Bottom of the 33rd

by Dan Barry

  Carole, the Red Wings are still on—

  Soon the two women, who have been friends since forever, are drinking coffee. They are listening to the radio, to Linda’s Bob. And they are trying to visualize this strange place called Pawtucket that has men in its thrall, and will not let go.

  You know, of course, that this traffic jam will clear. You know that the brake lights ahead will eventually stop their angry red stare, the stutter and halt will ease. You know that this airplane, idle on the tarmac, will eventually launch into the sky; that this subway train, stalled between stations, will soon shudder into movement; that this sermon will conclude and life will reanimate. It must. Still, Rochester’s center fielder, Dallas Williams, feels so trapped by the night—a night in which he has yet to get a hit—that he’s beginning to fear this is it. This is the end of the world and this is where he will die, in a never-ending game from which he cannot escape. And the only way that he can release his frustrations and worries is the liberal use of one particular epithet:

  Fuck this, fuck the cold, what the fuck are we doing out here, fuck, fuck, fuck.

  Williams speaks for many. Until now, in the bottom of the 26th inning, the ball-playing inmates of the McCoy Correctional Institution have believed that liberation would eventually come, most likely in the form of a home run. Sooner or later—later, it now seems, rather than sooner—the perfectly timed swing of a hard-ash bat would make a fair ball disappear, and that will be that. But even without so dramatic an ending, some combination—walk-steal-double, or error-single-walk-walk, or double-steal-sacrifice—will surely score a run, pop the lock, set us free. Every ballplayer here knows this, as well as they know that dawn follows night. Baseball games do not continue ad infinitum. Right?

  Dave Koza lines out to right field.

  Wade Boggs strikes out swinging.

  Sam Bowen, right fielder, approaches the plate.

  A baby-faced country boy from the coastal marshes of south Georgia, he is an unassuming presence: neither tall, at five feet nine, nor imposing, at 170 pounds. And when he takes his place in the batter’s box as a right-handed hitter, he doesn’t wave his bat with an air of controlled aggression, because he believes that less movement means less a chance of doing something wrong. With body nearly still and feet planted a good foot off the plate, he looks as though he could be waiting for a bus whose arrival time is of no concern to him. But everyone in the International League knows that you underestimate Sammy Bowen’s power at your peril. Yes, everyone knows Sam Bowen, or thinks they do.

  For all his outward calm, Bowen wants to catch that bus and get the hell out of here. Don’t get him wrong. He loves the Pawtucket Red Sox, and Mondor, and Tamburro, and all the others. He loves living in neighboring Central Falls, where he knows that if you give the local kids a scuffed baseball or broken bat, nobody messes with your truck, and where his friends always have his back, from Pat the barber to Al down at the fruit market, who stocks Dr. Pepper just for him. But this is Bowen’s fifth year in Pawtucket, and he might be overstaying his welcome. Just the other night, he hit his seventieth home run as a Pawtucket player—an achievement that is both a team record and an indication that he has been around too long. “I used to look up the ladder at the Triple-A guys…and I thought, ‘Why don’t those old guys get out of the way?’” he will say. “They were twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight years old. Then all of a sudden you blink, and you’re there. And you’re twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty, and then you say, ‘But I’m only this far away. All I’m needing is a break.’”

  Bowen is twenty-eight. And, lately, he feels misunderstood.

  Some might say that Sam Bowen has already lived the dreams, and nightmares, of others. His parents, both alcoholics, split up when he was young. When he was sixteen, his mother shot herself to death in the restroom of a bar. A couple of years later, his father, an itinerant construction worker who’d give you the shirt off his back, along with a drink, died of a brain tumor. Bowen’s young friends claimed to be jealous; no parents meant no curfew. But he was miserable, angry, immature, and able to experience joy and affection only on the baseball field. Baseball was his ticket out, he will later say. “I wanted something better than what I had seen.”

  After finding that baseball affirmation at Brunswick Community College, in North Carolina, and then at Valdosta State College, in Georgia, Bowen was drafted by the Boston Red Sox in 1974, and quickly worked his way up to become a Pawtucket star and Boston prospect. His first major-league at bat came on a late August Sunday in 1977, before thirty thousand fans in Fenway Park and against the Texas Rangers relief pitcher Paul Lindblad, who, at thirty-six, seemed ancient to Bowen. The old man caught him looking, a called strike three. In the clubhouse afterward, Boston’s superstar catcher, Carlton Fisk, handed Bowen a beer and said: Ain’t no place to go but up.

  He found himself back with Boston in the summer of 1978, when the Red Sox were in first place, the hated New York Yankees were in third, and the possibility—the probability—of an American League pennant electrified New England. Imagine being Sam Bowen as he raced around the bases in Texas after hitting a home run—his first major-league hit!—for the first-place Boston Red Sox, with his famous new teammates waiting to clap him on the back, the season aligning in their favor, and Bowen, just twenty-five, a part of it all. Although the Red Sox lost the game, he will never forget how Fisk, Pudge himself, handed him another clubhouse beer and, this time, said: Way to go, big guy.

  No time to savor the moment. The very next day, a Boston regular came off the disabled list, sending Sam Bowen back to Pawtucket.

  Just two summers have passed, but that giddy night might as well belong to another century, so effective are the coping mechanisms of grief. The Red Sox dithered and the Yankees caught fire. Then came the drop-dead playoff game in October, when New York’s slap-hitting shortstop, forever known northeast of Middletown, Connecticut, as Bucky Fucking Dent, somehow hit a three-run home run to help the Yankees win the game, the pennant, and, eventually, the 1978 World Series. As for Sam Bowen, he had been called back up from Pawtucket, and so watched Dent’s home run from the dugout shadows. With Rice, Lynn, Evans, and Yaz taking turns in the outfield, there seemed to be no place for a Triple-A-plus ballplayer who was extremely good, but not good enough.

  In 1979, Bowen led the International League with 28 home runs and 75 runs batted in. Although he batted only .235 and struck out, on average, about every fourth at bat, his power impressed the Detroit Tigers enough to set a deal in motion. Last May, the Tigers and the Red Sox announced a trade: Sam Bowen for veteran pitcher Jack Billingham. Suddenly, here was Jim Campbell, Detroit’s general manager, on the telephone in Ben Mondor’s office, asking to speak to his new acquisition. What an opportunity! Finally, Sam Bowen could escape from Boston’s deep dugout shadows and redefine himself as a full-time major-league ballplayer! Dave Koza and Wade Boggs could only dream of such fortune. Bowen reached for the telephone receiver.

  But something happened during that long-distance conversation, something that would change Bowen’s life by keeping him where he was. The moment he hung up the telephone, the Bowen-for-Billingham trade was in jeopardy. Within hours, it was dead. Sam Bowen never went to Detroit.

  As he placed the receiver to his ear and heard Detroit’s general manager say the words you live to hear—Welcome aboard, we just traded for you and we want you to start for us tomorrow night— Bowen considered not mentioning the hamstring pull in his right leg, an injury that had kept him on the sidelines for the entire spring. He had recently run a few sprints and taken some fielding practice, and Boston officials had determined that he was ready to play, but Bowen had his doubts; he thought that he was at least a few days away from game-ready form. Deciding that he did not want to begin his career with Detroit on a false note, Bowen told Campbell of his injury, explained that he wasn’t healthy enough to play in Pawtucket, much less Detroit, but assured the gene
ral manager that he would be ready to play soon.

  “He went berserk,” Bowen will recall.

  After the stunned Campbell told him to “sit tight” until he called back, Bowen assumed that the deal would go ahead as planned. He said his good-byes in the clubhouse, packed his belongings, returned the furniture he had borrowed, arranged to have the power in his apartment shut off—and waited for a callback from Detroit that never came. Then, the next night, the two teams issued a joint statement that said the trade had been “restructured,” although the way it was reported in the Boston Globe was, effectively:

  Bowen Refuses to Go.

  At first, Bowen’s efforts to correct this interpretation seemed to lack emphasis. He sounded more wistful than excited at the prospect of moving to Detroit. “I’ve bounced around quite a bit, and I really liked it here,” he told the Providence Journal, a few days after the trade was killed. “I felt I had a home here. I realized I’d have to say good-bye to all my friends, not to mention the guys on the club.” He went on to say that after overcoming the initial shock, he began to feel “pretty good” about the trade, and realized that a promotion to the major leagues, whether in Boston or Toronto or Detroit, was “what it’s all about.” But his words came too late, both for the trade and for his reputation.

  Bowen’s teammates, along with Red Sox executives in Boston and Pawtucket, gleaned two possible reasons for his deal-breaking candor with the Detroit Tigers. One: That with the major-league ballplayers considering a strike, Sam Bowen feared losing a steady paycheck, and would rather make modest money in the minor leagues than no money at all. Or two: That Sam Bowen was afraid of failing. For years now, since childhood, the likes of Dave Koza and Wade Boggs and Danny Parks and Marty Barrett have dedicated themselves to reaching the major leagues. The idea that someone would jeopardize a rare opportunity by sharing too much information just didn’t make sense. Unless, that is, Bowen actually preferred the easier, less pressurized setting of Pawtucket, a theory that gained traction after reporters got their hands on a heartfelt letter he had once sent to Ben Mondor. If he was destined to play his entire career in the minor leagues, Bowen had written, there was no place he would rather be than here, in McCoy Stadium, in Pawtucket, among friends.

  Bowen felt betrayed by the dissemination of the letter, as well as by what he thought was the willful misinterpretation of its context. His honesty about his injury and about his affection for Pawtucket had been purposely distorted, he thought, to make him look weak. He became angry.

  “I was honest with Detroit,” he told Steven Krasner of the Providence Journal, his every word weighted with frustration. “I was hurt. And I was willing to take the consequences. I’m in the minors. I’m not content being in the minors, but I’m here.

  “Listen, they can take away my money, they can take away my uniform,” he said. “But I’ll be damned if people are going to take away the concept of what kind of person I am.”

  Now, coming off a lackluster season in 1980, Bowen knows the end is near. His performance on the field and on the telephone clearly did not impress the parent club, and no other major-league team is expressing interest in him. Some might say that he is exactly where he wants to be: Pawtucket.

  And this is where Bowen is now, standing in the batter’s box in Pawtucket, waiting for that bus. Ball one. Ball two.

  The rest of this year will peter out, and he will not be called up again to Boston. Come spring training in Winter Haven next year, he will find validation, if not a major-league job, from the great Ted Williams, who will tell him: Sammy, I’ve seen you play, and you can play this fucking game. The oracular words will all but carry him up to New England, where he will learn that, despite manager Joe Morgan’s vow to play the best nine, Sam Bowen was no longer a starting outfielder for the Pawtucket Red Sox. He will become so enraged during a confrontation with Morgan that he will knock everything on the manager’s desk onto the floor.

  Done.

  Thirty years later, Sam Bowen will have a wife and three kids, and a job as the director of marketing and advertising for the Sport Seasons athletic footwear stores in Tennessee. He will reminisce about having those clubhouse beers with Pudge Fisk; recall, with evident pain, the details and the aftermath of that phone call with the Detroit Tigers general manager; profess his enduring affection for Rhode Island; and describe himself as another Crash Davis, home-run heartbreak of the minor leagues. But he will also be candid about his brief major-league career. Three for twenty-two, with one home run, one run batted in, and a batting average of .136. “When I got my chance, I just didn’t do well enough,” he will say, leaving it to others to question why that chance was so brief.

  Ball three.

  But then the Rochester pitcher, Umbarger, makes a mistake in his next pitch to the man who almost played for the Detroit Tigers. A ball right down the middle, and you just don’t do that with Sam Bowen at the plate. He gets all of it, the sound of bat meeting ball cracking over the radio like a thunderclap.

  “Uh-oh,” says Bob Drew.

  The ball rockets out of the infield, bound for some distant place well beyond the left-field wall: Division Street, maybe, or the junior high school parking lot, or the Massachusetts town of Attleboro.

  “One of the hardest balls ever hit off me,” Umbarger will say. “Going straight to left field, and it’s out of the ballpark.”

  “Over the light tower,” Wade Boggs will say.

  “When he hit it, everyone was, like, al-l-l-l right,” Pawtucket’s clubhouse joker, Mike Ongarato, will say.

  “A lot of the players on the field put their heads down,” Rochester’s catcher, Dave Huppert, will say. “They really thought it was over. A lot of them probably wished it was.”

  Rochester’s left fielder, John Hale, who had replaced Chris Bourjos a dozen innings ago, races to the wall as if prepared to escape this ball game by making a run for it; as if he might burst past the billboard come-on for the Fournier dealership on Newport Avenue, where you can buy an odd-looking car called the Pacer. Suddenly, at the warning track, Hale turns back toward the infield and waits to receive his gift from the mischievous wind, which is once again toying with the desires of men to get this over with and just go home. The hardest-hit ball of the night, one that seemed destined for a different zip code, halts in mid-journey—“like it hit a wall,” according to Rochester’s shortstop, Bobby Bonner. The ball plummets to earth, spent, and comes to rest in the leather bed of John Hale’s glove. Fop.

  “He makes the catch for out number three.” Drew sighs. “Wow. That was close.” Sitting a few feet away in the press box, Mike Scandura jots three words in red ink into his scorebook: “To Warning Track.”

  Bowen cannot believe that the ball did not carry over the wall. Instead of being embraced by relieved teammates gathered at home plate, he takes the solitary trot to the Pawtucket dugout, telling players from both teams as he passes by: If that thing’s not going out, boys, we’re in for a long night.

  Save for the pitcher, Umbarger, who feels as though he has just been given new life—Thank you, Lord—players on both teams now sense the encroaching fear of eternal stasis. In the Pawtucket dugout, Wade Boggs lies down on the bench, exhausted, in disbelief. We are not going to score, we are not going to score, he keeps saying. This will go on forever.

  At the dawn of the 27th inning, the night gives a sleepy nod to posterity.

  “Howie’s gotten twenty-five calls back there at the studio, and four lines have lit up, and that’s pretty good, considering I gave you the wrong phone number,” Bob Drew confesses. “It’s 325-five-three-hundred…. Give Howie a call and tell him you’re listening, ’cause the Red Wings and the Pawtucket Red Sox just set an all-time baseball record for the longest game ever played in both the minor leagues and in the major leagues. This game is now entering its twenty-seventh inning, making it the longest baseball game ever.

  “How about that!”

  How about that. On the annual celebration of Christ�
��s resurrection, in the drive-by New England city where Samuel Slater encouraged the industrial revolution, at a tired ballpark that Mayor Thomas McCoy all but willed to float on water, baseball history is quietly realized. Without fanfare. Without cameras. With two journalists as witnesses, one cranky, one content, and neither able to report the event for their newspaper employers, so late is it, and so early. History.

  The fires in the fifty-five-gallon drums continue to burn on the fuel of broken bats, with ballplayers warming their hands or heating their bat handles to make the pine tar stickier to the touch. In the Pawtucket clubhouse, the men hustle in and out, looking for coffee, warmth, and maybe some common sense, though they will not find their teammate, Luis Aponte. By now everyone on the team has heard how Aponte’s wife was so upset by his late return and his lame excuse—We’re still playing!—that she sent him back to McCoy. But a little while ago, after having pitched the best he will ever pitch, he quietly left the stadium, walked down Columbus Avenue, and knocked once more. This time, Xiomara Aponte opened the door, stepped aside, and, as he will later sweetly recall, “let me sleep beside her.”

  Meanwhile, in the Rochester clubhouse, Larry Jones, who pitched the first 8-and-some innings of the game, is telling everyone that it’s been a couple of days now, and he’s rested and ready to return. Amid some empty beer cans, a couple of players are passed out, sprawled across a table, tucked up near a wall heater. Hustling into the clubhouse to thaw out between innings, Umbarger will soon encounter Jeff Schneider, the Rochester pitcher who left the game back in the 15th inning. “Jeez, you guys still playing?” Schneider will say. “We have already showered, dressed, had a few beers, gone to sleep and gotten back up and have hangovers already!”