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Field restoration a fitting tribute to Forde
- Updated: December 26, 2016
LITTLE FERRY, N.J. — There is an unmarked softball diamond near the southeastern tip of this tiny New Jersey borough where, past the deepest edge of left-center field, the Empire State Building rises over a lake. Scan right and One World Trade Center becomes visible, peeking out from behind a tangle of fallen trees and tufted underbrush.
This time of year, the field is a bed of mud and ice, squishing and crunching beneath those who trudge across it. It’s a neighborhood park; as children, Shannon Forde and Alicia Dalton Reilly would make the short trip here for summer recreation activities. As adults, the sisters formed a women’s softball team. Practices were twice a week — “my dad was serious with that,” Dalton Reilly recalls, laughing. The women won five consecutive championships at their peak.
Ask Dalton Reilly, and she cannot tell you the park’s actual name. Once upon a time, additional softball diamonds lived here, before borough officials constructed a modern soccer turf field and roller hockey rink over the excess. Now, across a parking lot from those luxuries, a single diamond sits mostly unused in the shadow of Manhattan’s skyline.
It is here that Major League Baseball plans to funnel the $235,000 it raised through a league-wide auction, using those funds to construct protective fencing and benches, perimeter fencing, bleachers, a new backstop, a scoreboard and other field markers. Money not spent on the groundbreaking will go toward establishing youth programming at the site. This is a massive project and a dear one to the Mets, who lost Forde, their beloved longtime public relations staffer, to breast cancer last March. When MLB is finished, it will dedicate the field in Forde’s name.
Consider this the latest, grandest tribute of many to a woman who spent her life giving without much fanfare. It was only in the years following Forde’s diagnosis that Dalton Reilly gained a full appreciation of her sister’s reputation within …
