On April 15, 2013, the city of Boston changed forever.

That was the Marathon Monday when two brothers detonated pressure cooker bombs full of shrapnel by the finish line on Boylston Street, killing three and injuring hundreds.

For the Red Sox, who play a special mid-morning game each Marathon Monday, the events of the week galvanized the team, and became forever embedded in the DNA of the franchise.

Ten years later, the Boston Herald spoke with five members of the organization about their recollections of that week, from Marathon Monday through the first game back the following Saturday. Here’s Sam Kennedy (team president, CEO), Dr. Charles Steinberg (former executive vice president, current Triple-A WooSox president), Brian O’Halloran (then-assistant general manager, current GM), Tom Caron (NESN sportscaster), and Will Middlebrooks (2013 third baseman, NESN analyst), in their own words:

(Marathon Monday fell on Jackie Robinson Day that year, so the Red Sox were wearing the customary 42 jerseys instead of their own numbers when they played the annual mid-morning game. After beating the Tampa Bay Rays 3-2 on a walk-off by Mike Napoli, they headed out of town for a series in Cleveland. They heard initial reports about an incident at the finish line as they sat on the bus, waiting to go to the airport. The game had ended just after 2 p.m., and the bombs went off before 3 p.m..)

Will Middlebrooks: “It was only my second year in the big leagues, so you always want to be one of the first ones there. And it was cool to be a part of it, because I missed it my rookie year, because I didn’t get called up until May 2. This was my first one.

“It’s just a special day, obviously, because of it being a holiday in the city, how much it means to the people. The baseball game is the second-most important thing going on in the city, but fans still pack the stadium, which is really cool.

“After, we’re sitting on the parked bus, and Twitter is down, phone service is down. A lot of the guys on the team were older, so they had family and friends who went down to the finish line after the game. They couldn’t get in touch with them, and they’re freaking out. Like, (Shane) Victorino was one of the guys trying to get in touch with family. Eventually, they did, but we knew no details.

“It felt wrong leaving. We’re just a baseball team, but it was still home. We’re like, ‘Are we running from this? There was just this eerie feeling on the plane, like, things like that happen but never around you, right? You see it on the news, but you never think it’s going to happen to you or impact you.”

Tom Caron: “After the game, I’m doing the postgame show by Gate D, and all these sirens start. The police motorcycles and cars left the team buses they were supposed to escort to the airport. They told me keep taping, and we just started filling time while we tried to get information and figure out what was going on. And Tim Wakefield had left, so I was doing this alone. When I left Fenway, it was the most surreal thing. When the bombs went off, all of the runners had been stopped, but they knew nothing. They didn’t have radios or anything, they were running. Two runners were so distraught, their husbands were waiting for them at the finish line, and they had no way to communicate and find out if they were okay, so I gave them a ride. And I drove as close to the finish line as I could, and I thought, ‘what the hell am I doing?”

Brian O’Halloran: “I had my two older kids with me that day, and it was an amazing game. The details are fuzzy now, but it was a great win, and then I ended up taking the kids down to Kenmore Square to watch the marathon runners go by. All of a sudden I started getting texts and alerts about something that had happened at the finish line, so we came back in and I was nervous as I learned about it, like to protect my kids from it. I wanted to understand what happened first, so I could explain it to them.”

Sam Kennedy: “Marathon Monday has always been the most important day of the year, you circle it on the calendar. It was always a day of celebration and partying, and really celebrating Boston as one of the coolest, most important cities on the planet.

“I can tell you exactly where I was when the bombs went off. I was in the basement of Game On! (restaurant and bar) with a bunch of friends from Major League Baseball, a bunch of colleagues. There’s so much pressure on Opening Day, with everything getting prepared for the year, so Marathon Monday is sort of a day to kind of enjoy, and pretend like we don’t work for the club, just have a great day, take our credentials off, and have a good time.

“Then, all of a sudden the TV’s started to turn to like, local news outlets, and I remember Bob Bowman, who was president of Major League Baseball at the time, hit me on the shoulder and he’s like, ‘You need to get out of here. You need to go upstairs, something’s wrong.’ He knew immediately that this was not an accident. And everything changed, you know from that moment.”

Charles Steinberg: “April 15 was an exceptionally beautiful spring day, on the warmer side. The surprising play of the team continued with a walk-off win that day, followed by Kids Run The Bases. And thank goodness we had kids running the bases, because it kept about 1,000 people in the ballpark longer than they would have been. They might have gone to the finish line.

“I was sitting in the empty seats on the third base side by the dugout, watching the children go up the aisle, to gauge the happiness and excitement on their faces. As I walked up to the red door to go to my office, I turned and looked at the field, and I remember noticing that it was 2:47 p.m. I noted that, because my elementary school’s number in Baltimore was 247. By the time we get back to the office, the TV’s are on with news reports that something had just happened. The news of the fire at the JFK Library, combined with the bombs at the marathon, led us to initially believe that Fenway could be targeted.”

(The Red Sox were in Cleveland, but back in Boston, the organization had to figure out what would happen at the end of the week, when they returned to begin a homestand on Friday, April 19. And they had no idea if or when law enforcement would find the bombers.)

SK: “My wife and kids were away for school vacation week, so I was alone. I drove into Fenway each morning that week, and there’s literally no one on the road. On the Mass Pike!
I showed up at 4 Jersey Street, and there’s (former Red Sox director of security) Charlie Celucci, literally with a gun. I’d never seen Charlie with a gun before, but he’s a former Boston cop.”

TC: “We did pregame shows for Cleveland, and those are always the surreal moments. You’re trying to find the line between normalcy for those who need an escape, and on the other hand, you can’t ignore what’s going on. The 617 jersey in the dugout sort of galvanized the whole thing for us.”

WM: “The series in Cleveland, we were kind of like, let’s play ball for Boston. Let’s give them something to watch.”

SK: “One of the things that we always try to do at Fenway is make sure we’re secure and safe. We’re a hard target, so we have snipers on the roof, we have metal detectors, we have bomb-sniffing dogs. Really, that started in the sports industry post 9/11. You’re always on guard. But we felt vulnerable.”

SK: “My memory was Will Middlebrooks tweeting ‘Boston Strong,’ but I don’t know if he started that.”

CS: “During this weekly meeting, I doodled a ‘B’ and the word ‘Strong.’ While the team was in Cleveland, Will Middlebrooks had hashtagged Boston Strong on Twitter, and it soared. I imagined a Boston ‘B’ in red with ‘Strong’ in white, and a sea of blue behind it, with the double meaning of ‘B Strong.’ I showed the drawing, and we all knew that the phrase ‘Boston Strong’ might stick. We could sense that.

But you can’t just create a logo, it has to be approved by MLB, and that can take months. Right after the meeting, Sam Kennedy went into a superior mode of focused attention, with phone calls to MLB officials, in which he cut six months of process into about four hours. Sam was remarkable. And because he got the approval for the ‘B Strong’ logo, the Twins Enterprises and Bobby D’Angelo could start making the products the next day. By the end of the year, those products exceeded $2 million for the One Fund. Sam’s work was really heroic.”

WM: “I fired out a tweet and hashtagged ‘Boston Strong,’ and it was just kind of one of those things. But I’m not going to take credit for that, a lot of people said it.”

(When the FBI released the brothers’ names, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev went on a crime spree that included killing Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier, and kidnapping a man who was able to escape about an hour later and alert the authorities. A car chase and shootout ensued in Watertown, with the terrorists detonating another bomb and other homemade explosives. As they ran out of ammunition, the younger brother ran over his sibling with the stolen car, killing him.)

CS: “By Thursday night, I was working late at Fenway with Sarah (McKenna) and we were in a writing groove. We wanted to focus on the street heroes, ordinary folks who suddenly reacted heroically, as well as law enforcement, nurses and doctors, first responders, as well as marathon runners who kept right on running to the hospitals. We wanted everybody who’d been part of it to be a part of this.
“Sarah was aggressively reading stories online about a fellow from Lynn, someone from Lowell, and the heroic things ordinary people had done, and we began writing people into the ceremony and calling them to invite them to be a part of it. Then she heard that an MIT police officer had been killed, but we didn’t connect it to the bomb, and then all hell broke loose outside our windows. It was a surreal scene; sedate Brookline Avenue, quiet without a game going on at the ballpark, was roaring.”

TC: “We did the postgame show at the NESN studios in Watertown, and then one of our producers hears something on the police scanner. We wondered if it was connected to the bombing, but we didn’t want to jump to conclusions, so I finally said that we should go home, because it was going to be an emotional weekend at Fenway. And within that hour, everything that happened was essentially on the other side of our parking lot, the car chase, pipe bombs, boat, right around our studios, and I had no idea because I’d gone home and gone to bed. I woke up the next morning and my phone had a million texts.”

WM: “We’re coming back to Boston after that series, and we get wind of all this (expletive) going down at MIT as we’re getting on the plane. Someone, I don’t remember who it was, had the idea to pull up the police scanners on the internet, right? And we were listening to the police scanners on the plane. You look around the plane and there were groups of like, 10 together, listening to the police scanner on someone’s phone, or laptop.”

(With the Boston and Watertown areas under orders to shelter in place, the Red Sox had to postpone Friday night’s series opener. That evening, a Watertown resident found the suspect hiding on his boat, under a tarp, and law enforcement was able to arrest him.)

WM: “I was sitting in my house in Southie, watching SWAT on the streets.”

CS: “I got a call from the mayor’s office around 3 in the morning, telling me that we were unlikely to play the first game Friday night, and we woke up Friday morning to the news that we were to shelter in place.
“That was another beautiful, exceptionally warm day, but no one was on the street, no cars, no businesses open. I lived about three blocks from Fenway then, and by early afternoon, I apologize for any violation (of the shelter-in-place order), but I walked up the street to Fenway. I felt at home there. Other colleagues had done the same, and it was from Fenway that we worked through the day and past midnight.
“We announced in the early afternoon that we wouldn’t have a game. We coordinated with the city and the Boston Bruins, who were also postponing. Around 6, we got the call that we could resume our lives, but the killer was still on the loose. I spoke to Larry (Lucchino) and I said, ‘I’m concerned, we’re having 35,000 people over for lunch tomorrow – meaning a day game – and there’s a killer on the loose.
“About an hour later, they announced that he’d been captured, and that’s what launched a remarkable merry-go-round of emotions. There was relief that he’d been caught, there was triumph for law enforcement, yet you had to go back to the sadness of those whom we’d lost and who’d been affected. But yet, you also found this strength in the triumph. The emotions were swirling.”

SK: “I have vivid memories of talking to the governor and mayor and them both saying, ‘We need you. We need you guys. We have to begin healing. (Mayor) Menino was just incredible. I remember, he was like, ‘We’re playing. We’re not letting [the terrorists] shut the city down, because we need sports. We need a distraction.
“I’ve been fortunate to work in other markets, I travel around the country with this job, there’s nowhere – certainly nowhere in America – where sports matter more than they do here. Whether it’s the Patriots, the Bruins, Celtics, Revolution, the Red Sox, we’re such a tight knit community. And when something threatens to take that away from us, it really upsets people.”

(On Saturday, April 20, the Red Sox played their first home game since Marathon Monday, wearing special jerseys, and with a pre-game ceremony that instantly became legendary.)

WM: “I found out about the ‘Boston’ jerseys when I walked into the clubhouse. But everything we did from that point on was for the city, and not for the Red Sox, so it made sense. They didn’t have our names on the back, our home jerseys never do, but even more so, it was like Boston was the only thing that mattered.
“But something that was hard for me to grasp was people telling us players ‘Thank you.’ Law enforcement, first responders thanking us for playing baseball. It took me a while to really grasp what that meant. I know, it’s Boston. I know it’s a sports town. I know, city of champions. I know how important sports are here. I had no idea how important it was for us to play that day until things started and I saw fans, adult men, crying in the stands.”

BOH: “After everything that happened, we were really starting to understand our place in this and how we could help heal, and get back to playing, bring a sense of normalcy and positivity while remaining solemn about what had happened, what we had lost. You always want to win games, you know, but I think that day, there was definitely a feeling that we wanted to put our best foot forward on behalf of the city.”

TC: “It was so powerful, you could not make this up. As the group of first responders stood on the first base line, the clouds separated and the sun came out. God parted the heavens, and the sun was shining on the first responders, who were smiling, probably for the first time in days. And I remember saying on the air, ‘It feels like Boston can breathe again.”

SK: I just remember, the governor, the mayor, the Watertown police chief, the Boston police commissioner, everyone being recognized. At that moment, it was like, this is so much more than a baseball game. Fenway, yes, it’s a ballpark, but it’s the ultimate community-gathering place. We all have our own family stories and connections, and you just feel like you’re stepping out of the real world and into this magical place. I think that’s why our sports venues are so important, but especially Fenway.”

[David Ortiz had been rehabbing an injury, and wasn’t with the team to start the season. The Red Sox first activated him for Saturday’s game, before which he took the field and made a heartfelt, empowering speech, including the ‘F-bomb’ Steinberg and his colleagues had expected.]

CS: “Our staff had gathered in the office (before the game), and I was troubled that the heaviness of the ceremony would be incongruent with the festivity of playing a baseball game. My words were, ‘We need an elbow, we need something to change the mood from the ceremony to be ready to play baseball.’ I asked my colleagues, what if we asked David Ortiz to speak? They told me, ‘If you ask David Ortiz to speak, he’s liable to drop an F-bomb.’ I said, ‘You think so?’ and they said, ‘We know so.’
“Sarah goes down the hall and sees Larry and says, ‘Charles wants David Ortiz to speak,’ and Larry says, ‘I was thinking the same thing.’ She said, ‘He’s liable to drop an ‘F-bomb.’ and he said that we should do it anyway.

SK: “I just remember Sarah McKenna telling me the night before, ‘We got the right guy’ for tomorrow’s ceremony.
“I remember thinking, I am so glad he said that, but my mom is not going to be happy. As it turned out, my mom was just fine with it.”

CS: “I think my first thoughts were, ‘Oh my god what did he just say?’ Still, we were shocked but not surprised. But David Ortiz’s most famous line ought not overshadow the follow up the following line, ‘And nobody’s gonna dictate our freedom.’ And how did he finish it? Two words: Stay strong. And with that fist, clenched in the air, with the American flag as a backdrop, David Ortiz, to me, was our statue of unity. Later that day, I heard that the FCC had tweeted about not fining for the swearing.”

BOH: “I was like, good for him, he spoke from the heart. He said it how he needed to be said, and it fit the situation. The crowd reaction, and the reaction in general, to it tells you everything you need to know. That fit the situation, that fit with our city, with our fans, with the larger population. And it also fit David Ortiz, and who he is. It fired me up, I was like, that is perfect. And of course, it’s perfect. It’s David Ortiz.
“I’m not sure how much I took note of it at the time, but it’s definitely clear now, as you look back on it. He was always a larger-than-life figure in Boston ever since 2004, but that was more on the field, obviously, as a person in that community and in the clubhouse and all that, but this was something different, no doubt.”

TC: “David does his thing, and you know, to drop the F-boomb, only David could. That day, he becomes larger than life.”

WM: “We take the field, so emotional, tears in our eyes. It was such an emotional speech, and like, he was choking back tears. We know how important he is, not just to Boston, but to baseball, sports. He transcends Boston sports.
“But when he said it, we didn’t even flinch. We were locked in. But I was more nervous to start that game than I’ve ever been for any game ever. It felt like the biggest game of my life that day, more than my MLB debut. We all felt that way, though, because we knew how important it was. It wasn’t scared, it was just we knew the importance of it. It felt more important than any game I’ve ever played. More important than any World Series.
It was like, losing is not an option. I know baseball is a sport where you lose a ton of games, that’s just part of playing 162, percentages are against you. Not today. Not today. We have to win, we don’t have a choice. And then Nava came up with the biggest hit of his life, ever. People forget that the first hit of his career had been a first-pitch grand slam, and there’s maybe a handful of people in all of baseball history that did that. But what he did in this game was even bigger.”