'Just Sadder Than Sad'

"We played golf all the time on the road," the Cardinals' Mark Mulder said. "I know he loved flying. He did it all the time. He just started getting all the hours and stuff recently.

"I feel terrible. I can't imagine what his wife and son feel like. My brother flies a plane just like that. It just goes to show you how quick things can go."

In tragedy, the links to Lidle seemed to span out through the game. One of the Mets coaches, Manny Acta, actually lived in the same building, the red-brick Belaire overlooking the East River, into which Lidle's plane crashed between the 30th and 31st floor. The Mets team doctor had his office on the second floor. Mulder had been in the building for medical treatment and at least one other member of the Cardinals had stayed there at times when in New York.

Acta received so many calls that he simply answered his phone with the words, "I'm fine." "I knew no one was calling about baseball," said Acta, who left the building about 45 minutes before the accident. "You've got to feel sorry for everybody."

Because Munson's death in 1979 still is so painfully recalled by the Yankees, Lidle was quizzed about his passion for flying. "I'm not worried about it. I'm safe up there. I feel very comfortable with my abilities flying an airplane," he told a Philadelphia paper, and he described to a New York reporter how his plane was equipped with a parachute which, Lidle claimed, allowed the plane to "go down slowly" if something went wrong.

In a day, the entertainment of baseball will continue. A rainout of Game 1 of the NLCS accidentally, but appropriately, provided an evening of respect for Lidle. But, long after this day, he will be remembered. Few events in baseball have ever been so completely chilling and bizarre, such a stretch of coincidence, leading to so vivid and appalling an image.

If every person in New York had been asked, in those first minutes when TV pictures flashed of a burning skyscraper with a flame-spewing hole in it in the shape of an airplane, "What caused this?" there might have been 10 million different guesses.

Not one person would have said, "A Yankees pitcher just died."