This story by Bill Ladson was excerpted from Anthony DiComo's Mets Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- Shannon Forde passed away 10 years ago this month following a 3 1/2-year battle with breast cancer. She may be gone, but her legacy is alive and well in Mets Nation.
Forde’s 22-year career with the team took her from intern to senior director of public relations, and her work with the team was recognized at Madison Square Garden on Tuesday night, when St. John’s University, her alma mater, presented her family with a basketball jersey during the game against Georgetown. Former Mets reliever John Franco, an SJU alum, was in attendance to present the jersey to the family, which included Forde's mother, Debbe Dalton.
“It’s very wonderful of them to do,” Dalton said about the school. “She loved going there. She always had some kind of connection with the university. … She was an overachiever.”
Forde's connections in baseball will be forever linked to the Mets. Her work ethic was second to none, according to her boss, Jay Horwitz, who is currently the team’s historian and vice president of alumni relations. Not even cancer could stop her from doing the job she loved during her final years.
“People talked about how she worked four years with cancer, but she also raised two kids, commuting back and forth from New Jersey by car, working long hours and doing a tough job [in media relations],” Horwitz said. “She was basically the editor of the team’s yearbook and the press guide. She was great at her job.”
Horwitz pointed out that Forde was a trailblazer. When she started working in baseball in 1994, there weren’t many women in media relations. But she became a pro’s pro. She built great professional relationships with Mets players such as Franco, Mike Piazza and David Wright.
“She gravitated towards me because she genuinely cared and wanted to help me become the best player that I could be, and her way of doing that was to make me feel comfortable in the clubhouse and with the media,” Wright said. “She realized that I was going to need some help organizing my daily routine.
“The friendship was completely different. She would send me recommendations on where to live and eat. She would send a subtle text after a bad game where she said, ‘Keep your head up. Get them tomorrow.’ There were so many stories where Shannon fell under during my time in New York. She was incredibly helpful from Day 1.”
Forde also was willing to confront a player when he didn’t complete his media obligations, according to Horwitz. One day in the 1990s, former Mets catcher Todd Hundley was supposed to do a live interview with New York sportscaster Scott Clark but was a no show. Forde went to the locker room and saw Hundley playing a card game with his teammates. She broke up the card game and “yanked him” onto the field to do the interview.
“Shannon was not afraid,” Horwitz said. “In our jobs, the public relations person has the owners, media, players and the front office to deal with. She got along with everybody.”
While she took her job seriously, Forde was known to have a great sense of humor. Wright saw her at her best when he arrived early to the ballpark.
“Some of my best memories that I have of Shannon is that we would be cracking jokes for 20 or 30 minutes before everyone [arrived] in the locker room,” he remembered. “She was incredibly funny and witty. You have been in a locker room where locker-room talk is not for the faint of heart, and she could keep up with all of us. She could take it but give it back.”
It’s been a decade since Forde passed away, but Mets broadcaster Ron Darling will never forget the energy she brought to the Mets.
“As I get older, my life is going really fast right now. I know intellectually, it’s been 10 years, but, emotionally, it seems like 10 days,” he said. “It’s always a sad thing when special people are taken away from you prematurely, but her legacy lives on in so many different ways, whether it’s St. John’s or the ball field at Citi Field.”