About book Bottom Of The 33rd LP: Hope, Redemption, And Baseball's Longest Game (2011)
This is an account of the longest game in baseball history, played between Rochester (New York) and Pawtucket (Rhode Island), starting on a Saturday and extending until 4 AM on Easter Sunday, April 18, 1981.It was finally suspended after 32 innings, score tied 2-2. At that point, there were 19 fans left in the stands. The game was resumed two months later to a packed stadium of over 6000 and lasted only one more inning before the winning run was scored. What is there of interest to say about a game that would seem incredibly boring to a lot of baseball fans - 30 innings of scoreless baseball, nothing but goose eggs going up; on the scoreboard? That's the challenge for Barry, and he succeeds well. At the beginning raises the question of why these teams kept playing, hour after hour. Technically, the game should have ended because of a a curfew, but the umpires checked the rule book, and oddly, the page for t hose rules had been omitted, so they felt they had no authority to stop the game. Calls to the league president went unanswered, so everyone just kept going. Barry provides his own philosophical (baseball "philosophy" anyway), answers to the questions of why did you keep playing (players) and why did you stay (the nineteen fans who hung on until 4AM), "Because we are loyal. Because in our own secular way, we are celebrating communion, and resurrection, and possibility." Those qualities are explored further with the players that night who would go on to big league fame, most notably Cal Ripkin Jr. and Wade Boggs , future Hall-of-Famers. But everyone playing baseball was motivated by hope, hope that they would have their shot at major league baseball, money and success, and for most of them, that would only be a dream. A few more years in minor league ball and they would leave baseball forever. And there were the players who had played a few innings in the big leagues before being sent down again, and they waned one more opportunity. For most of them, this was a futile dream as well. This memorable (except that no one knew in advance that it would become memorable) night which went on and on captures this sense of possibilities, one that exists in our heads outside of time, until finally time does comes to a stop, just as it did for Shakespeare's Hotspur. Baseball is one of the sports that does not use a time clock - it proceeds in its own non-clock rhythms. On this evening, Barry speculates that it "morphed into some kind of extravagant performance art, in which the failure to reach climax is the point, in which the repetition of scoreless innings signals the meaninglessness of existence. Then again, maybe it is intended to convey the opposite message; that this is all a celebration of mystery, a reminder that the human condition is complex and unpredictable." For whatever reason, the uniqueness of this game is remembered, enshrined even in the Cooperstown Hall of Fame as one of a kind. The wind blew, the temperatures dropped, the night grew darker, but the game continued, a succession of balls and strikes that amounted to futility - no victory, no defeat. At the end of the book, Barry writes, "this is a book of informed imagination." He tells the facts, not only of the game, but of Pawtucket, an old New England mill town, and in a sense the longest game reflects this place - not quite dead, but culturally light years away from the city of Boston, just 40 miles to the north. Imaginatively, It's America in its unending expectation that victory is at hand - one key hit, one key battle to be won and victory/the great society will be at hand. But instead . . . well, you get 33 endless innings. You'd think an inning by inning account of a thirty-three inning minor league baseball game would be a read for a very small niche of sports aficionados, which would be incorrect. The subtitle: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball's Longest Game clarifies the title, for it a book of hope and redemption set against the backdrop of that game. It reminded me a long forgotten book of baseball stories I read as a baseball playing boy on the Plains of west Dakota. I was lying in bed with a broken ankle, from sliding into a catcher's leg what was bigger than my torso. I hadn't had it x-rayed yet, and it was throbbing the way only a broken ankle can throb. The story was about a washed-up major leaguer reaching, like Gatsby reached for the green light across the bay, for his former fame and glory on the dusty diamonds of eastern Montana. It was the story of such sad longing that it made me turn my head to the wall and cry myself to sleep. I was 13. Baseball was in my blood and in my dreams. This book is about players like that past-his-prime major league shortstop picking ground balls out of Montana dirt and firing it through the haze to the first baseman's outstretched glove. And about 13 year old baseball playing boys of long ago whose dreams of replacing Willie Mays in centerfield spun the windmills of his mind. But I digress. If you happen to be attracted to redemption and hope, and don't care all that much for baseball, this book is for you. You don't have to know or like baseball to be drawn into this book. You might even be moved by the poetry of the centerfielder of the Rochester Red Wings spoken to the cold, windy Rhode Island night as he stands shivering and alone out in the middle of a wide expanse of enemy outfield grass stretching over a former Rhode Island swamp, although it is not exactly fitting to the early, early Easter Morning in which the last 20 or so innings were played.
Do You like book Bottom Of The 33rd LP: Hope, Redemption, And Baseball's Longest Game (2011)?
Funny this book is centered on the one ballpark that I didn't visit while living in Rhode Island....
—vee
A very good baseball book and a very good story.
—pollyann
A really good read for a baseball fan!
—sexyexample
