A divide: Maverick or scab?

OAKLAND, Calif. — The biggest burden Eric Chavez faced when he woke up yesterday was his team’s loss to the Detroit Tigers the night before in the first game of the American League Championship Series.

Before he left home, the Oakland Athletics third baseman heard something about a crash in New York. It was, they said, a helicopter.

When Chavez walked into the clubhouse at McAfee Coliseum in the afternoon to prepare for Game 2, he learned it was a small plane and that it had crashed into a building.

Then he learned Cory Lidle, a former teammate with whom he had shared good times, was aboard that plane.

And then neither Chavez nor anybody else wanted to talk about Game 1, Game 2 or any other game in this ALCS.

“It’s kind of unbelievable at this point,” said Chavez, who played with Lidle on the A’s in 2001 and 2002. “It’s going to be so hard to think about the game, but we are going to have to. We get reminded how valuable life is constantly.”

We also get reminded constantly about how imperfect we all are as human beings.

The 34-year-old Lidle, who had just pitched for the New York Yankees in their division series against the Tigers, died yesterday when that small plane inexplicably veered from its path up the East River, turned up 72nd Street in the Upper East Side and crashed into the 30th and 31st floors of a high-rise.

It was not clear whether Lidle, a new pilot, was flying the plane.

The tragedy hit hard in New York, a city still raw from the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center more than five years ago. It also is a city that never will forget the tragedy of Yankees catcher and leader Thurman Munson dying in a small plane crash in 1979 near his home in Canton, Ohio.

The tragedy hit hard, too, in Oakland, where Lidle played for two seasons. The A’s were one of seven teams for which Lidle pitched over the course of his spotty and controversial major league career.

“Cory was a free spirit,” Chavez said. “We got along great when he was here. We hung out a lot. We went to a lot of dinners with him and his wife and me and my wife. … It’s weird.

“It’s tough for everybody in the baseball world, especially somebody that you knew.”

It will be tougher for some than for others because Lidle broke into the game in a way that made him an enemy for life in the eyes of a few players: He was a replacement player for the owners during the 1994-95 strike.

That kept him outside the brotherhood for as long as he played, though it lost at least some of its impact in the clubhouse as the years passed.

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