Absolutely horrible. Thoughts and prayers go out to the Lidle family, tragic thing to have happen. RIP Cory
seriously man, never take anything for granted. anything could happen.. what if derek jeter was on that plane with him the whole world woulda been crying
It's not very good, but it gets the point across. Dwalsh helped me out a bit as I just got my Photoshop back. (Thanks Dwalsh!) If you'd like to use it you can.
Francesa reacts Francesa feels haunted by Lidle interview October 11, 2006, 9:58 PM EDT Mike Francesa understands as well as anyone the rough-and-tumble reality of sports talk radio, where arguments often are just for fun and ratings, and quickly disappear into the ether. Wednesday night, though, as he drove home from Shea Stadium to Long Island after the Mets were rained out, he could not help but think back on one particularly strange, sporadically contentious interview. Click here to find out more! "When you look at it today and you know what happened, you weigh every word, where normally you would just dismiss it as another athlete who was disgruntled," he said. That's certainly what Cory Lidle appeared to be Monday afternoon when he called the popular WFAN show hosted by Francesa and Chris Russo to defend himself. A friend had tipped off Lidle that Francesa and Russo were harshly criticizing him for remarks he made Sunday. The hosts interpreted Lidle as having accused manager Joe Torre of not having the Yankees ready to play against the Tigers; Lidle insisted he is a strong supporter of Torre. For 13 minutes, Lidle, Francesa and Russo awkwardly debated the pitcher's words and intent, the hosts mostly being respectful but persistent and Lidle growing increasing frustrated. It was silly talk radio fodder, but in retrospect two sequences stand out and were difficult for Francesa to shake 3 1/2 hours after he and Russo initially told listeners of Lidle's reported death. The first began with Lidle saying that he was "sitting here trying to enjoy my day in New York" when a friend's text message alerted him to the criticism. Russo's response to that was, "First off, no Yankee fan should enjoy the day in New York ... If I'm a Yankee right now I'm in hiding. I'm not enjoying any day in New York." Lidle: "Hold on. I have friends in and I'm not allowed to go and enjoy this day in New York?" Russo: "I don't know any Yankee fan who's enjoying the day, to be honest with you." Lidle: "I want to win as much as anybody, but what am I supposed to do, go cry in my apartment for the next two weeks?" Russo: "I know a lot of Yankees fans who are doing that, that's for sure." Russo had been critical of Lidle previously, and got into a heated discussion about his merits (or lack thereof) with Yankees general manager Brian Cashman the day after he was acquired from the Phillies. Later in Monday's interview, Lidle told the hosts, "I'd like to meet you sometime and we can sit down and you guys can really get to know me instead of just what you think about me." Said Francesa, "I haven't thought much about you at all, to be honest with you." At the time both exchanges sounded more amusing than insensitive. Not anymore. "If I knew he had two days to live, I would've told him to enjoy himself," Francesa said. "But you can't do interviews that way. No one in the world thinks that way. "And then to think my last words to him were that I don't think about him very much. You just weigh it very differently now." Francesa said he couldn't help thinking of Lidle "not going home to a 6-year-old. Being a father changes your perspective dramatically. You think about not going home to your own son." After the story broke, Francesa, Russo and the staffs of WFAN and YES did a good job switching into news mode. The mood inside their booth at Shea was somber and focused as the rain pelted the field and the grim details poured in. "I don't care if it was sunshine," Francesa said. "We weren't going to back [to talking about] the game at that point."
Michael Kay was busy talking about what the Bankees should do this offseason, however. I guess he wasn't interested in talking about the Mets game or Lidle.
Thats very classy of him, imo, to go to the board and post. To avoid another post, I found this posted on nyyfans: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1110AP_Plane_Crash_Aircraft.html Just absolutely terrible. God bless his family.
http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/columns/story?columnist=schwarz_alan&id=2622245 [size=+2]Recalling a now eerie conversation[/size] You read about these things, you watch some hair-netted nitwit peer into Geraldo's camera and declare, "By golly, I was gonna go in that car with him" ... and you roll your eyes, numb to the tale's banality. Someone was always gonna go in that car with him. Or eat that burger. Or take that plane flight. And then it's you. About three weeks ago, I was talking with Cory Lidle about his newest hobby, flying. My tape recorder was off. Cory and I chatted about a lot of things over the years. Playing poker. Shooting pool. His newest cell phone. We even occasionally talked about baseball. But not that often. Similar ages, similar hobbies; whenever we ran into each other in Oakland or Philly or now in New York, we'd jabber about anything but work. On this afternoon, in the Yankees clubhouse, we started talking about his new Cirrus SR20. "You want to go up with me?" he asked. I was a little flummoxed at the offer but intrigued enough to see if he was serious. He was. "Where do you live?" he asked me, knowing I lived in Manhattan. "Upper East Side," I said. "90th and Third." "Dude" -- Cory was from Southern California -- "you should really come up with me. We can fly right past your apartment building. You've never seen Manhattan 'til you've flown right up the East River. It's beautiful. We can do it one day before a game." He wasn't kidding. Sufficiently convinced -- and, frankly, flattered -- I mentioned how I've always longed for the guts to skydive. But I had a baby boy in May. I will barely roll craps dice, let alone those. "My wife would kill me," I said with a wink. "Small planes, you know." I'd said that a little too flippantly, I guess, because Cory got somewhat serious. "Totally exaggerated," he said. "You only hear about the crashes." Having made his point, he said more lightly, "The kind of plane I have will be safer than the cars on the FDR Drive below us." We got a laugh out of that, because we agreed it was probably true. We talked about flying for maybe another three or four minutes. I distinctly recall being a little befuddled about this East River thing; I asked him why, maybe only 6 or 7 miles from La Guardia Airport, a recreational pilot like himself would be allowed to fly for, essentially, sightseeing. He explained that the Federal Aviation Administration had created zones and procedures to make room for everyone, to create zones where tailwinds from other planes would not be an issue. I'm pretty sure he said it was 4,000 feet. But it was no big deal. I had work to do. He had work to do. "How's this," I said. "We'll play poker sometime." This was actually going to happen. Cory and I had talked about poker quite a bit over the past few years, given how he had run a few charity tournaments for the Make-A-Wish Foundation. We talked strategy, silly my-nut-straight-got-rivered sort of stuff. (Much more fun than my-changeup-got-walloped-by-Pujols.) When Cory got traded back to New York, he said he could use a simple, low-stakes, regular-guy game for an off-night sometime. No ballplayers. Just buddies playing cards. I said my friends and I played every week, and he was more than welcome. He gave me his new cell phone number and joked, "You know my schedule." In the meantime, he asked for a good place to shoot pool. I told him of a few joints close to his place near Times Square but said that Amsterdam Billiards on the Upper West Side was the place to go. Apparently, he took me up on that. A lot. Enough for people there to see what kind of fellow he truly was. "He was just one of the guys," Greg Hunt, the owner of Amsterdam Billiards, told me Wednesday. "He wasn't a big guy -- he was like 5-10, 180 pounds, and he fit right in. We had a lot of matter-of-fact conversations about playing for the Yankees, and it was almost like talking to someone about his day office job. Just normal conversation among guys." Cory came in maybe three or four times a week while the Yankees were in town and took lessons from house pro Tony Robles. "We'd be in the middle of a lesson, and people would come up to him, and he didn't mind," Robles said. "Every time someone stopped and talked to him, he would stop what he was doing and have a conversation. He never said no. He never had a problem with it. That's what was so special about him." (One aside that's important to interject right now -- for all of you surprised at this, who assume that players instinctually bark at every autograph request or public annoyance, shame on you, and shame on us in the press who have apparently painted that picture. Most players are incredibly patient and gracious about their celebrity. Here, too, you only hear about the crashes.) Or, in Lidle's case, when it's horridly late. When I learned this afternoon of a plane having been flown into an Upper East Side apartment building, my synapses exploded like popcorn. First, as with any New Yorker, came 9-11 and then the fact that, until a few years ago, I lived two blocks from that building and knew several businesses below it. (Mike Piazza, in fact, lived across the street.) As it became clear this was not terrorism but simply an accident involving a small plane, I thought, "Man, Cory'll be freaked out." Maybe a half-hour later, a writer friend of mine instant-messaged me that the plane was Cory Lidle's. I figured this was some rumor, but then I remembered our conversation last month, about how he offered to fly me up the East River with him, to see Manhattan from his pilot's eyes. I picked up the phone and called his cell, the same number he'd given me to get him in on our poker game someday. I heard his greeting -- "Hi, this is Cory ... " -- and after the beep left a clumsy message to the effect of, "Hey, I know I'm gonna be well down on your list of people to call, but if you could put me on there somewhere to tell me you're OK, I'd appreciate it. Talk with you soon." I hung up with the increasingly ghastly feeling that I never would. And as the news was confirmed that Cory Lidle -- major-league pitcher, father, husband and, well down the list, my friend -- was dead and that building still was burning 20 blocks south of me, his final words to me about flying wafted by like the sickening smoke. "Tell me if you change your mind," he said about that East River flight. "You can write about it. Would make a cool story." Alan Schwarz is the host of ESPN.com's Baseball Today and the senior writer of Baseball America. His book, "The Numbers Game: Baseball's Lifelong Fascination With Statistics," can be ordered on Alan's Web site.
and this is why you shouldn't be a dick to someone regardless of whether you know they only have 2 days to live or not. that was a rude thing to say, and I hope he regrets it for the rest of his life. perhaps he should think about not only conducting his interviews but himself with a little class. I am sure Lidle felt worse about losing more than any fan, he in fact did have more to lose by any of them considering he was the one playing for a championship instead of watching. fans should consider teating the players as personally as they embrace the team. truly a sad event. I would rather have seen the Yankees win the WS if it would have kept him out of that plane on this day.
a reporter was on Mike & the Mad Dog talking about how he went flying with Cory just recently, and they were talking about doing it again.
CNN, on their homepage, is reporting that they have a video of the actual crash. I can't access it because of the firewall- can anyone else try and open it up?
I'm literally in disbelief that this occured. It happeend, tragically, but still it's hard to believe...It's hard to see something like this, for anybody...Has to be extremely tough on the son and wife, along with the rest of his family... Prayers out to his family.
