Bottom of the 33rd

by Dan Barry

  So, no. The umpire is wrong. Shy Billy Broadbent was, and is, very, very bright.

  But Broadbent will not smile when he remembers his only ejection from a baseball game, even if Ben Mondor and Mike Tamburro and Lou Schwechheimer and Bob Ojeda and so many others continue to tell the story with humor and affection. He will never take pride in his role, nor forget how livid his mother was upon hearing of his brief insolence. In fact, for years after, while working as a clubhouse manager in Pawtucket, he will share a sanitized version of his story with many of the wide-eyed teenagers working their first baseball jobs at McCoy.

  Its lesson: Be careful with your trust.

  Tonight, as he avoids his mother, Billy knows that his manufactured ejection last year at least had the intended effect of making him more mature. And it is true; he is much more assured this year. He is sixteen now. He weighs 115 pounds, up 15 pounds from last year, thanks to some off-season weightlifting. And when Dave Koza throws the practice ball toward the dugout before the start of every inning, Billy catches it with confidence.

  Broadbent rifles a throw to first—in time!

  “I hope you’re still with us,” the broadcaster Bob Drew says to the night, a note of desperation in his voice. “And if you are still with us, drop a postcard or letter to the Rochester Red Wings, Post Office Box—no post office box—the Rochester Red Wings, 500 Norton Street, Rochester, New York 14621.

  “Tell us that you were listening on this historic night, as the Red Wings and the Pawtucket Red Sox break a record for the longest game ever played in the International League. As happened here last night into this morning, on this Easter morning, as we are going into the bottom of the twenty-fourth inning. You let us know that you stayed with us all the way through by sending us a postcard or a letter and we’ll send you two tickets to a future Red Wing game. Just for sticking with us.”

  Who, exactly, is sticking with them? Who, exactly, cares that this game is now the longest in International League history, surpassing some Rochester–Jersey City contest back in 1950?

  Here is another question: Is this even a baseball game anymore? Maybe it has morphed into some kind of extravagant form of 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 the performance is intended to convey the opposite message: That this is all a celebration of mystery, a divine reminder that the human condition is too complex and unpredictable, so enjoy this party while you can. Shake off the chill by dancing to “The Candy Man” and “Thank God I’m a Country Boy,” two of the songs looping over and over on the stadium’s sound system. Take a sip of the champagne that one of the fans has smuggled back into the stadium, along with a few chocolate Easter eggs. Treat yourself to whatever you want from the only concession stand still open, courtesy of the house.

  The game’s halo glow is now attracting the strays of the night, from an insomniac walking his dog to a couple of cops tired of patrolling Pawtucket in its slumber. Somewhere in the stadium’s bowels, a man suddenly appears beside Joe Morgan, the ejected but ever-present Pawtucket manager, who is peering through that private window of his behind the backstop. Drawn like a moth to the ballpark’s brightness, the stranger has entered through the unguarded doors of the stadium with an ease that would impress none of the neighborhood kids, who routinely break into McCoy to collect the old baseballs on the roof. He has walked through a second set of unlocked doors and down a narrow hall, past rakes and bags of lime, to identify himself to Morgan as a doctor at Memorial Hospital, fresh from having delivered a baby, and he has a question: What’s going on here?

  Morgan explains that a baseball game is being played—a game now in the twenty-something inning. The doctor does not believe him. So Morgan steps aside and invites the man to see for himself.

  Yep. A baseball game.

  The two men take turns sharing the view through Morgan’s magical portal.

  Pitching for Pawtucket now is Joel Finch, a tall right-hander who is blessed in the knowledge that once this season ends, barring some extraordinary development, he will return to his home state of Indiana to create a life disconnected from professional baseball, the pursuit that has dominated most of his years. He is twenty-four, and his head is spinning.

  Just two years ago, during a road trip to Toledo, Joe Morgan called Finch to his hotel room and said the words every minor-league ballplayer yearns to hear: You’re going up. Suddenly, Finch was staying in the best hotels in cities across the country, having his bag carried, being given the VIP treatment wherever he went—so much so that he began to feel guilty. With memories of Pawtucket, and less modest Bristol, and Elmira, oh, Elmira, fresh in his mind, he found all this luxury to be unfair. It was reward enough just to be in the major leagues!

  Before Finch could catch his breath, he was being summoned from the bullpen—immediately after the warm-up catcher had candidly and unhelpfully told him, “You’ve got nothing”—to pitch in front of twenty-six thousand people on a June night in Kansas City. He pitched 5 innings, gave up no runs and just two hits, and struck out two—including the great George Brett, caught looking.

  If only some of his other games had gone as well. That loss against Tommy John in Yankee Stadium, when he surrendered a home run to Reggie Jackson. That second game of a doubleheader in Cleveland, when he allowed eight hits before being pulled in the 4th inning. And that game against the Toronto Blue Jays in Fenway Park, at the very end of the 1979 season. He was winning the game, 3–1, going into the 8th inning, but gave up a triple to the leadoff batter, Alfredo Griffin, the American League co–rookie of the year.

  And Joel Finch, just plain rookie, was yanked, forever, from major-league baseball.

  That was almost nineteen months ago. Since then, Finch could tell that he had lost both some speed off his fastball and the support of his employer. An injury or two hadn’t helped. This spring, he had barely made the Pawtucket team, and he knew that his only hope was to dazzle and be traded, neither of which seems likely. Just two years ago, he would run out to the mound, convinced, absolutely convinced, that he was about to win another ball game. Now, inconsistency has replaced that confidence. He’s throwing harder to make up for his lost velocity, a counterproductive mind-set. He’s married. And he is thinking, more and more, about Indiana.

  His life seems as complicated as the first inning he pitches tonight, the top of the 23rd. Bobby Bonner singles off his first pitch. Dave Huppert lays down a sacrifice bunt, sending Bonner to second base. Eaton rockets a ground ball to third base, but Boggs makes a nice stop to hold Bonner at second and throw Eaton out at first. And poor Dallas Williams grounds out to second; he is 0 for 10.

  Meanwhile, now pitching for Rochester, the gangly left-hander Jim Umbarger, who some 10 innings earlier was being razzed by his punch-drunk teammates for wearing a warm but silly outfit that made him look like a lanky Dr. Seuss character. That silliness is shed the moment he is summoned into the game; this is his life, his future. An introspective man, he thinks that every step in his professional life, every success and every failure, every injury and every front-office encounter, pleasant or otherwise, has led to this very moment on this mound, a mound so chewed up after 22 innings that he has decided to pitch from the stretch. In other words, no windup. Just stand there and throw. Fastball, curveball, slider. Throw.

  Umbarger grew up in Southern California. His father was an aerospace engineer, his mother a homemaker who struggled with her health. After starring as a pitcher for Arizona State University, he signed with the Texas Rangers in 1974 for $15,000 in cash and a $7,500 sweetener, and embarked upon a life of baseball. He pitched one year in the minor leagues, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where the setting sun at the ancient, wooden Wahconah Park shone into the eyes of batters and where the players’ showers had six inches of standing water. The next year he made the leap to the majors, playing for the Texas Rangers and its genius madman of a manager, Billy Martin.
He pitched in relief on Opening Day, and induced the first batter he faced—Rod Carew, the hitting virtuoso and future member of the Hall of Fame—to ground out.

  Umbarger played for four years in the major leagues, pitching for Texas and the Oakland A’s and then Texas again. But he had trouble with his arm and trouble with some of his superiors, including one who supposedly bet that Umbarger would not make the 1978 Rangers (a bet the man lost). Other health problems followed, including a bout with a debilitating viral illness, and soon Umbarger was paying the minor-league dues he bypassed at the beginning of his career, in Tucson, and Tulsa, and Charleston, and, now, Rochester. His struggle to return to the major leagues has been defined by close calls and near call-ups—a good stint in Tulsa missed by the scouts, word trickling down that Baltimore manager Earl Weaver really likes him, but…

  Discouragement is taking hold. He is, after all, twenty-eight years old.

  Just the other day, Umbarger had a very private conversation about his future. He asked the Lord to please send some indication of what He wanted him to do with his life. Do you want me to keep trying to make it in baseball, Lord? Then please, Lord, send a sign.

  Now here he is, on this cleat-ravaged mound, seeing nothing but the brown target of a catcher’s mitt, open, waiting, beckoning. Put it right here.

  In the bottom of the 23rd inning, Umbarger strikes out Laribee, swinging; strikes out Koza, swinging; and gets the hitting machine, Boggs, to ground out to second. He feels pretty good. Great, in fact.

  It’s Easter Sunday. Is this the sign, Lord? To keep playing?

  Is anyone out there?

  Is anyone out there? Is anyone listening, as radio announcer Bob Drew describes one of the strangest games in professional baseball history, pitch by pitch, against a background of the press box telephone ringing with questions (What the hell’s going on?), and the press box men laughing in delivering the only answer (Baseball infinity)? As he wishes his listeners a happy Easter, followed by, “There’s a pitch, outside, ball two.” As he says again that this game is “all tied at two,” followed by, “You’re probably getting very tired of hearing us say that.” As he continues to share statistics and observations never before uttered in a baseball broadcast:

  “And behind the plate, Dave Huppert, who’s caught twent-e-e-e—he’s going into his twenty-fifth inning behind the plate. That’s a long night.…

  “Chico Walker steps in, and I’ve lost count. That’s about his twelfth trip to the plate. In order to find out, I have to go to three score sheets….

  “For the Wings in the twenty-sixth, nothing doing. So, at the end of twenty-five and a half, this game is still tied at two.”

  Again, Drew seeks a sign. “If you’re listening out there, we’d like to know how many people we still have with us. So why don’t you give Howie a call at WPXN, 325–5300. Or is that 5500?”

  “Fifty-five-hundred,” his booth partner, Pete Torrez, answers, mistaken.

  “325–5500,” Drew says, repeating the mistake. “Give Howie a call down there and we’ll count you when you call in. See how many people we have still with us on this Easter Sunday morning, listening to Rochester Red Wing baseball here on WPXN.”

  In other words: Is anyone out there?

  Yes.

  Back in Rochester, hundreds are listening: the tired but riveted, the sleepless, the faithful. In a house on the road called Flower City Park, a man is intently listening, no matter that in a few short hours he has to help his eleven-year-old son deliver the Sunday newspapers. On Westchester Avenue, a couple is entertaining friends, former Rochesterians who are home for the holiday weekend, and they are all listening. On Edgemere Drive, a man in his mid-fifties who has been up and down all night, and who will die in little more than a year, is listening, and having one of his last great times.

  In a colonial home on Sydenham Road in Irondequoit, Norma McNair, twenty-seven, is lying on the floral-pattern couch in the living room, where a portrait of the Holy Family hangs above the fireplace, and she is listening through the earphone of her transistor radio. A clerk in the order department at the R. T. French mustard company, she adores the Red Wings and has been a season ticket holder for seven years now, always sitting in the second row on the first-base side of Silver Stadium, where she has begun to take many, many photographs of her favorite player, Cal Ripken Jr.—enough to one day fill two leather-bound albums. He and the impossibly tall first baseman, Dan Logan, are always the last ones out of the clubhouse after a game, which means she has to wait that much longer for autographs. But Cal is great; always seems to have time to say hello, pose for a photograph, sign his name. Did you know that Norma and Cal share the same birthday?

  Norma loves baseball because each game presents a new narrative with no scheduled ending, and because each game reminds her of her father and namesake, Norman, dead five years now. Back when he was working as a factory shipping clerk, he’d occasionally come home with free tickets to a Red Wings game, courtesy of some trucking company, and he would take his Norma on a spontaneous date to the ballpark. In the hours to come, Norma and her mother, who has long since gone to bed, will be attending the eleven o’clock Easter Mass at St. Ambrose Church. And in the years to come, her mother will pass away, the French mustard company will move away, and her beloved Cal will belong to the entire nation. But she will continue to live in this house, her childhood home, on Sydenham Road, and she will continue to root for her Red Wings, her boys, just as she is doing now, alone, on a couch in the living room, where a photograph of her father sits on the mantel.

  Two miles away, in a split-level home on Parkview Drive in Penfield, John Ambrosi is lying on a bed, entranced by words and sounds traveling four hundred miles across the northeast terrain and directly into this darkened upstairs room. The hour is very, very late, or very, very early, but this young man believes that if he turns the radio off now, he will be muting history in the making. He is twenty-one, a student at the University of Rochester, home for spring break, and he is mesmerized. This is history.

  Earlier tonight, John went out for a couple of beers with his younger brother Marc and a friend from high school. When the three returned to the Ambrosi house, John did what is customary for so many Rochesterians during the baseball season: He turned on a radio to see how their Wings had done. Guys, he announced. The Wings are still playing! After listening for a while, John’s friend and brother gave up; the first went home, the second went to bed. John, though, unplugged the radio from its kitchen socket and carried it upstairs to the small back bedroom reserved tonight for the home-again college boy. He set the volume low, so as not to disturb the sleep of his parents and younger siblings, and laid himself down on the narrow bed. He is five feet six or so, and muscular, thanks to hours spent lifting weights in the family’s basement. His brown hair is close-shaved on the sides, a look that, in this time of fashionably long hair, sets him apart. He is a member of the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps, and is planning to join the navy, or maybe the marines. Yes, it will be the marines. A decade from now, he will fight in the first Gulf War, joining the invasion of Kuwait as an artilleryman with the First Marine Division. He will eventually leave the military with the rank of captain, return to Rochester, earn a graduate degree, marry, and pass on to a son his love for baseball—a love that deepens tonight, as the distant murmurs of strangers, the echoing claps of connecting bats, and the mere words of a broadcaster conspire to cast the stadium lights of Pawtucket upon a small dark bedroom in upstate New York. History.

  Finally, maybe four miles away, there listens the very person to whom Bob Drew directs his play-by-play patter: his future wife, Linda DuVal. Her first husband died four years ago, nine months after the youngest of their four children was born. Now she works long hours as the owner of a trophy shop, filling orders for bowling trophies and Little League trophies and high school sports trophies. Given that athletics often figure in her business, it was only natural that at some point she would meet the general m
anager of the Rochester Red Wings, Bob Drew. And only natural, then, that after they became a couple, she would tape-record the radio broadcasts of the voice of the Red Wings, its general manager in exile, her boyfriend, in case he wants to hear how he sounded on the air.

  Tonight, in the raised-ranch house that Linda bought after her husband died, chosen because it was across the street from her best friend for life, Carole Blauvelt, the four children are asleep and the small cassette recorder hums. The game has gone on for so long that Linda has replaced the tape several times and run out of new ones, reluctantly recording over some 1950s rock-and-roll music, even going so far as to use the tape of Elvis Presley that her cousin recorded for her as a birthday present. The melting serenades of the King (Take my hand, take my whole life too, for I can’t help falling in love with you) erased forever, replaced with the soporific crooning of Bob Drew and Pete Torrez:

  The count remains two and two….

  I tell you, Bob…

  Easter Sunday morning will be hectic. Linda’s kids all expect Easter baskets, and she and Carole usually stage an egg hunt in the backyard. But this baseball game refuses to end. She’s been around long enough to know about the standard practice of a curfew. Shouldn’t someone have called the game by now, on account of basic common sense? She knows that Carole Across the Street is usually awake at this hour, fixing something to eat for her husband, a truck driver who often doesn’t finish his run until early morning, and so she reaches for the phone: