place to play.