COMMENTARY : Bomb’s Terror Reaches Spring Training

Kelly Stinnett, out of Lawton, Okla., had not made the trip to Fort Lauderdale for the Mets-Yankees game. He had stayed up in Port St. Lucie, working out with the other players the Mets left behind on this day, knowing he would start for the Mets against the Dodgers the next day in Vero Beach. Stinnett came off the field at about 11:30 Wednesday (April 19) morning, feeling pretty good about everything, back playing ball again after the long and bitter strike. He is 25 and coming off the year when he proved he belongs in the big leagues.

A lot of the Mets’ regulars had made the trip to Fort Lauderdale. But some, outfielder David Segui included, had not. When Stinnett, the Mets’ backup catcher, came into the clubhouse at Thomas J. White Stadium, Segui was in a large group of players standing in front of the television set in equipment manager Charlie Samuels’ office. Stinnett was struck by how quiet the office was. This was spring training, and everybody’s work was done, and the rest of the day was wide open.

Whatever was on television, there should have been more noise.

“What’s everybody watching?” Stinnett said.

“CNN,” someone said.

Nothing unusual there. That set is tuned to CNN all the time. No one turned around, though. Stinnett still couldn’t see the television screen.

Finally, Segui said, “They just bombed Oklahoma City.”

Stinnett grew up an hour from Oklahoma City. His grandparents, Walter and Fern Mabrey, live there. His best friend, Steve Johnson, is a rookie cop on the Oklahoma City force.

“Yeah, right,” he said.

Segui quietly said, “Check it out.”

Kelly Stinnett looked up at the screen and saw what everyone was starting to see from Oklahoma City at about that same hour Wednesday morning. He saw pictures he had seen before on CNN, but from places like Beirut or Baghdad or Bosnia. This was a corner of the world he considered safe. This was home.

“When you’re from Oklahoma,” he said, “you feel like the whole state is home.”

He still had his catcher’s mitt in his hand. He said, “How many dead?”

“A lot,” one of the other players said. Stinnett couldn’t tell whose voice it was. He was staring at the screen with the rest of them. It looked as if a war had broken out at the Alfred P. Murrah Building. In Oklahoma City, Okla. Stinnett comes from Oklahoma. In those first moments Wednesday morning, he thought the same thing a lot of people thought: These things aren’t supposed to happen there.

As if there is some logic, or road map, or geographic order, to madness.

“I know it doesn’t make any sense,” he was saying Thursday morning before the Mets made the bus trip up to Vero Beach. “I mean, I know we’ve got an Air Force base around there, an Army base. I actually used to think we’d be well protected if anybody ever tried anything in Oklahoma, like you could ever be protected from something like this. But there’s a bigger part of me thinking, ‘Hey, we’re a state of farmers and cowboys and just plain good old boys. How could this have happened to ?’ ”

Stinnett doesn’t remember how long he stood in front of the television set in the Mets’ clubhouse, still dripping with sweat after a good, hard morning of baseball in the Florida sun. He thinks it could have been as long as a half-hour. Watching the horrible pictures that came from half-a-country away. Pictures that came from somewhere else. Now they came from an hour from the mechanic’s shop where his father, Johnny, works in Lawton, 10 minutes from Walter and Fern Mabrey’s house at the southern end of Oklahoma City.

“I know I’m prejudiced, but I’ve always thought Oklahoma was the best place to be from,” he said. “Whenever I’m done playing ball, it’s where I plan to live the rest of my life. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.”

There was irony for Stinnett when people talked about this sort of terrorism finding its way to a place like Oklahoma City, which seemed to become the unofficial capital of the American heartland Wednesday morning. As if madness belongs only in the big cities of the world. A bomb at the World Trade Center, New York City. Poison gas in the Tokyo subway system.

“Oklahoma City has always been the big city for me,” Kelly Stinnett said. “It’s always been city. Where I come from, if you said you were going to the city, you didn’t have to explain where you meant.”

He went to one of the clubhouse phones and tried to call his grandparents. He was not worried that they were in the Alfred P. Murrah Building, or near it, when the hideous bomb, 1,000 pounds of it at least, went off. His grandmother is retired, his grandfather is semi-retired. Stinnett still wanted to hear their voices. But there were calls coming to Oklahoma City from everywhere at this hour, and all the circuits were busy. He could not get through. He would keep trying throughout the afternoon and into the night. When he finally got a call to ring through, no one answered.

Thursday, Stinnett said, “I know my grandparents. When I couldn’t get through to them last night, I figured they were off somewhere giving blood.”

Later, sitting in his hotel room, watching one of the reports on television, Stinnett saw someone he recognized, a cop named Casey, being attended to by doctors. “He didn’t seem to be hurt too bad,” Stinnett said. “But somehow seeing a familiar face, it made the whole thing hit even closer to home. He was in his officer’s uniform and everything. So he must have been in the area when it happened.”

Kelly Stinnett said, “It must have been a heck of a bomb.”

On Wednesday, he stood in spring training, in a baseball place, and looked at pictures from home that were snapshots from hell.

“It’s a shame that it takes something like this to put everything in perspective,” he said. “You know, all during the strike, people sometimes sounded as if a baseball strike was some kind of tragedy. Then something like this happens, not just to innocent people just showing up for work in the morning, but innocent children who never knew what hit them, who never had a chance ... “

The words drifted off, between baseball and home.

“You know you’ll never think about things quite the same way ever again,” Stinnett said. “You can’t even think the same way about home.”