The Mets were in their hotel rooms in Pittsburgh getting ready to face the Pirates when they began getting calls and seeing the news of the gruesome terrorist attack in lower Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001.
"I was told about the first plane during a phone call, so I hadn't turned on the TV yet to see what was happening," John Franco told me during an interview in 2013. "I called my wife, Rose, and watched the news with her, she was home, and I was speechless, we just couldn't believe what we were seeing."
Franco, who grew up in New York and is the son of NYC sanitation worker, said he was friends with firefighters and people who worked and died in the buildings that day.