Quake rattles Mets, Yankees and stadiums

Nick Swisher was watching television in his 21st-floor apartment in Manhattan with his wife and a friend when the set started shimmying across the floor.

"I wasn't nervous, I was just like, 'This is not right,' " said the Yankees outfielder, who played in Oakland for four years but hadn't experienced an earthquake. "My TV is moving in my living room and I'm not touching it," he said. "It was nuts. It was crazy."

That unsettling sense of the unfamiliar affected tens of thousands of people, including players, sports fans, managers and front-office personnel, from the East Coast to the Midwest Tuesday, as the tremors from a 5.8-magnitude earthquake in Virginia at 1:51 p.m. rattled buildings -- and nerves. The temblor struck half a mile deep and was centered near Mineral, Va., in Louisa County, about 90 miles southwest of Washington.

In Philadelphia, Mets infielder Justin Turner was in a taxi en route to Citizens Bank Park when the cab started shaking at a red light. "I thought the driver was pumping the brakes," Turner said, "I was like, 'What are you doing, man?' "

At the Jets' practice facility in Florham Park, N.J., general manager Mike Tannenbaum initially misunderstood the rumblings.

"I was at my desk and usually when the building shakes, Rex is laughing," Tannenbaum said. "That was my first instinct . . . But I looked in the hallway and there must have been 50 people lined up and everyone was kind of like, 'Was that really an earthquake?' . . . There were no visible signs of damage. But it was kind of surreal."

Those familiar with quakes understood immediately, and their thoughts shifted to potential damage. Mets manager Terry Collins, who managed the Angels, for example.

"I had had been in a few, out in Southern California," he said, "so we were having lunch when the building started shaking, and I just said, 'This is an earthquake.' The issue is my house [in Midlothian, Va.] is 20 miles from the epicenter of that thing, so I've been trying to find out if it's cracked in half or not."

The tremors halted the New Haven Open during the third game of a match between Serbia's Jelena Jankovic and Russia's Elena Vesnina. The umpire stopped play and the stadium on the Yale campus was evacuated. The start of the Washington Nationals' game against the Arizona Diamondbacks was delayed 20 minutes. The Nationals had delayed opening the gates to check the stadium for damage before letting fans in. The gates were opened at 6:40 p.m., 25 minutes before the scheduled start.

At Progressive Field in Cleveland, when the Seattle Mariners were batting in the fourth inning, the press box moved left and right for about 30 seconds, but play was not interrupted. At Yankee Stadium, an engineering examination found "nothing irregular" with the ballpark's structure, team spokesman Jason Zillo said.

Athletics pitcher Rich Harden, who grew up in Victoria, British Columbia, where schools stage earthquake drills, said he was on the team bus in midtown headed to the stadium when he noticed something odd.

"I saw all these people out on the sidewalks, and I knew something was up," said Harden, who spent seven seasons in the Bay Area. "I never imagined it was an earthquake; I mean, it's New York. But maybe that's me: As a kid, I slept through them."

With staff writers Rod Boone, David Lennon, Anthony Rieber and AP