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The New York Mets finished 82-80 and did not win the World Series in 2001, when the crosstown Yankees — one year removed from beating the Mets in the first Subway Series Fall Classic in almost five decades — came within two outs of their fourth straight title.
The 2001 Mets were a team assembled almost entirely via free agency and splashy trades. Amongst the regulars, just Edgardo Alfonzo, Benny Agbayani and Jay Payton, along with Cuban defector Rey Ordonez, were signed and developed by the club.
By the time the season ended, the only Mets who’d been with the club for more than three seasons were Alfonzo, Ordonez, John Franco, Al Leiter and future Hall of Famer Mike Piazza.
The Mets, who spent most of the season struggling to stay out of the NL East basement, dealt almost as many similarly tenured vets at the trade deadline, when Todd Pratt, Rick Reed, Turk Wendell and Dennis Cook were moved.
But in the most important of ways, there has never been a finer or more impactful Mets team.
Nor has there been one more bonded with one another and reflective of the city they call home than the 2001 team, which 25 years ago Friday began navigating a new world while absorbing and sharing in the grief of those around them following the most personal and collective tragedy in American history.
“That 2001 team will always be a band of brothers,” Franco said.
2001 Mets Aid In New York’s Recovery
The Mets were uniquely positioned to be of some assistance and to provide some comfort during one of the worst times in the nation’s history.
Shea Stadium, with its acres of parking lots located off a handful of highways, was a textbook staging area following the attacks.
Pivotal figures on the team and throughout the organization — from Franco, Leiter and manager Bobby Valentine amongst the uniformed personnel to executives such as media relations director Jay Horwitz, his longtime assistant Shannon Dalton Forde and vice president of ballpark operations Sue Lucchi — were New York-area natives, which allowed them to immediately and quickly help coordinate staging and relief efforts.
With only occasional breaks for workouts on the Shea Stadium field, every member of the Mets — players and staffers alike — pitched in during the several days before play resumed Sept. 17.
“Not one guy said no to anything,” Franco said Thursday, when Citi Field hosted the premiere of “When America Took The Field,” a documentary on which former Mets first baseman Todd Zeile served as an executive producer.
“Every guy up here — and the other guys on that team that are missing, coaches and trainers, not one guy said no to helping out. Not one guy said no to donating a day salary. Not one guy said no to wearing the hat to represent the police, firemen and Port Authority.”
In addition, the Mets were long connected with first responders via former player Rusty Staub, who founded the New York Police and Fire Widows’ and Children’s Benefit Fund in 1985 and raised millions for the families left behind by those who died in the line of duty.
The Mets were also amongst the first athletic faces of the grief, anguish and uncertainty everyone else felt.
They were in Pittsburgh on Sept. 11 and were the first local team to try and get home with the skies shut down — and the first to return to New York and realize the scope of the attack and the recovery efforts as well
“That bus gave silence a new meaning,” Valentine said during “When America Took The Field,” which airs throughout the weekend on MLB Network.
The Mets were also the first to realize that simply traveling to Ground Zero and showing their support to those sifting through the rubble was a way to offer some help at an otherwise helpless time.
“When you got down there, you don’t know if you’re supposed to be there,” Robin Ventura, the third baseman for the 2001 Mets, said Thursday night. “For some reason, it seemed to brighten their day for a minute — which was enough. It was enough to make the trip down there just to have one conversation with somebody. And it might have brought a smirk or a smile to their faces for a minute, but it was worth it.”
Mike Piazza’s Sept. 21 Home Run Unleashes Pent-Up Emotion
The sight of Franco wiping away tears and a Mets bullpen catcher weeping during the National Anthem prior to the game against the Pirates on Sept. 17 symbolized a nation still grieving and uncertain when or how to begin doing quote unquote normal things again — and provided just a hint at the emotion and trepidation to follow four nights later, when the Mets faced the Atlanta Braves in the first sporting event in New York since the attacks.
“Playing that game at Shea Stadium was scary,” Valentine said during a 2019 interview. “And no one in their right mind wanted to play that game. And luckily it took two teams who are crazy enough to play to play and make it happen.”
The solemnity of the pregame ceremonies — including a 21-gun salute and the NYPD bagpipe band playing “Amazing Grace” — moved to tears most of the 41,235 at Shea Stadium, including Piazza. As the ceremonies concluded, the Mets and Braves exchanged hugs on the field — two fierce rivals offering a perfect symbol of unity at an unprecedented time.
A few hours later, Piazza hit the most memorable homer of his career, a two-run, eighth-inning shot off Queens native Steve Karsay to deep center that lifted the Mets to a 3-2 win.
Piazza’s homer and the image of the crowd yelling and cheering has long been associated with the moment it began to feel as if sports could matter again — a belief underlined by the present time reactions of those interviewed in “When America Took The Field.”
“People were just hugging and crying,” WFAN host Mike Francesa said. “The city had to eventually release all those tears. And they released them in a good way.”
“That was the most captivating moment in my lifetime,” Valentine said in the documentary as the crowd gathered at Citi Field Thursday night applauded.
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“That was awesome,” Braves icon Chipper Jones said.
The home run is mentioned on Piazza’s Hall of Fame plaque — a symbol of the universal weight of the homer, which Piazza is reminded of on a nearly daily basis even while splitting his time between America and Europe.
“It’s just such an honor, because the fact that it just keeps rolling in time — it doesn’t really have a stop point, which is rare,” Piazza said Thursday. “If that’s what I’m remembered for, great. I’ll definitely take it and continue to reflect with other people when they come up to me.”
The dramatic win was part of a 25-6 surge for the Mets — tied for the second-best 31-game stretch in franchise history — that got them back into contention in the NL East.
But for the Mets, it felt like a footnote.
“That night, it had the celebration of a World Series game,” Leiter said. “Yet it was all the result of something — a heinous terrorist act.
“I just kept going back to the insignificance of it all.”
“I don’t think we felt like the wins and losses mattered,” Zeile said. “You take that away from the equation, often times you play more relaxed, you feel like you’re playing for something else. You feel like you’re playing for the people that we just went down and spent time with that have family members that never got to watch another baseball game.
“Symbolically, we wore the hats, and I think that was part of that for us. But I remember not really feeling like baseball mattered as much.”
By 2002, the shell of something resembling normalcy was in place.
Sports seasons played out at their usual rhythms. Rivalries took on their usual personal and outsized importance, along with the breathless coverage of mundane events such as Roger Clemens pitching and batting at Shea Stadium for the first time since he beaned Piazza in July 2000 and later threw a jagged bat at him in the World Series.
As part of the overhaul following the third-place finish in 2001, Ventura was dealt to the Yankees while Zeile was traded to the Colorado Rockies. When the reconstruction resulted in a last-place finish, Valentine was fired.
He won his finale as a skipper against the Braves Sept. 29, 2002, when Bobby Cox used pitcher Jung Bong — a rookie who hadn’t appeared for the club since his big league debut more than five months earlier — as a pinch-hitter in an obvious dig at the marijuana scandal that engulfed the Mets over the final weeks of the campaign.
Other than Zeile, who returned to the Mets for his final big league season in 2004, no core member of the 2001 team finished his career with the club.
But despite most of the players growing up outside of the northeast and spending the bulk of their careers in other organizations, the 2001 Mets remain uncommonly bonded to each other and the franchise — linked together by their unique and delicate understanding of the moment 25 years ago.
After 9/11, The 2001 Mets Are Forever Bonded
Zeile, a California native playing for his eighth big league team, was the one who decided to wear the hats of the first responders, over the objection of commissioner Bud Selig and his office, in the first game against the Pirates on Sept. 17.
The homer by Piazza, whose roundabout route to the Mets often left him bemused, cemented his status with the franchise. Well-traveled players such as Zeile, Ventura and Steve Trachsel — the latter two of whom were also California natives — identify themselves as Mets.
Trachsel, who spent his first season with the Mets in 2001, offered the greatest summation I’ve ever heard of trying to put the loss of the Twin Towers into perspective during an interview in September 2002.
“You can’t go and tell somebody, ‘Take that building and take that building and combine them and it’s still not as big as one of the Twin Towers,’” Trachsel said.
The 2001 Mets have always understood the shell of post-9/11 normalcy is just that. As Piazza said about his home run, it doesn’t really have a stop point.
That 9/11 was witnessed by millions in real time made it a uniquely and terribly universal event, one almost impossible NOT to personalize. Yet the loss remains impossible to convey, even when stated as a fact.
“Three thousand people died on that day going to work,” Leiter said.
The 2001 Mets have listened to thousands of stories but never personalized theirs, which are conveyed during the round-numbered commemorations of the attacks — a la this year and in 2021 — as well as via their annual visits to New York City firehouses on and around Sept. 11.
The impact also continues regularly within the franchise’s lineage. Franco, Leiter, Piazza and Zeile were all teammates with David Wright during the latter’s rookie season in 2004. Wright, the son of a retired cop, hosts the Battle of the Badges between the NYPD and the FDNY at Citi Field and attended Thursday’s premiere with his former teammates.
Wright’s last day in a Mets uniform in 2018 was followed by the first day in a Mets uniform for Pete Alonso, who, as a rookie, bought his teammates 9/11-themed cleats for the team’s game against the Arizona Diamondbacks on Sept, 11, 2019.
Those in attendance Thursday spoke hopefully of the next generation of Mets players — some of whom weren’t even born in 2001 and all of whom are too young to have tangible memories of 9/11 — understanding the club’s role within New York in the post-9/11 world.
But the Mets will always get right the passing of the baton forever shared by the 2001 team, whose record could never reflect the importance and impact it continues to make.
“One of the things that I really hold such an affection for this team is the fact that we haven’t forgotten,” Piazza said, “We do have this continual — it’s part of us, it’s part of the Mets, it’s part of our life blood, it’s part of our history.
“And it’s something I don’t ever see this team relinquishing or even fading away.”
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This story was originally published September 13, 2026 at 8:33 AM.