Bottom of the 33rd

by Dan Barry

  “Well,” the manager will answer, “He ain’t going to Baltimore.”

  Our baseball game continues its sleepwalk toward dawn. Like actors in an endless and mostly unwatched rehearsal, the ballplayers appear and disappear upon the stage of the dew-damp amphitheater, fulfilling the roles of futility assigned to them by some mad playwright.

  Bonner grounds out to second. Huppert strikes out looking. Eaton strikes out.

  Do it again.

  Valdez grounds out to first. Graham grounds out to third. Barrett singles. Walker flies to right.

  Again.

  Williams grounds out to the pitcher. Ripken walks. Rayford strikes out looking. Logan grounds out to the pitcher.

  Again.

  Laribee grounds out to the pitcher. Koza grounds out to second. Boggs singles. Bowen pops out to short.

  Again.

  “Inning number thirty-two,” says Bob Drew. “It’s been tied since the twenty-first, for ten innings. My goodness. What a beautiful morning for baseball here in Pawtucket. We’ll hear birds chirping anytime now.”

  A beautiful morning? Has Drew been mixing something in his coffee up there in the broadcast booth? The ballplayers on the field are hopping up and down to keep warm, while their frigid teammates in the dugout are wrapped like mummies, in towels and blankets, and just as still. Exhaustion and the elements are clearly conspiring with the two pitchers, the only ones enjoying themselves, to ensure that no one scores. Every now and then, Rochester’s left fielder, John Hale, peeks out of the dugout and into the stands, as if to convince himself that there are people still watching this travesty. “You are truly troubled souls,” he mutters. In the infield, the Rochester catcher Dave Huppert has been goading the home plate umpire to call sixteen straight balls and end this thing, while in distant center field, Rochester’s Dallas Williams has continued his private chant of Fuck, fuck, fuck. Up in the press box, the Providence Journal’s Angelo Cataldi cannot believe his bad fortune. The last of his three deadlines has passed, and all he could file was a game-in-progress story, a story without a point. He will forever remember tonight as the single worst assignment in his long career. He buttons his coat and heads for the door, while somewhere below him, in the stadium’s concrete bowels, Joe Morgan is getting angrier and angrier, seeing no evidence of common sense through that peephole of his, and damn if the wind-blown dirt whipping through the hole isn’t stinging his eye.

  Some beautiful morning.

  Still. The peanuts-and-popcorn calls of wandering vendors and the conversational murmurs of the long-gone crowd have risen up to be swallowed and forgotten by the amnesiac night. The laughs, the coughs, the childlike bleats have evaporated, along with the repetitious music that tried so hard and for so long to muster cheers and foot stomps from a mostly empty stadium. Now the sounds are spare: the leather pops and wooden knocks, an umpire’s grunt, a player’s sigh.

  Along the wind-whistling concourse, the three Pawtucket police officers working the McCoy detail find refuge in the concrete nooks and crannies. Among them is Bruce Germani, who is glad for the winter police coat he wears over his springtime navy blues, and whose childhood memories include seeing this stadium under construction. Strange how random moments of youth stay with you for the rest of your life. As a teenager, Germani played organized baseball at McCoy when the neglected field was a municipal embarrassment, a rock garden. He still sees this one ground ball coming toward him at shortstop. All he had to do was catch it and toss to second for a force-out. But the ball kicked off a large stone and that was that. Another ground ball, remembered forever.

  Other Pawtucket officers are here as well, officers who have paused from their shifts in the dark town beyond. Tonight, a fight broke out on Woodbine Street. Two cars collided on Newport Avenue. Down at the Douglas Drug store, three men knocked down a woman after robbing her of $40. And over on East Street, someone stole five rabbits from a backyard cage—so happy Easter.

  These lesser moments in our daily struggle will continue tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. For now, though, the police officers, and the few remaining fans, and a baseball manager peering through a hole, bear witness to a radical break from the mundane. They see figures that seem charged by the stadium lights with a vital radiance, running in pursuit of something represented by a small white ball.

  Cataldi, tired, annoyed, perpetually annoyed, pauses at the door. Sits back down. He cannot leave.

  Somewhere in the top of the 32nd inning, somewhere close to four o’clock in the morning. One out. With runners on first and second, Rochester is threatening to score, with the count 1–1 against a pinch hitter, Ed Putman, who has briefly returned to the dugout, apparently to work out a kink. “I tell you, Bob, talk about somebody being stiff,” Pete Torrez says. “Somebody sitting for thirty-two innings.”

  Time has lost its urgency. Waiting for Putman to return to the plate, Pawtucket’s Wade Boggs lies down on the field with his head on the bag at third base. Then, in the middle of Putman’s at bat, the third-base umpire, Jack Lietz, suddenly jogs off the field and disappears into the Pawtucket dugout.

  “We don’t know what the heck’s going on,” Drew says.

  This is what’s going on:

  Harold Cooper, the president of the International League, in Grove City, Ohio, 735 miles away—whose name appears on each of the 150-odd balls used so far in this game—has finally returned that anxious phone call from Mike Tamburro. The same call in which Cooper’s wife informed Tamburro that Harold was not home—at two o’clock on Easter Sunday morning—but that she would pass on the message: Pawtucket in crisis; cannot stop playing baseball.

  Thirty years later, Harold Cooper, irascible, hilarious, revered Harold Cooper, so integral to professional baseball in central Ohio and beyond that a statue of him stands outside the new ballpark where the Columbus Clippers play, will pause from a bite of his Arby’s sandwich to remember that telephone call. He will be eighty-six; his wife, Eloise, deceased; his health not great; his life a daily crapshoot. He is nowhere near as robust as his gleaming statue might suggest. But just about every week, Randy Mobley, a Cooper protégé and now the conscientious president of the International League, will stop at an Arby’s before heading for Cooper’s tidy, quiet town house. There, at the kitchen table, they will eat their lunch and talk the baseball of now and especially then, when Cooper was famous for getting what he wanted.

  “I wasn’t the nicest guy to work for,” he will say, to which Mobley will respond, “Maybe some of them didn’t like you, but they respected you.”

  Sometimes the two men will talk about the longest game, and how the strange disappearance of a single paragraph in the 1981 “International League Instructions for Umpires, Managers and Players”—the very paragraph that allows for a curfew after 12:50 in the morning—caused heartache and history in Pawtucket. Mobley will say that when he joined the league as an administrator in the fall of 1985, four years after the longest game, the process was the way it had always been: a secretary still adding revisions, typing out the document, making photocopies, and mailing out the manual to various parties. “Is it conceivable that it could have gotten dropped out?” Mobley will say. “It is conceivable.”

  Sitting at a kitchen table adorned with a floral display of opened fast-food wrappers, Cooper will remember the night. Back then, he was the acknowledged visionary and baseball know-it-all of Columbus—a burden as much as an honor. For example, a couple of guys on bar stools at midnight might begin arguing about, say, the number of home runs that Al Pilarcik hit for the Columbus Jets in 1956—Was it 18 or 19?—and decide that the only way to avert fisticuffs was to call Harold, at home. Mr. Cooper? Sorry to disturb you, but me and my friend Eddie are down at Johnnie’s Tavern, and we were just wondering… After one too many of these friendly phone calls, Cooper instructed Eloise to pass on this standard message to late-night callers: Harold is not here.

  But when Eloise explained the strange reason for tonight’s late-night call,
something about two teams still playing baseball in Pawtucket, Cooper decided to call back because this could not be the case. Eloise must have misunderstood. Taking his time, he finally reached Tamburro, whose panicked message—They won’t stop the game!—has prompted Cooper to demand a word, immediately, with the head umpire, Lietz.

  Jack Lietz is gone from the field for a minute, maybe two—only long enough to miss six pitches. Putman has struck out and the next batter, Tom Eaton, is in the middle of his at bat. As Lietz jogs back to his position behind third base, he gives his two colleagues a hand sign not found in any umpire’s manual: a slicing gesture across the neck.

  “Now the third-base ump, Jack Lietz, is back out on the field,” Bob Drew announces. “I have no idea where he went. But I guess it doesn’t matter at four o’clock in the morning.”

  Actually, it does matter. The exact words that Cooper used in his brief conversation with Lietz are lost to the night. The New York Times will later report that Cooper said, “If it’s still tied at the end of the inning, suspend the game and get some sleep,” while the account by the Gannett News Service will suggest the conveyance of a more succinct message:

  “Call the damn thing after this inning.”

  Two on, two out, and the count is now 2 and 2 against Eaton, Rochester’s second baseman, who still believes that the wad of Red Man tucked in his right cheek gives him heft and power, and who sees, just beyond the pitcher, the possible key to the game’s end: his teammate John Hale, whom he barely knows, a step off second base, waiting for what comes next.

  Hale, twenty-seven, who joined Rochester a few weeks ago after a peripatetic career through the major and minor leagues, has gotten the hint. Just last night, he set his bags down in yet another Howard Johnson hotel room and told himself it was over. He grew up in the California farming town of Wasco, just north of Bakersfield, was drafted by the Dodgers before he turned eighteen, and played his first major-league game in the September heat of the 1974 pennant race. In the last two games of that season, he collected 4 hits in 4 at bats, including a double off the ferocious fastball pitcher J. R. Richard that nearly cleared the wall. After that, he will say, “It was all downhill.”

  Hale played for the Dodgers for parts of four seasons, then spent two years with the Seattle Mariners before being released in August 1979. His last appearance was as a 9th-inning replacement in left field, his career batting average, .201. He began the journeyman’s wander through the minor leagues, where, he will later say, younger players “look at you with eyes that say, ‘What are you doing here, old guy?’” By the time he landed in Rochester, less than a month ago, he more or less knew that he had joined the ranks of veteran ballplayers who bounce around, filling rosters, serving as seat warmers for prospects who have yet to reveal themselves. He knows what Baltimore’s assessment of him is: This Guy Will Do for Now.

  After tonight, Hale will continue to be a fill-in player with Rochester for a couple of months before being traded to the Denver Bears, in the American Association, where he will have a good enough season that his Pawtucket hotel epiphany will briefly lose its impact. He will think that, maybe, things might fall into place one last time; they will not. The 1981 season will be his last in professional baseball, and he will not fully appreciate the unforgiving separation—between those who play and those who played—until he finds himself chatting with a couple of old Indianapolis Indians teammates, now with the Cincinnati Reds, before a game in San Diego, soon after his forced retirement. He will be in civilian clothes, they will be in uniforms, and the chat at the railing will be pleasant. But with game time approaching, his former teammates will say good-bye, delivering the unspoken but clear message: Okay, it’s time for us to go play baseball, and you’re not coming with us.

  The sweet ruthlessness of that moment will stay with Hale. Either you are part of the brotherhood or you are not. Soon enough, though, he will find perspective and move on, redefining himself as a husband, father, weekend sportscaster (very briefly), and successful commercial real estate salesman, not far from where he grew up. What’s more, he will always be able to say that he hit a double off J. R. Richard, played beside some of the best baseball players of the 1970s—and once stood on second base in the 32nd inning of a twilight-zone baseball game in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

  Standing a step or two off second, Hale is hyperaware: of the slightest movement by the pitcher, Bruce Hurst; of the whereabouts of Marty Barrett (to his left, at second) and Julio Valdez (to his right, playing short); of the hand signals of Doc Edwards, his manager, coaching at third base; of the late hour, and the pervasive fatigue, and the slight chance he has to help win this game and prove to the decision makers of major-league baseball that John Hale, while an ancient twenty-seven, still has the speed of youth. Everyone knows exactly what will happen if the ball passes through the infield.

  “You’re listening to Rochester Red Wing baseball on WPXN in Rochester, New York, and this, the history-making ball game—the longest game ever played in organized baseball,” says Bob Drew, his weariness evident in the repetition of his patter. “We’re in the thirty-second inning, it’s two balls, two strikes, to Tom Eaton, two outs, in the thirty-second inning, with two runners on base. Two, two, two, thirty-two.”

  “And, Bob, we’ve played exactly eight hours,” says Pete Torrez.

  “Eight hours of baseball here in Pawtucket, and McCoy Stadium,” Drew answers. “The pitch…”

  Eaton whacks a line drive into right field for a base hit, and Hale bolts for third, where Doc Edwards is swinging his arm like a windmill, signaling to keep going, keep going, as if there were ever any doubt. “How would you have liked to have gone back to face your teammates at four o’clock in the morning, and you held up at third base with the go-ahead run?” Hale will later say. “Everyone in the ballpark was saying, ‘Please! Go!’”

  Waiting at home plate is Roger LaFrancois, once the Red Sox organization’s up-and-coming catcher, but now playing behind the younger, more powerful Rich Gedman, who is so gifted that in a few weeks he will be summoned to Boston, never to return. But Gedman left this game hours ago, back around the 10th inning, when sanity still prevailed. So it is Roger LaFrancois, now in his 22nd inning of the night, who waits, in shin guards and chest protector.

  LaFrancois, twenty-four, grew up in Jewett City, Connecticut, about forty-five miles southwest of here. His French-Canadian father, a gifted ballplayer in his time, works the midnight shift at the Plastic Wire and Cable mill, a schedule that on some nights allows him to drive up to Pawtucket and play baseball again, vicariously, through his son. It is the mill that motivates Roger LaFrancois. A few years ago, when he was a talented but aimless athlete, just beginning to make some bad choices in his senior year in high school, his father dragged his ass down to the clanking, dirty, mind-numbing mill at three in the morning. “You had better get on track, son,” his father had said. Message received.

  Here, then, is Roger LaFrancois, six feet two, 215 pounds, and determined not to work in a mill, destined to make the major leagues next year, if only briefly, but long enough to collect 4 hits in 10 at bats for a career batting average of .400; his large mitt aches for the ball. Here, too, is John Hale, six feet two, 195 pounds, and almost ready for a new career, but not yet and certainly not at this moment, racing toward LaFrancois, hell-bent on becoming the sliding exclamation point that ends this epic sentence of a ball game.

  And here, in shallow right field, is Sam Bowen, Pawtucket’s misunderstood outfielder, the one who has to keep denying that he torpedoed his own trade to Detroit last year, rushing toward a ball that nearly dies in the thick grass. At this late hour, who would blame him if he approached it too fast, or bobbled the ball just long enough? If he threw high? If he threw wide? Who, really, would blame him? Only everyone.

  “Here comes the lead runner around to score!” Bob Drew shouts.

  Sam Bowen’s brief major-league career is behind him, and his reputation within the Boston Red Sox organi
zation is irreparably damaged, and his professional baseball life will end next year, and this meaningless game is entering its ninth hour, and it is four o’clock in the freezing morning, but he knows he has a good arm, and no way will this runner score. In fact, he is thinking, No way will this runner even try. No way.

  “I’ll be damned if I look up, and he’s rounding third,” Bowen will later say.

  With all that he can muster from his exhausted, 170-pound body, Sam Bowen heaves the baseball toward a spot at the distant center of the McCoy horseshoe, his fatigue working to reduce the chance that he might overthrow his target, home plate. The ball, the be-all and end-all, the white sun to this contained universe, arrives chest-high for the catcher-son of a mill worker. Perfect. Ball beats man to home by several feet. Roger LaFrancois, going up, tags out John Hale, going down.

  “And they’re going to get him.”

  “Ahhhhhh,” exhales Pete Torrez, while all around him, the Rhode Island rooters in the press box whoo-hoo and clap in weary, joyous delirium.

  The Pawtucket Red Sox go meekly in the bottom of the 32nd inning, three up, three out. It is 4:09 on Easter Sunday morning, and brightness limns the eastern horizon. Surrender.

  As the public-address announcement is made that the game is suspended, the players and umpires trudge off the field, the only winners of this endeavor the cold and the wind and the dark. Along with the hundreds of people in far-off Rochester who are clicking off their radios, and the less than two dozen fans who are sleepwalking their way to the exits, they are just beginning to wonder what lessons the night has attempted to impart.

  Here it is, eight hours after the first pitch, the score remains tied, 2–2, and in the judgment of baseball, nothing has changed and nothing will until the game resumes—who knows when. Then again, so much has happened during this protracted demonstration of endurance, commitment, and that great engine of human existence, ambition. With nothing and everything simultaneously unfolding, with eight hours becoming one hour and one hour becoming eight, the night seems to have said something about time itself: the deceptiveness of it; the dearness of it. Beseeched by the older ballplayers to slow the clock, and begged by the younger players to hasten it, the night chose instead to stop time; to place it under a stadium’s laboratory lights and pin it to the Pawtucket clay. See? Between the past and the future there is the sacred now: the brush of shoulders between father and son; a wife’s focused gaze upon a preoccupied husband; a boy’s seamless fielding of a simple ground ball; a pitcher’s effortless motion and a catcher’s easy crouch. The spare moment of solitude granted to us between our many obligations; a moment in which we drop all defense and artifice and feel a smack from the wind that is like a doctor’s slap to a newborn.