Bottom of the 33rd

by Dan Barry

  Here, in the International League, you have hungry former major leaguers like Jim Umbarger. You have stars of the lower minor leagues, the sluggers who dominated bandboxes, now facing battle-savvy pitchers eager to demonstrate how a big-league curveball, their good friend Uncle Charlie, can reduce a .300 batting average in Double-A to a .200 average in Triple-A. You have athletes who have always been the best in their county, their state, suddenly realizing that the teammate using the adjacent locker has something extra, something nearly imperceptible, that they lack.

  You have hard-luck players, the hopelessly misunderstood. No one on the field tonight has surer hands, for example, than the Rochester shortstop, Bobby Bonner, whose jutting ears only enhance an aura that says nothing gets by him. Although not a strong hitter, he has the gift: that extra sense of baseball anticipation that cannot be taught.

  A couple of years ago, Bonner turned his life over to Jesus Christ, snuffing out the fire of his hell-raising Texas ways and startling teammates who remembered a guy not unfamiliar with a postgame beer or joint. Before tonight’s game, in addition to stretching and throwing, Bonner knelt in the bathroom and prayed: Lord, just let me see you in the stands tonight; let me play for you. Where was Jesus, though, when Bonner finally got his big chance last year, and was called up to play for the Baltimore Orioles and its holy terror of a manager, Earl Weaver? Where was Jesus when a certain ball hit the artificial turf in Toronto and skipped past Bonner like a skimming stone—earning him an error, the profane and everlasting wrath of Weaver, and a return to the minors? Was this all part of the Lord’s plan?

  Another thing Bobby Bonner wonders: Does his brief major-league visit mean that he will be nothing more than a “cup of coffee” guy? Among the strivers and strugglers in the Triple-A, you also have men whose boyhood dreams have been reduced to the near-desperate desire for a mere cameo in the major leagues—as a September call-up, perhaps, when major-league rosters are expanded to rest veterans and assess minor-league talent, or maybe as a temporary replacement for an injured player, whose pulled hamstring or twisted ankle is the answer to certain lower-league prayers.

  After they retire, these marginal players will forever describe themselves as having had a cup of coffee in the major leagues, without even time enough to stir in the milk. At their best they were barely adequate, their names destined to become answers to trivia questions almost too trivial to pose. But in this self-description, they send the subtle but proud signal that at least they made it, their names recorded for posterity in the Baseball Encyclopedia.

  At least they made it. Consider how many of us have played on sandlots and in league games since the formal organization of baseball in 1871; how many of us have conceived of action on imagined fields while following a game on the radio; have watched afternoon World Series games on televisions wheeled into the classrooms of similarly afflicted teachers; have sat so deep in the bleachers that the players are but white blurs moving across a green expanse; have thrown a spongy ball into a box painted on the side of a school building and heard the thump against brick as an umpire’s “Strike three!” have, alone, in the post-supper twilight, thrown a ball into the sun-washed sky, again and again and again, the game-saving catches coming over fences and hedges and hoods of cars now inexplicably parked in the outfield of Yankee Stadium. The crowd goes wild, and a parent inquires what in the world are you up to, and the answer is nothing. To say you want to play in the major leagues someday is to jinx yourself. Hope is an intimate matter.

  Imagine, then, how many have dreamed of playing in the major leagues, if only as a backup to the backup catcher in the bullpen. Hundreds of thousands? Millions? Yet by the end of the 1980 season, just twelve thousand men had ever realized that dream. Twelve thousand; their bodies and ghosts would not fill a third of Fenway Park.

  So glimpse now over the shoulder of Bill George, the official scorer, at his masterpiece in progress. Stop randomly at any name and try to divine that player’s future based on how well he has played on this long, long night. Pause here, for example, to read the string of symbols that tell the game story of Pawtucket’s third baseman, Wade Boggs. Four hits in twelve at bats so far, same as Koza, only with one double instead of two. This twenty-two-year-old bundle of superstition, a curious incarnation of a Southern-gentleman jock, is said to be nothing more than a Punch-and-Judy hitter, when what you want from your third baseman is power. Right? And look at the unimpressive performance of Rochester’s tall, movie-star-handsome third baseman, with eyes an almost otherworldly blue. True, the Baltimore organization sees this twenty-year-old as the Oriole third baseman of the future. But in tonight’s endurance-testing game, does his subpar performance—eleven outs, two walks, and a single—begin to cast doubt on those big plans? Does this ballplayer, this Cal Ripken Jr., have what it takes to play at the Triple-A level, much less in the major leagues?

  In the cold-night concentration of balls, strikes, and what will become of us, Jim Umbarger, the Rochester pitcher who has been to the majors and wants to get back, waits for the next batter, Dave Koza, the Pawtucket first baseman who never has been and can only imagine. Here in the lost world of deep extra innings, every at bat is the alpha and the omega: One swing could both end and begin this thing. One out. One swing.

  “There’s a ground ball that might get through there. Eaton over after it, got it, nice play, throw to first base! In time!”

  Batting for the thirteenth time in the game, Dave Koza has just made the second out in the bottom of the 31st inning. To anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of the national pastime, this sentence appears to have at least two typographical errors. Thirteenth at bat? Thirty-first inning? Yet both are true. What’s more, there still exists the possibility, even the expectation, that Dave Koza will have another chance.

  Could happen. Because something is certainly happening here in Pawtucket. Something wondrously strange.

  “Two outs in the thirty-first. Umbarger, the pitch—shot foul in the left field stands. The count goes to oh and two, to Wade Boggs, the third baseman for Pawtucket….

  “No balls and two strikes to Boggs. Here’s the pitch. There’s a fly ball to center field. That should be in there for a base hit. Drops in front of Dallas Williams and the Red Sox have a runner at first.”

  But the wondrously strange something happening here is in addition to baseball—besides baseball. It is something just beyond the articulation of those few still in the ballpark, as though this modest piece of Pawtucket broke free of time’s restraints with the first pitch at eight o’clock last night to become a community apart, afloat, unrelated now to anything beyond the ballpark’s lights.

  Someone not here tonight could pose quite legitimate questions to the players and fans, questions that would naturally start with why. Why did you keep playing? Why did you stay? At two o’clock in the morning, and then at three o’clock, why didn’t you just—leave? The official answer, that some umpire refused to call it a night, would be so lacking in the weight of common sense that it might twirl off like a deflating balloon before the sentence could be finished. But the truer answer might be as unsatisfying to the outsider as it is surprising to these inhabitants of this in-between place, where time’s boundaries have blurred.

  Why did you keep playing? Why did you stay?

  Because we are bound by duty. Because we aspire to greater things. Because we are loyal. Because, in our own secular way, we are celebrating communion, and resurrection, and possibility.

  Here now is the earnest, skinny batboy, nicknamed “Panic,” whose single mother, frantic since the turn of midnight, has already driven to the ballpark and demanded that he come home immediately. But his friends, his surrogate fathers, are engaged in something historic, and a small piece of it belongs to him. He retrieves tossed baseball bats with the same implacable sense of duty as everyone else. He will not go.

  Here, too, is the home plate umpire, with red hair as fiery as his desire to become a major-league umpire someday. H
e works in the off-season at any job that will allow him leave in March so that he can earn lousy pay, sleep in plastic-cup motels, and be part of the game until September: a fan without fealty, an arbiter, the last word. He doesn’t know it, but his family in Massachusetts has been calling area hospitals and police departments, looking for him and his young nephew, who is struggling to remain awake somewhere in the stands. The two of them should have been home hours ago.

  And here, scattered among the stadium’s mostly empty pews, are the last straggling congregants, a few of them steeled by champagne and chocolate Easter eggs, courtesy of a fan who left and returned with treats appropriate to the occasion. These are the McCoy regulars, the constant presence, who will still be here in the seasons to come, long after the players on the field have moved on: a father and his nine-yearold son; a young man who came alone; another whose girlfriend left hours ago. When services began nearly eight hours ago, 1,740 sat in attendance; now there are maybe 19—a number that does not include the few police officers who have radioed one another about an early-morning disturbance off South Bend Street, and who are now watching from the edges of the light.

  And here, along the third-base line, in a rudimentary VIP box of blue-painted particleboard, sits the stocky owner of the Pawtucket Red Sox, a poor boy from Woonsocket who made a fortune propping up and selling broken textile mills, including one in Pawtucket, not far from here. Four years ago, he bought and rescued this baseball franchise, which had been so poorly run that many in Rhode Island refused to do business with it, let alone bring their families to watch. The owner is unhappy; he thinks this crazy game should have been suspended hours ago. But there is nothing he can do but brave the wind, take a sip from a bottle of Chivas dug out of a drawer, and pass it on.

  On to his general manager. On to his communications director. On to some of the wind-whipped wives of the players. To Ann Koza, the newlywed wife of the Pawtucket first baseman, who has given over a good part of herself to the major-league dreams of her husband, Dave. That dream is their child, sharing their small apartment on Pond Street, not a quarter mile from McCoy Stadium, and buckled into their car as they drive the 1,900 miles back to his hometown of Torrington, Wyoming, at the end of every season. Some 770 miles on Interstate 90, followed by nearly 900 more on Interstate 80, in a silver Oldsmobile Toronado packed with their luggage and that dream, a precious thing growing more fragile by the day. They make the trip every September, because every September the small clutch of Pawtucket players summoned to Boston once again does not include Dave. On these days-long drives home, Dave’s brooding silence and wounded expansiveness combine to pose a single plaintive question: Why, Ann? Why?

  Ann doesn’t know the answer. But she has faith in her husband, and she tells him so. She accompanies him to Torrington, a place many hundreds of miles removed from her childhood home in Pennsylvania coal country, and works in a sugar beet factory, sharpening the knives that slice the beets. Then, at the start of each season, she returns with him to Pawtucket, a place even more foreign than Torrington, and takes whatever job she can find—including a stint in one of the last Pawtucket mills, where she developed a thick callus on her pinkie from the repetitive task of removing the thread that bound big sheets of lace. She is twenty-three, with large, expressive eyes, long blond hair, and a lack of pretense that draws others to her. She roller skates to the ballpark; she drinks beer; she knows what it’s like to work in a mill. And she is devoted to her Dave. In letters she writes to his family back in Torrington, and in words she whispers to him at night, Ann Koza reassures: It will be all right.

  The errant priest of the night is Joe Morgan, the manager of the Pawtucket Red Sox, technically absent. He was ejected by the home plate umpire back in the 22nd inning, after arguing a call with glorious invective that resounded through the bare and cavernous stadium like a profane Gregorian chant.

  Morgan’s ruddy countenance conveys an almost amused intelligence that seems to say: Yeah, I’m fifty years old and still wearing a baseball uniform—but I’m happier than you are, pal. He was an infielder and outfielder whose thirteen long years in the minors were interrupted only occasionally by stints in the major leagues. When his playing days ended, he took up professions that followed the seasons: coaching and managing in the spring and summer; driving trucks and plowing snow on the Massachusetts Turnpike in the fall and winter. He has been managing in Pawtucket for seven years now. Nearly time to move on.

  Fans in the International League’s eight cities are quite familiar with Morgan of Pawtucket. They know, for example, how much he enjoys theatrical argument. In disputing a close play at second base, he may very well pause in mid-quarrel, take several steps back, and slide into second base to illustrate his point. Such antics might leave some with the impression that he is another Max Patkin, the droopy-faced baseball clown who travels the minor-league circuit in a sack of a uniform that features no number on the back—only a huge question mark. But Joe Morgan is the opposite of a baseball fool. He knows the game’s obscure rules and philosophical intentions, its wise men and buffoons, its rhythms. He knows, too, who has major-league ability and who does not. And if asked, he is always candid. Son, you might want to start thinking about the next step in life. This might be interpreted as ruthless, but Morgan doesn’t see it that way. Some players need to hear aloud what they have been privately thinking and fearing. When a player has leveled out in Triple-A, he needs to hear the truth. His wife and young kids need for him to hear the truth. Blunt honesty can free families from baseball limbo, nudging them on.

  Joe Morgan may have been kicked out of tonight’s game, but he has not left. He is monitoring the proceedings through a break in a forest green plywood divider, a few yards behind home plate. From here he sees all—the players, the umpires, the fans, everyone whose life now centers around a baseball game being played at three thirty on Easter Sunday morning—but does he know all? Does he know what will happen to Dave and Ann Koza? Or whether the home plate umpire will ever make it to the major leagues? Will Bobby Bonner ever be forgiven for that cheap error in Toronto? Does this Ripken have what it takes to last? Does Boggs? How about that father and his son in the stands? And the anxious batboy?

  Damn. The wind keeps blowing infield dust through the hole, right into the ejected manager’s searching eye.

  “There’s the pitch. Popped up. On the infield. The shortstop, Bob Bonner, calling for it. It’s hung up in the wind! And—Bonner makes the catch for the final out. The wind played tricks with it again, but Bonner was underneath it to make the catch for the final out. For Pawtucket, no runs, one hit, no errors, one runner left on base.

  “At the end of thirty-one innings, here in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, this history-making ball game, the longest game ever played in the history of organized baseball, both minor league and major league. At the end of thirty-one innings, it’s Rochester two, Pawtucket two.

  “Well, we start another inning here in Pawtucket. Inning number thirty-two….”

  INNINGS 1 TO 9

  Pawtucket Red Sox

  At last.

  A pitcher from Alabama you’ve probably never heard of, his blue cap struggling to contain his curly brown hair, his five long years in the minors leading him to this throw, the next of thousands more toward the major leagues he will never reach, rocks back, half pirouettes, and surrenders the baseball to the indifferent night. It cuts some sixty feet of Pawtucket, slices past a batter from Oklahoma who already senses being out of his depth, and smacks into the mitt of a catcher from Massachusetts who will someday hit a home run in an unforgettable World Series. The crack of ball hitting leather echoes like a champagne bottle’s uncorked pop.

  “Strike,” the umpire calls at 8:02, and we’ve got us a game, at last.

  We nearly didn’t. For a while, the antiquated light towers that stand sentry just beyond McCoy Stadium’s outfield wall of pun-riddled advertisements (shop at Anderson-Little for “Clothes That Make A Hit”) refused to share their blessi
ngs of illumination. The game—one of the night’s many expressions of devotion—came perilously close to being postponed for, of all reasons, darkness.

  Elsewhere in Pawtucket, people gathered at dinner tables set for the Passover Seder to recall the Exodus from Egypt and to listen, once again, as a child asked why tonight is different from all other nights. Others filed into the dimness of Catholic churches built by their mill-grunt immigrant forebears (St. Joseph for the Irish, St. Maria Goretti for the Italian, St. Jean-Baptiste for the French Canadian) to light the tapers of their modest candles with the paschal flame, signaling the end of solemnity, the beginning of joy. Beneath spires that have long competed with textile mill stacks for the New England sky above and the Pawtucket people below, believers, for the first time in forty days, exhaled hallelujah.

  And here, in this more secular house of worship called McCoy, denizens adhered just as rigorously to the ritual of preparation, all for the Holy Saturday event spelled out on white rectangular tickets stamped with the sacred seal of two red socks: a Triple-A baseball game between the Red Wings of Rochester, New York, and the home team, the Red Sox of Pawtucket, Rhode Island. April 18, 1981. Seven thirty p.m.

  But those four towers of light initially declined to cooperate. First, left center went dark, then right center, in a kind of baseball SOS that sent one front-office employee searching for maintenance and another scampering up to the press box to explain the delay, the two of them like panicked cathedral sextons. They knew how many people had worked to snatch from the everyday madness the pacifying, mesmerizing wonder that is a baseball game. They knew, too, that 1,740 fans were settled now into their foldout seats, awaiting escape.

  Think of it: all the myriad endeavors combining to conjure the illusion that a baseball game just happened to break out one night in Pawtucket. The concession workers along the open-air concourse, heating popcorn in the glass-fronted machines that envelop the giant horseshoe of wooden seats with a buttery perfume, summoning memories of happy childhoods that never were. The ticket-office workers at the stadium’s entrance, dispensing ducats in a booth crammed with maintenance equipment reeking of gasoline, where an entire wall is lined with slotted boxes containing $3 reserved tickets for the 72 home games of the 1981 season, along with spools of $2 general-admission tickets hanging from nails. (Feed money into the small mouth beneath the glass window and a ticket appears, like a thrust tongue.) The three Pawtucket police officers, patrolling the open-air concourse for the extra dough that comes from working a McCoy detail, freed by spring’s arrival to shed their heavy winter coats for light, Class A uniforms of navy blue, offset by Sam Browne belts with the leather strap running diagonally over their right shoulders. The grounds crew, manicuring the field, kneading the clay around the pitcher’s mound into hump perfection, running a taut piece of string from the foul poles to home plate and laying the lines of white lime that distinguish fair from foul. The diamond cutters.