MILWAUKEE - Baseball commissioner Bud Selig and his wife were in New York last Thursday night, and decided to take a drive through the city after dinner.

"We went to the World Trade Center because I hadn't been there in a while. Now to believe that they don't exist anymore," a stunned Selig said yesterday, slowly shaking his head. "It's beyond human comprehension. There is nothing in any of our backgrounds to even begin to prepare you for this."

With the start of the playoffs only three weeks away, baseball became little more than an afterthought yesterday after terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.