Zalusky: Josh Paul remembers 9/11: 'Hopefully, I never have to see that again'

The defending 2000 AL Central champion White Sox had just wrapped up a series in Cleveland against the division-leading Indians.

Entering the series 8 games out, the Sox would have kept their waning division hopes alive with a sweep.

The Sox could only manage a split and remained 8 games back heading to New York for a series with the Yankees.

As the team awoke in Manhattan the next morning, all thoughts of games and standings faded into insignificance. They found themselves amid the chaos and panic created by the assault on the World Trade Center.

As Buffalo Grove native and former Sox and Cubs catcher Josh Paul remembers it, the team arrived at the Grand Hyatt at 2 a.m.

Paul, now a Detroit Tigers coach, said in a recent phone interview he was awakened by a phone call from teammate Sandy Alomar Jr.

"He said, 'Turn on the TV.' And I was, like, 'Sandy, it's 8 in the morning.' And he said, 'Just turn on the TV.' And then he hung up. And I did, and obviously we started to watch that day unfold."

He remembers being shuttled in and out of the hotel following the collapse of the Twin Towers.

"All the crazies came out and started calling in bomb threats, so they evacuated the hotel. Then they said, 'No, it's too dangerous outside. You have to get back in.'"

Outside the hotel, he recalls seeing "this giant billow of smoke from a distance."

Paul and his teammates called to assure family members they were safe, dialing directly out of the hotel, since cellular service was impaired.

As the day developed, he said, "New York stopped. There were no cabs. There was no traffic. There was nothing. It was the weirdest thing."

In the early afternoon, Paul was confronted with the sight of people making their way back from downtown.

"They really looked like zombies ... a wave of people covered head to toe in white dust marching north.

"It was traumatic. It messed me up for a long time."

Sept. 11 also brought a personal tragedy, the loss of his friend and former Vanderbilt teammate Mark Hindy, who worked in one of the towers.

"He was one of the most amazing human beings I've ever met. I wish I could meet a whole lot more people like him. I still remember his laugh. It was so contagious and so uncontrolled. Once he got going, you couldn't stop yourself from joining.

"He was working in New York, so when we would come into town (we'd) make it a point to get together."

The Sept. 11 trip would have been one of those occasions.

"His family spent probably at least a week combing all the hospitals and ERs searching for any word of him. It was about a week later we got a call. They said, 'We're going to accept that he's gone.'"

Major League Baseball canceled all games Sept. 11, the first time since D-Day that an entire day of regular-season play was called off.

Associated Press reports recorded the reactions of Sox players and coaches.

Sox coach Art Kusnyer said he looked down Fifth Avenue and stared at a cloud of smoke. "All of a sudden the whole tower just collapsed."

Designated hitter Harold Baines said, "It was like a horror movie. I came downstairs and people were running. I walked to Lexington Avenue and I could see the smoke. It was unbelievable."

"Who cares about baseball? It doesn't mean anything right now," Paul said at the time.

The Sox arranged for two buses to take the team out of New York the next morning.

Paul said he spent the bus ride following the news reports on a transistor radio.

"It was chaos because nobody knew what was going on," he said.

The Sox didn't play another game until Sept. 18, meeting the Yankees at Comiskey Park.

The White Sox returned to New York Oct. 1 and Paul and some teammates visited ground zero.

"That was overwhelming. It was still basically a smoldering ruin at the time," he said.

"You could see through the streets in lower Manhattan almost like a tide line of where the dust went rushing through, like a river. About halfway up the buildings there was white all the way up to a certain line, and then it was a normal building.

"I remember these giant steel beams that held the World Trade Center up. They were bent over in an arch and there were icicles of melted steel hanging down. That's how hot it was.

"The pile of rubble was immense. And there were tractors on it, big yellow Caterpillars starting to pick through from the top. And they looked like small insects on a termite hill somewhere."

Paul says today, "The way I see it, we should never forget and we should come back and touch on this periodically, but we shouldn't dwell on it. We have to move on as a people.

"Hopefully, I never have to see that again."

With the 20th anniversary, he said, it is important to educate people about what happened, especially those who were too young to remember it, but "to dwell on it is really toxic. It's hard to heal if you're dwelling on something. It took me a long time to keep moving on and keep going."