Tara Sullivan

Sports Columnist, @Record_Tara

Nick Forde loves baseball. He loves the Mets. He wears No. 5 and plays third base and someday he wants to play in the majors, just like his favorite player.

But no matter whether this 8-year-old boy from Little Ferry realizes his dream, no matter if he traces David Wright’s steps all the way to Citi Field, Wright will never be his baseball hero.

That status belongs to his mom.

Shannon Forde, the longtime public relations executive with the Mets, passed her love for baseball on to her son (as well her 6-year-old daughter Kendall), just as she’d learned it from her dad, Mike Dalton, just as she’d shared it with her sister Alicia and her niece Felicia, just as she taught it to her Irish-born husband, John.

And even as the pain of Shannon’s untimely passing last March from breast cancer weighs over a family that misses her presence every minute of every day, the baseball legacy of a woman who crashed plenty of glass ceilings in her 44 years but never let go of her local roots lives on.

While baseball executives flash their cash at the annual Winter Meetings being held down in Maryland, the best money being spent this week is on Major League Baseball’s fifth-annual charity auction, the sale of once-in-a-lifetime baseball experiences that this year will support the renovation of an existing youth baseball and softball field, as well as youth programming, in Forde’s hometown. The field, located on Little Ferry’s Mehrhof Avenue, will get upgrades to its playing surface, dugouts, protective fencing, benches, perimeter fencing, bleachers, backstop and scoreboard and field signs.

And when that’s all done, it will be renamed “Shannon Forde Field.”

“Actually, we were kind of shocked at the whole thing, Major League Baseball went to the town first, then the town called us,” Shannon’s sister Alicia recalled in a phone call Monday. “It’s actually quite an honor and privilege. If you knew my sister, you know she wouldn’t have liked any of this, that she did not like being the center of attention. But it’s great.

“When Nick found out, he said, ‘That’s so awesome that every time I get up at bat, I can look up at the sign, or the scoreboard and say, ‘This home run is for you.’’”

That Forde is gone is still so hard to accept, certainly for those of us who had the privilege of crossing her path professionally, but mostly for a family that had watched her do so much, so well for all of her life. From turning her St. John’s education into a PR internship with the Mets (inspired to make her Mets fan father proud) to turning that internship into a multi-decade career, from raising her own family with John to organizing everything for the rest of the family too, from arranging birthday parties and holiday dinners to fashioning the best school treats any class mom ever made, there was nothing Shannon couldn’t do.

Except beat cancer, that damn disease that robs too many of us of our loved ones too soon.

“It’s one of those surreal things. She’s not here and I understand she’s not here, but I still go to call her, especially when the Mets do something stupid,” Alicia says, the echo of her sister’s voice and sense of humor impossible to miss. “It’s very upsetting. Especially now, with the holidays. I thought her birthday would be bad, but this is worse.”

The void Shannon leaves behind is enormous. But so too is the effect she had on those around her. That is what this gesture speaks to, what it says about a baseball community intent upon making sure she is remembered, about the men like longtime Mets’ PR chief Jay Horwitz and former Forde colleague Ethan Wilson, who are working tirelessly to promote the auction and drive bidders its way (www.MLB.com/Shannon).

“It was a short life, but a big impact,” Little Ferry mayor Mauro Raguseo said Monday, recalling his friendship with Shannon and her entire family, remembering how he would see her at every town or community event, how she would pull any string she had to help others raise money for causes, how he’d just run into John, Nick and Kendall at the town’s tree lighting ceremony. “She touched so many people. Her kindness, her smile, her perseverance. She was always hopeful, she was a person who gave back in any way she could.

“Sports and her community were so important to her. We believe this is a fitting tribute to remember her. The whole community is so excited. We look at it this way: She left us in March, and she’s still giving, through the generosity of those donating to MLB. She really was an extraordinary person. This will benefit all the kids in town, including her own children.”

“This field is actually sort of on my parents’ corner,” Alicia said. “We grew up playing a lot on this field, we’d have summer rec there, a town-sponsored thing. We spent time there every summer. … The town never really took care of it, the grass overgrew the dirt, and mostly the teams just used it for practice. It’s nice to see it come to fruition and be something nice, something usable for more than practice.”

By spring, Nick, already a seasoned rec and travel baseball pro, and Kendall, who has tried her hand at tee-ball but so far prefers dance class, will run across the same tufts of grass their mom and aunt used to practice on, use the same field where Shannon once organized a group of friends into a softball team managed by her dad, step into the same batter’s box their mom did when she was growing up.

“I see her in them all the time, little things they do that remind me of her,” said Felicia, Alicia’s 27-year-old daughter who has taken on the job of driving Nick and Kendall to school each morning.

“It’s funny, when I’m having a bad day, they’re the ones who give me strength, they’re just happy kids. They have moments, but they’re very happy kids. Nicholas loves to hear things about his mother, and I see his smile, how proud he is that she’s his mother.”

His mother, his hero. Then, now, forever.

E-mail: sullivan@northjersey.com