Bottom of the 33rd

by Dan Barry

  You are released now. Go.

  A father and son return to their Providence apartment to ease the worry in the house. A solitary young man heads off to catch a few hours of sleep before joining his grandmother in her kitchen. Another young man leaves with pockets filled with discarded ticket stubs that he believes possess historic worth. An umpire collects his exhausted nephew and begins the long drive north to his pregnant wife and their new house. The scoreboard operator discovers that he needs to call a tow truck to jump-start his dead Ford Pinto, inside of which sleeps a stepson blissfully unaware of having activated the car’s headlights hours ago. The official scorer, meanwhile, secures his precious score sheet—confirmation that this night did, indeed, happen—before taking the short drive to his home in Greenville, where his drowsy wife asks why he’s up so early. He simply holds up the Dunkin’ Donuts bag of Easter treats that she had asked him to buy for their two children, last night and so long ago.

  Inside the stadium, a mother collects her batboy sons, while ballplayers and managers and front-office employees collect their things and their thoughts, which include the realization that in a few hours, Rochester and Pawtucket will set aside this unfinished game and start another game. The Pawtucket pitcher Keith MacWhorter, this afternoon’s starting pitcher, will arrive in a little while to find a baseball in his locker. On it will be scrawled: “You’re on your own.”

  They trudge from the stadium to be received by an awakening Pawtucket, where some hear birds singing good morning. Wade Boggs, dispensing with a shower, leaves at the same time as Cal Ripken, who jokes that this is the first time his postgame meal will be breakfast. Dave and Ann Koza make their way home to a tired triple-decker a few hundred yards down Pond Street, where a pimp named Wesley lives in one apartment, Mike and Jenny Smithson live in another, and the newlywed Kozas will fall asleep in a third, talking and laughing about their absurd night. And Joe Morgan, ejected from the game but never absent, climbs into his powder blue Mustang and begins his drive back to Dottie and home in Walpole, thinking of that Irish saying he has known all his life, something about how the sun dances for joy at Easter’s dawn. Negatory.

  At the Howard Johnson motor inn, Rochester’s last pitcher, Jim Umbarger, orders a Ruthian breakfast: oatmeal with bananas, hamand-cheese omelet, home fries, toast, three pancakes, sausage and eggs. He then attempts sleep in the room where his spent roommate, Bobby Bonner, is dead to the world, but sleep does not come—perhaps because of the twenty or so cups of coffee he consumed during the game. So Umbarger spends ninety minutes writing down his fast-coming thoughts in a spiral notebook, the thoughts of a man who has just done the very best that he can at his profession. He writes:

  Just this past Tuesday night, I was down, lonely and unhappy in Rochester, only because my desire to be in the big leagues again is so strong. I had a chat with the Lord and asked Him to please show me if He still wanted me in baseball or to lead me wherever. Wow! Has He shown me.

  Though Umbarger will never return to the major leagues, as he hopes and prays tonight, he will have this to keep: 10 innings of scoreless pitching, in professional baseball’s longest game. Sleep, now, as the proprietor of the Irish social club might say. It’s time.

  Back at McCoy Stadium, the home team’s owner, Ben Mondor, does not leave until he is satisfied that everything is under control; that the records of last night’s game have been saved, and the plans for this afternoon’s game are set. What a business this is, this bazeball business.

  Mondor gets a lift from Mike Tamburro to his Dutch colonial home in Lincoln. He showers and shaves, and then he and his wife, Madeleine, attend the seven o’clock Easter Sunday Mass at St. Jude’s Roman Catholic Church. Tamburro, fresh from Mass with his wife, Anna, at St. Maria Goretti in Pawtucket, returns to pick up Mondor. The two men come right back to McCoy, where the telephones are now jangling with calls from the disbelieving.

  INNING 33

  Bill George/Pawtucket Red Sox

  The rise of the Easter sun returned time to its natural rhythms. The hours once again lasted sixty minutes; the minutes, sixty seconds. The news of baseball’s longest game, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, made headlines around the country for a few days, then lost prominence as the relentless succession of other events, great and small, occupied the next two months. Police officers in Atlanta hunt for a suspect in a series of child murders. New Jersey senator Harrison Williams is convicted of corruption and sentenced to prison. The Federal Communications Commission makes a portion of the radio spectrum available for cellular telephones. A new musical, Cats, opens in London. Bob Marley dies, and a Turkish gunman seriously wounds Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square, and the Centers for Disease Control report an ominous strain of pneumonia surfacing among homosexual men in Los Angeles, and Major League Baseball goes on strike, and a prime suspect is arrested for all those children’s deaths in Atlanta, and—

  The hammering has stopped. Carpenters provided by the City of Pawtucket have built several rows of plywood tables behind home plate in section 7, creating a press gallery of World Series caliber for the 150 reporters and photographers about to descend upon McCoy Stadium. Yesterday, McCoy was just another decrepit Depression relic in another declining New England mill city. Today it is the hottest sports venue in the country, attracting several major-league television networks, a crew from Good Morning America, and reporters from Time magazine, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, the Washington Star, the Philadelphia Inquirer—even England and Japan—to a place that they will invariably pronounce as PAW-tuck-it, to the chagrin of its P-spitting natives. One after another, these big-league media players are passing the local landmarks—the historic Slater mill, the shady Lily Social Club—before making the turn at the Mei-King Chinese Restaurant, into an old ballpark on unsettled ground. Vital. Bustling. Significant. This is exactly what Mayor Thomas McCoy envisioned more than forty years ago, when he commanded workers to raise a stadium from the ooze of Hammond Pond. Dead these thirty-six years, His Honor wears an outfit appropriate for the occasion—light-weight tan suit, straw hat—and takes his seat in the section reserved for apparitions.

  After decades of serving as a backup maintenance garage for the city, of seeing weeds in the infield and rot in the girders, of playing host to no teams and bad teams and teams that could only draw an audience with win-a-jalopy come-ons, McCoy is now blessed by a serendipitous twinning of events. First, the matter of the Major League Baseball strike. Eleven days ago, on June 12, the players announced a work stoppage over free-agent compensation. The owners are insisting that if a marquee player joins another team as a free agent, his former team should receive a player of equal worth. The players, though, see the demand as a threat to their hard-won right to test the market after they have fulfilled their contract. What the complicated issue means to the rest of the country is this: no poring over the box scores in the morning newspaper; no watching a baseball game on television after work; no drifting off to the nighttime lullaby of AM radio baseball, in which innings are counted like sheep and the broadcaster’s canned baritone comes from someplace beyond the moon. The strike has the country out of sorts. The nation needs its baseball distraction.

  As if divinely provided to fill the void, here it is: the continuation of the longest game in baseball history, which has lingered in between-inning limbo for two months—until now. Well before the major-league strike was declared, the Rochester Red Wings and the Pawtucket Red Sox agreed to pick up where they left off, in the top of the 33rd inning, when Rochester was next back in town. That would be today, Tuesday, June 23, 1981. The nation trains its fickle attention on Pawtucket.

  The home team’s owner, Ben Mondor, wandering about in his open-neck shirt and blue plaid pants, granting interview after interview, has spent $5,000 to have that makeshift press gallery built, and even more on the catered food he is providing his many out-of-town guests—cold cuts, potato salad, macaroni salad, pastries, soda, and beer. All worth it, though. The sellout crowd
and the hundreds of telephone calls, seeking press credentials, asking for confirmation of the 6:00 p.m. start, have signaled to Mondor and his staff that today will be unprecedented. He could never have planned for the inability of two teams to score runs, for the mischievous wind to redirect balls in play, for that single paragraph concerning curfews to vanish from the umpires’ manual—and now, for the game’s resumption to take place during a Major League Baseball strike, an occurrence as rare as a Boston Red Sox championship. A gift ordained by Ruth, Cobb, Mack, and all the baseball saints in heaven! And Mondor plans to seize the opportunity to wipe clean McCoy’s blemished past; to redefine the stadium as a pleasant, inexpensive place where you can see the future stars of the Boston Red Sox. Pure baseball. He’s hoping for at least 5 innings, with the game ending on a bang-bang play that results in a Pawtucket win.

  “I don’t want to lose this sucker,” he keeps saying.

  Of the many Pawtucket Red Sox employees scurrying about to meet Mondor’s edict that everything be perfect for this influx of suits and so-and-sos, none is more dedicated to the task than the excited young man working at the mimeograph machine in the front office, inhaling the fumes of the purple ink. This is Lou Schwechheimer, the team’s one-man publicity department, who is busily printing and collating two hundred copies of the press packet—a kind of CliffsNotes, or Lou’s Notes, to the Longest Game. If Bill White, the former All Star first baseman who is now broadcasting the New York Yankees games, wants to know how many plate appearances Dave Koza has so far, it’s there (14); if Peter Gammons of the Boston Globe wants to know how many times Russ Laribee has struck out, it’s there (7). Schwechheimer is twenty-three, yet every day he seems to bring to McCoy the enthusiasm of a nine-year-old boy attending his first baseball game. This is one of the reasons why, along with Mike Tamburro, he has been all but adopted by Mondor, who calls him by his given name, Ludwig, or by his nickname, Kraut.

  Mondor, up from nothing, sees a version of his younger self in this earnest workhorse, beginning with the kid’s modest New England circumstances. Schwechheimer grew up in a small housing project in Newburyport, a Massachusetts city on the banks of the Merrimack River. His father, a German immigrant, is a chief master sergeant in the Air Force Reserves and an expert carpenter; his mother, the daughter of New England clam diggers, works on the assembly line in an auto-parts plant. Hardworking, penny-saving, they will make sure that their four children graduate from college, including the oldest, their baseball-obsessed Ludwig, who long ago vowed that he would someday work for the Red Sox.

  Two years ago, while still an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Schwechheimer got himself invited to the Red Sox front office at Fenway Park, where a top executive gave him a New England interpretation of Horace Greeley’s famous counsel: Go to Pawtucket, young man. When the college student stammered that he didn’t even know where Pawtucket was, the executive explained that a savvy businessman, Ben Mondor, and his assistant, Mike Tamburro, a UMass guy just like Schwechheimer, were trying to clean up a Triple-A franchise.

  Go to Pawtucket.

  Schwechheimer borrowed a tie from a college buddy and drove his used Volkswagen Beetle, with its rotten floorboard and broken heater, down to Pawtucket to be interviewed for an internship. Tamburro began the session by taking the applicant on a tour of McCoy, beneath its decaying canopy, past its mishmash of seats, some of them hand-me-downs from the old Narragansett Park racetrack. The tour was intended not to dissuade the young man but to inspire him, as Tamburro shared Mondor’s determination to turn this rust bucket into a clean, inexpensive place where families could watch bazeball games. Struck by the simple, benevolent brilliance of the plan, Schwechheimer told Tamburro that he really, really wanted the internship.

  Tamburro: Well, we’ve got dozens of candidates.

  Schwechheimer: I will do whatever is necessary.

  Tamburro: We can’t aff—

  Schwechheimer: I’ll do it for free. This is where I want to be.

  A few weeks later, Schwechheimer, all of twenty-one and with nothing to his name but a Volkswagen Bug with a dead engine, borrowed $500 and moved into a $25-a-month rooming house within walking distance of McCoy—where he was now, proudly, the Unpaid Intern for the Pawtucket Red Sox.

  Schwechheimer stayed at the rooming house for several weeks, but moved out after a neighbor named Jimmy, whose chronic inebriation never impeded his polite inquiries into the fortunes of the PawSox, died in the communal shower, four doors down. With no money, the only place Schwechheimer could think to live was, of course, McCoy, where he slept for nearly a month on the trainer’s table, in the clubhouse, even on Mondor’s secondhand couch. He could hardly afford to feed himself, yet he never went hungry, thanks to the kindness of Mondor, Tamburro, and other McCoy colleagues: takeout from Mei-King, across the street; massive roast beef sandwiches from the House of Pizza, around the corner; late-night, early-morning breakfasts with Mondor at Sambo’s, on Newport Avenue. Everything else in his life, apart from these meals and sleep, orbited minor-league baseball: compiling stats, running errands, stocking the souvenir stands, working the ticket office, hustling.

  At the end of the 1979 season, the unpaid intern received a gift travel bag containing a Red Sox jacket, some golf shirts, a $500 check, and a note of thanks. Schwechheimer went back to college, but continued to pester Tamburro for work during school breaks and holidays. Then, after graduating with a communications degree in May 1980, he returned to McCoy to do it all over again, taking to heart Mondor’s colorful words of advice: “Work your ass off, and we’ll see.”

  Last August, toward the end of the season, the unpaid intern was summoned to the owner’s office, where Mondor and Tamburro informed him that they were prepared to offer him a position with a starting salary of $4,800. It was only the organization’s third full-time position, after theirs. Not a lot of money, they acknowledged, but if he accepted, who knows what this place, this franchise, could become. Lou Schwechheimer said yes—Yes!—before Mondor even finished presenting the offer. And he never left, rising to become senior vice president, general manager, and the integral third part to a McCoy trinity—Mondor, Tamburro, and Schwechheimer—that will last for more than three decades.

  Right now, though, Lou Schwechheimer is in his very first year as a full-time employee of the Pawtucket Red Sox, wearing a short-sleeve shirt and a tie. Game days require ties. He can barely contain himself as he prints these press packets by the dozens—on a normal day he prints, maybe, six—and reads and reads again Mondor’s understated welcoming address, and just inside the front cover:

  The Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings would like to welcome one and all to the resumption of the longest game in baseball history. The game was originally played on April 18, lasting 8 hours and 7 minutes. Center fielder Dallas Williams will lead off for the Red Wings in the top of the 33rd inning.

  Tickets, by the way, remain at the same customary price: $3 for a box seat, $2 for a seat in the grandstands. And an extra fifty cents off if you’re a senior or a kid.

  Standing room only. The PawSox have hired seventeen security guards from the Pinkerton Agency to help keep order, including a retired electrician named Walter Wassmer, who remembers working on the construction of McCoy Stadium back in 1938, when a five-ton truck disappeared into the swampy mire. Ted Dolan, a popular Pawtucket police officer who grew up across the street—and whose father was also among the legions of laborers who helped to build McCoy—is working crowd control, though now and then he adds to the crowd by waving in the occasional buddy without a ticket. One of these friends, a Massa-chusetts state trooper, had called ahead to ask if he could bring his son and a couple of his son’s friends. Sure, sure, Dolan had said, anything for a fellow guardian of the law. Only the trooper has shown up just now with half his son’s Little League team. Sweet Ted Dolan can only shoo them in, joking all the while that his friend should have simply invited the entire team.

  When the
umpires suspended this game at 4:09 on Easter Sunday morning, two months ago, just nineteen fans were left, along with two reporters. Time’s passage has not improved Angelo Cataldi’s sour opinion of McCoy Stadium, the Pawtucket Red Sox, and that godforsaken, gonads-freezing longest night, only now he has found further reason to hold the affair in contempt. From his press-box perch, he sees nearly six thousand happy, well-rested people, all basking in the warmth of a sunny early evening in late June—and all thinking they’re now entitled to say that they, too, were at the longest game in baseball history. Bullshit.

  Even innocent Danny Card feels this way. Danny Card, the nine-year-old boy who spent eight freezing hours watching that interminable game with his father, is now proud of his feat of faithful endurance. Sitting in the same seat in which he watched the first 32 innings, yet surrounded by hundreds of Johnny-come-latelies, Danny senses this precious, personal thing of his slipping away. It’s that feeling you get when you try to explain a neat dream to someone else, but the dream’s enchantment melts away with every word you say.