"I was watching TV and saw something, but I never really paid attention to it," said the Red Sox first baseman last night from his home in Orlando, Fla. "I kept going about my business, and then my agent, Mike Fischlin, called me."

Suddenly, Pena's priorities changed.

Fischlin was relaying the news that Cory Lidle, a teammate of Pena on the 2002 Oakland A's, was involved in the accident strewn across news channels up and down the dial.

The 34-year-old pitcher, who most recently played for the New York Yankees, had been in the Cirrus SR20 single-engine airplane which flew into the 30th and 31st floors of a high-rise on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

The news had a dramatic affect on Pena, not to mention the rest of the baseball world.

"I immediately talked to a couple of teammates of mine who were also teammates of his," said Pena, who not only had joined Lidle in Oakland, but was also a member of the Yankees organization with him during the first two weeks of August. "Guys who were with him just a couple of days ago ... how do you feel? It's so tough. It really hits home when it's a guy you play with and have common friends. It's just such a really sad story. All of baseball is in mourning."

Across the country another member of the '06 Red Sox, Ken Huckaby, was coming to grips with similar emotions. Except the catcher's relationship with Lidle stretched further back than most.

"Everything is kind of spinning right now," said Huckaby when reached at his Arizona home. "I've known him for 15 years."

Huckaby first met Lidle after the two were represented by the same agent in 1991, their first year in professional baseball. Huckaby was a Northern California guy, while Lidle came from the Los Angeles area, where he was high school teammates with Yankees first baseman Jason Giambi and former Red Sox short-timer Shawn Wooten.

After the '91 season, Huckaby had gone down to Lidle's hometown of Covina, where he met up with Cory and his twin brother, Kevin, who was ultimately drafted in 1992 by the Detroit Tigers.

"After that first year in rookie ball, we were going around to look for a batting cage so his brother and I could hit," Huckaby remembered of his first time hanging out with Lidle. "He was really confident about everything he did."

Huckaby and Lidle would go their separate ways, although not far enough to break ties completely. They were finally reunited in 2003 when both played for the Toronto Blue Jays, Lidle's lone year in the organization.

"We had a great time that year," Huckaby remembered. "He was a lot of fun to be with ... a lot of fun to be with.

"They said on TV he touched a lot of people, but it's true. We've known each other for 15 years, and we could have gone three or four years, see each other again, and fall right back into the place where we were before."

Huckaby fully expected that another one of those get-togethers wouldn't be far away.

He had no way of knowing as he worked out at his area gym that Lidle, just 15 minutes after a 2:30 p.m. takeoff from New Jersey's Teterboro Airport, was sending out a distress call just before crashing into the same apartment complex which housed New York Mets coaches Manny Acta and Rick Peterson (Lidle's former pitching coach in Oakland).

"I was kind of watching it in the gym, then came home and started playing with my kids when my agent called me and said, 'Are you watching the news?'" Huckaby said. "He said, 'It's Cory Lidle!' I couldn't believe it. I absolutely could not believe it.

"I was not thinking for a minute that it is going to be anybody you know. When I saw it on TV, I thought it was exactly what was happening, an accident. It didn't look like it was enough damage to be a terrorist attack. Then it just shocked me to find out who it was."

While Huckaby continued to contemplate the tragedy last night, he realized the circumstances reached even closer to home.

"The thing about it was that I told my wife I had wanted to (learn to fly airplanes)," he said. "Now I'm definitely not going to."

Toronto third base coach Brian Butterfield, whose sister, Valerie, lives in Londonderry, N.H., conveyed the sentiments of many players and coaches who suited up with Lidle, saying, "He always had a smile on his face for me, that's how I'll remember him."

As the news poured in yesterday - including the fact that Lidle's wife, Melanie, and 6-year-old son, Christopher, had to be informed of the tragedy upon stepping off their cross-country flight yesterday - emotions built, along with the memories.

One of baseball's own had been lost.

"He was such a great teammate and a great guy," Pena said. "I've played with so many different teams, but I remember him well because of how nice a guy he was. It's just so sad."