LA Observed contributor Victor Merina checks in from Nashville:

Here in Music City, much of the conversation around town and on sports talk shows this past week revolved around a baseball player from Los Angeles who pitched for a team in New York and who never made it to supper in Nashville.

When his small plane exploded into the side of a Manhattan high-rise last Wednesday, the event made Cory Lidle a worldwide name even as many of us first sighed with the guilty relief that it wasn’t another terrorist attack. Instead, we learned the doomed aircraft belonged to a New York Yankees pitcher who died in the tragedy along with his flying instructor.

The 34-year-old Lidle was raised in West Covina and lived with his wife and young son in Glendora, cities that many people who cannot be bothered with the niceties of California geography find easier to just shorthand as L.A.

But for much of the media here in Nashville, chasing this dramatic story from afar, geography was indeed important because of that much sought-after journalistic twist that can turn a global story of disaster into a close-to-home reminder of personal loss.

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