Bobby Valentine, in stubbornly repeating his position Thursday that the Yankees were absent from New York City in the wounded days following 9/11, issued a challenge to produce photographic evidence of the team participating in a community event.
Here it is.
Yankees beat writer George A. King III chronicled the team’s emotional tour on Sept. 15, 2001, to the Javits Center, the Armory and St. Vincent’s Hospital to visit with rescue workers, injured and families of the missing. The images here show Yankees such as Mariano Rivera, Derek Jeter, Paul O’Neill and manager Joe Torre in solemn moments outside of St. Vincent’s with police officers and others.
Rivera was among the past and present members of the Yankees organization who disputed Valentine’s claims Wednesday – dredged up on the 12th anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center – the Yankees were “AWOL” in the period from Sept. 11 until baseball returned to the city on Sept. 21.
“You couldn’t find a Yankee on the streets of New York City,” the notoriously combustible Valentine, who was manager of the Mets in 2001, said on Wednesday. “You couldn’t find a Yankee down at Ground Zero talking to guys who were working 24/7.”
Yankees president Randy Levine called Valentine’s charge “sad” and “surprising,” and Valentine re-trenched Thursday morning on NBC Sports Radio.
“I was trying to make a fact, that 12 years of hearing what was done and it reported incorrectly, I just thought I’d speak for the record that, that week, there weren’t any Yankees out there,” Valentine said. “And if there were, Mr. Levine can just come up with a photograph of somebody at a firehouse or a funeral or at someone’s house.
“All I remember is people asking for the Yankees and me making excuses for them not being there.”
Valentine and the Mets were the most visible of the New York teams in the aftermath of 9/11. Shea Stadium was set up as a staging area for the relief effort, and Mike Piazza’s eighth-inning home run to beat the Braves at Shea on Sept. 21, in the first sporting event in the city after 9/11, is preserved as an iconic moment in New York lore.
The Yankees donated $1 million to the Twin Towers fund, and Mike Stanton, a veteran reliever on the 2001 team, told The Post’s Mark Hale that the players elected to do most of their outreach away from the public eye.
“The Yankees did plenty as a team,” Stanton said. “The players did a lot of stuff on an individual basis. … We talked about it as players and decided to do it on the down-low.”