33 innings and a scorecard of stories to tell
BOTTOM OF THE 33RD:
Hope Redemption, and Baseball’s Longest Game
By Dan Barry
Harper, 255 pp., illustrated, $26.99
Proustian ruminations on time are well served by baseball, where clocks are only minimally useful as innings and outs replace hours and minutes as the primary measures of progress. It is perhaps no surprise then that the best baseball writing tends to feature rococo prose, with rangy metaphors. Dan Barry, a national columnist for The New York Times, writes himself into that tradition with his dissection of the longest game in professional baseball history, a Triple A contest between the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings, a Baltimore Orioles farm team, that began on Holy Saturday in 1981, and became lost in the Rhode Island night.
The April 18 game featured two future Hall of Famers —Wade Boggs of the PawSox and Cal Ripken Jr. for the Wings — but Barry focuses not on these two, but on all of the players here, lodged as they are in the purgatorio of baseball’s minor leagues. And so we learn more about the life journey of Pawtucket slugger Dave Koza — arguably the book’s central character — a classic ’tweener who never made it to Fenway, but who nonetheless garnered a piece of baseball immortality in one of the most surreal games ever played.
A gusting, baseball-swatting wind, and plummeting temperatures conspire to stem any offensive attacks. A rulebook copy-editing error results in the omission of a passage that stipulates for a curfew. A literalist umpire insists on continuing play, deep into Easter morning, with dawn approaching. And just as each batter knows that “one at-bat could last forever, with foul ball after foul ball spinning into infinity, like the never-ending decimal measure of pi,’’ some of the players start to wonder whether they’ve left the space-time continuum entirely, while 19 hard-core fans look on.
The action of the game itself centered on a handful of bang-bang plays, so Barry extends this tale beyond the ballfield. “Bottom of the 33rd’’ is replete with character studies and mini-biographies that reveal just how difficult it is to make it to this level of baseball, a level where no player is content to remain. A certain levity is required if one is to succeed in this most difficult game of hitting a round object with a club, and as any baseball literature buff will tell you, the sport’s history is packed with cutups. Barry delights in his account of Pawtucket reliever Win Remmerswaal, a classic baseball clown in the style of throwbacks like Rabbit Maranville and Dizzy Dean, who probably would have confounded even the Marx Brothers. In another instance, a pitcher who has completed his duties is driven home, only to be scolded and refused at the door by his wife, who believes he has been stepping out around town, given the lateness of the hour. And so he returns to McCoy Stadium, and a baseball game that might as well go on forever.
Some of Barry’s metaphors get away from him (we probably don’t need a base runner as a potential “sliding exclamation point that ends this epic sentence of a ball game’’), but he has a way of making you care about these players and their daunting quest to become big leaguers, even if just for one at-bat. For all of the shenanigans we encounter — pitchers burning bats in oil drums to stay warm, outfielders chanting curses between pitches — “Bottom of the 33rd’’ is an opera seria with tragic overtones. Reader and player, in their different places in time, know that the bus stops here for most of these guys. And yet, there is something essential and almost holy in being sufficiently duty bound to see an otherwise meaningless Triple A game through to its conclusion. A religious man might liken it to true faith, while a baseball secularist is apt to doff his cap to that same purity of purpose that marks our earliest sandlot adventures.
Colin Fleming recently completed a story collection and can be reached at flemingcolin@comcast.net.
