Continuing honors keep memory of ballplayer alive
Just days after Yankee pitcher Cory Lidle’s small plane crashed into a Manhattan apartment tower, his hometown of West Covina swung into action to honor him.
He had grown up playing Little League in this baseball-loving city of 115,000, which has produced at least a dozen other professional baseball players. Besides Lidle, they include his childhood friend, South Hills High School teammate and fellow Yankee Jason Giambi.
This week, six months after the 34-year-old pitcher and his flight instructor were killed instantly in the Oct. 11 crash, the West Covina City Council approved its most enduring memorial: a $100,000 bronze statue of Lidle. His likeness will be in a striped Yankee uniform, with the athlete captured doing what he loved: throwing a pitch.
“I think he would love it,” said Dave Bletcher, 53, of West Covina, former Little League coach to Cory and twin Kevin Lidle, whom he met when they were 9.
“It’s all been pretty amazing,” said Melanie Lidle, 34, Cory’s widow, who remains in the couple’s Glendora home with their 6-year-old son, Christopher. “The statue will be the fourth thing the city has done.”
West Covina Councilman Steve Herfert said the Yankees have indicated that they have no problem with a bronze version of the team’s uniform.
San Antonio artist Don Hunt, was notified Wednesday that the council had approved the funds for the statue, which will take six months to finish, Herfert said.
Hunt, whose other works include the bronze bust of Dallas Cowboys Coach Tom Landry at the football team’s headquarters, had submitted a rendering and model of the Lidle statue for the council, which approved the design and funding Tuesday night by a 4-0 vote. (The mayor was absent.)
The half-ton statue will stand 8 feet tall and is to be completed by Oct. 1, Herfert said. The cost will be paid from a public art fund the city created with fees on new development in West Covina.
The sculpture will get the premier location for a city that prides itself on its baseball heritage: It will anchor the Big League Dreams Sports Park set to open Oct. 15 on half of a 100-acre site that was formerly a landfill. A Home Depot and Target will go on the other half.
Each outfield will replicate the appearance of a famous stadium, including Fenway Park and Wrigley Field. The batter can experience what it might look and feel like to smack a homer out into Fenway’s Green Monster, said Mayor Michael Touhey.
Lidle would probably have loved that, his friends said.
“After the plane crash, it really touched our community,” said Chris Freeland, assistant to the West Covina city manager and a fan who has visited 30 American baseball parks. “The statue was our way of saying, ‘How can we give back to his family?’ ”
The planned sculpture is only the latest of several memorials or events in or involving West Covina to honor Lidle since the crash.
In October, more than 1,000 mourners attended his West Covina memorial service. Just weeks later, there was Lidle’s namesake celebrity poker tournament in Las Vegas over Thanksgiving weekend, which city officials attended and which raised thousands of dollars for the Make-a-Wish Foundation, said Bletcher and Melanie Lidle.
Sports tournaments around town have also raised money for charities in the athlete’s name.
In addition to the statue, the city is naming one of three streets around the ballpark Lidle Way. (The others will be named after Tom Brunansky, another West Covina baseball player who went pro, and Giambi.)
Bletcher said the National Transportation Safety Board just days ago gave Melanie Lidle photographs from a camera found in the plane that showed the Statue of Liberty and Manhattan skyline. The cause of the crash, and which man was piloting the aircraft at the time, have not been determined. No other injuries were reported in the crash.
The NTSB investigation found that neither Lidle nor his flight instructor, Tyler Stanger, 26, of Walnut, had drugs or alcohol in his system. Lidle was a licensed pilot and a friend of his instructor, Bletcher said.
On Monday, Bletcher was with Lidle’s son and widow, the athlete’s twin, his parents and others as the Yankees honored Lidle during opening-day ceremonies marking the start of the 2007 baseball season.
The black bands on players’ arms that day will be worn all season in Lidle’s memory. His locker will remain unused, Bletcher said.
In an emotional pregame ceremony that had veteran ballplayers wiping their eyes, the team announcer introduced “No. 30” as if Lidle were about to trot out onto the pitching mound one last time.
Wearing Yankee blue caps, Melanie and Christopher threw out ceremonial first pitches -- both of them strikes -- and the sellout crowd gave them a standing ovation.
Even though Lidle had played for several teams, including the Oakland A’s and the Philadelphia Phillies, and was on the road during the baseball season, he and Melanie were set to build a custom home in West Covina, where they had met in middle school.
Theirs was a friendship that lasted past graduation from South Hills High and bloomed into romance two years after that, she said Thursday.
The move to West Covina has not been canceled, but for now, mother and son are remaining at the Glendora home, where the kindergartner is most secure.
But Christopher has started Little League, and it is, of course, in nearby West Covina.
“Where else would he play?” Bletcher said.