On the Saturday before Easter in April, 1981, the Rochester Red Wings, Triple-A affiliate of the Baltimore Orioles, took on the Pawtucket Red Sox, Triple-A affiliate of guess who, in an early-season game of little to no importance. Like all minor league games, it featured a few future star players, a few players who used to be big leaguers, and a lot of guys who never really made it. There were less than 2,000 fans present at the start, which was delayed by a power failure in the stadium’s floodlights. The game was not on TV or local radio, with just the Rochester broadcast providing proof to anyone outside the ballpark that the game was happening at all.
The game, seemingly predestined to fall into obscurity immediately upon conclusion, avoided obscurity simply by not concluding. Tied at 1-1 through nine innings, the teams played on, and on, and on. Many assumed that the game would end with a curfew at around 1am, as had been the case in previous seasons, but the umpires were insistent that their rulebook contained no provision for a curfew and the game had to continue. The drama became a farce when Rochester scored in the 21st inning, only for Pawtucket to tie it up in their half, sending the game to the 22nd inning. The game continued through 32 innings before the league commissioner finally found out what was going on and forced the game to halt, at a little past 4am, eight hours after play had started.
The teams picked back up the next time Rochester was in town, in June. By then, the legend of the longest professional baseball game ever played had grown to the point that the whole country was watching. Six thousand fans and dozens of members of the national sporting press showed up. It didn’t hurt that the Major League players were on strike at the time, and fans were starved for baseball. As one more cosmic joke, the restarted game wrapped up in just one inning, requiring only 18 minutes to play.
Thirty years after the game, author Dan Barry takes a look at what happened that night and how it impacted the lives of all the men involved. He takes a wide-ranging approach, talking not just to players and coaches, but to the clubhouse attendants, batboys, umpires, scorekeepers, radio announcers, and the hearty few fans who stuck it out to the end. It’s a fascinating snapshot of humanity. The people who, for one reason or another, found themselves stuck in the vortex of the longest game ever played, came from all over the world, from many different backgrounds, and came to many disparate conclusions. Barry does an excellent job at capturing their humanity.
Barry spends some time on the game’s future stars, but baseball fans are already well aware of what became of Rochester third baseman Cal Ripken, Jr. and Pawtucket third baseman Wade Boggs. He shines more in catching the reader up on the rest of the game’s participants. There’s the Dutch pitcher Wim Remmerswaal, who can breakdown the science that makes flight possible but can’t understand that when the coach tells him the team bus is leaving at 8 o’clock, that means he has to be on the bus at 8 o’clock. Or pitcher Bruce Hurst, a do-gooder future World Series star whose Mormonism keeps his teammates at a remove. Rochester shortstop Bobby Bonner is haunted by a groundball he misplayed in a brief callup to Baltimore, a play he swears turned the major league club against him and stalled his career. Then there’s Rochester centerfielder Dallas Williams, a child of a family full of gospel singers from Harlem, who set a ignominious record by going 0-13 in the game.
Barry’s chief protagonist is Dave Koza, who sort of epitomizes the triumph and travail of minor league baseball. A slugging first baseman with a dependable glove, Koza seems like exactly the kind of player any baseball team would want. Except that a weakness for swinging and missing at breaking pitches has made him unsuitable for a role in the highest league. It’s a tough blow for a young man who happens to be the best ballplayer in the history of his hometown Torrington, Wyoming. Dave’s wife Ann, who loves him desperately and knows how much it would mean for him to get a callup to Boston, is one of the few who lasted the whole game in the stands, dying to see her husband get the big hit to finally end it.
Though Barry is giving to the occasional burst of purplish prose, engaging in the kind of overwrought romanticizing endemic to baseball writers, on the whole he does a good job using what is really just a historical oddity as a window on life. There are dozens of memorable anecdotes and unforgettable stories, even from players you’ve never heard of and those behind the scenes.