Reflecting on the 23rd Anniversary of September 11th

By Jay Horwitz

As we approach the 23rd anniversary of September 11th next Wednesday, I wanted to reflect upon two people who played vital roles on how our organization responded after the attacks. Sometimes, they get overlooked and they shouldn’t be.

One is Steve Phillips, our GM at the time, and the other was our first baseman Todd Zeile, who was our player rep in 2001. The subject for both is hats, specifically first responder hats.

One of the things I am proudest of during my time with the Met is that we were the first sports team to wear hats honoring the agencies who lost a member on 9/11. I think we wore seven different hats during our first game back against the Atlanta Braves on September 21st.

The hats came about during one of our visits to Ground Zero where Steve handed out Mets hats to firefighters and in return they have our guys FDNY hats. Coming back from one trip, Steve said we need to wear those hats in a game.

Well, some people only wanted us to use the hats for one game and one game only. Todd wouldn’t stand for that. He told the people from MLB they would have to come down the locker room and rips hat off our players’ heads.

Needless to say, we wore the hats the rest of the year and I was proud than and even prouder some two decades later of the stance our guys took back then.