The stories behind baseball's longest game

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Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball's Longest Game

By: Dan Barry

Info: 272 pages; Harper; $28.99

As any disciple of baseball knows, the sport is much more than a game, much more than nine men tossing a ball on an emerald diamond. It is a connection to the divine, a celebration of hometown heroes, a ballad of loss and longing and love. Life encapsulated.

So, it follows that the longest game ever recorded in professional baseball would be rife with untold tales of triumph and tragedy, sorrow and struggle, comedy and competition. Untold, that is, until now.

In "Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball's Longest Game," Dan Barry, the gifted New York Times national columnist, has crafted a meticulously reported, finely embroidered account of the minor league face-off between the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester

In this book cover image released by Harper, "Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball's Longest Game," by Dan Barry is shown. (AP Photo/Harper)

Red Wings.

The game, which began on the cold Saturday evening of April 18, 1981, in the flailing textile town of Pawtucket, R.I., would straggle into the frigid dawn of Easter Sunday before being stopped in the 32nd inning. Two months and one inning later, on June 23, Pawtucket first baseman Dave Koza drove in the winning run to end the marathon match.

Barry does more than simply recount the inning-by-

inning box score. He delves beneath the surface to reconstruct a time and a night that have become part of baseball lore.

Barry writes of the jittery batboy in the dugout, the baseball wife tethered to her husband's dreams of glory, the pitchers milling in the bullpen, the fans lashed by frigid winds in the bleachers, and the future hall-of-famers, never-heard-ofs and whatever-happened-tos on the playing field.

It is a teeming cast of characters as colorful and changeable as a kaleidoscope.

The clubhouse manager named Hood, a fixture in the stadium, who once wheeled the team's dirty uniforms through the streets in shopping carts. The team owner, a poor kid from Woonsocket who hustled his way to riches and raised McCoy Stadium from the depths of disrepair. A father and son who ride out eight cold and dark hours in the stands, holding fast to a pledge never to leave a game "until the last out is recorded."

Then, there are the players. Some went on to become baseball royalty: Wade Boggs, Cal Ripken Jr., Bobby Ojeda. Some faded into obscurity: Drungo Hazewood, Danny Parks and Koza, who never made it to the majors.

Barry's storytelling, like America's national pastime itself, ambles along in a slow, steady cadence that builds and unravels with no thought of a clock. In other words, it is designed to be savored, not sped through.

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