Bottom of the 33rd

by Dan Barry

  The ache of possession shared by a boy, a sportswriter, and a band of a happy few is understandable, yet unrealistic; this game no longer belongs to them. Nor does it belong to Pawtucket, despite the national attention the game is drawing to its striving existence. “Not since the time they had to shoot the drunken camel at the city zoo has there been this much excitement in Pawtucket,” is how Bob Minzesheimer, a reporter for the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, began his setup story today. This was true: A few years ago, at the fast-declining Slater Park Zoo, the police shot and killed Kibubi the camel after it trampled a friendly caretaker to death. Although the police suspected that Kibubi was in the throes of a mating frenzy, Pawtucket’s mayor, Dennis Lynch, told Minzesheimer a more intoxicating version that involved the animal’s supposed ingestion of a fermented apple. (“It was all over the networks,” the mayor said of the incident. “I got letters from schoolchildren in Seattle saying what meanies we were to shoot the camel.”)

  There is no question that this baseball game grants to the city the rare publicity that is refreshingly unrelated to closed mills, a depleted downtown, or the execution of a zoo animal—or two. (Just two years ago, Frosty the polar bear died in a police SWAT team’s barrage of bullets, after vandals set him loose to wander in a residential area.) Here is a television crew from London, the British flag affixed to the side of its camera, filming every stretch and toss by the players as they loosen up. Here are reporters from New York and Chicago and even Japan, hovering around the cage, watching Sam Bowen take batting practice. And a few days ago, producers from Good Morning America asked the two teams to provide one player each for a morning-after interview. Rochester’s manager, Doc Edwards, immediately chose his third baseman, Cal Ripken Jr.: articulate, telegenic, on his way. But Pawtucket’s manager, Joe Morgan, spent the night thinking about his choice before deciding on his first baseman, Dave Koza: steady, hardworking, uncertain. No matter which team wins, Ripken and Koza will be standing in front of a camera early tomorrow morning, telling the country about the biggest, longest game of their lives. That is, if the game is over by then.

  The sun takes its time finding rest somewhere beyond the triple-deckers in the left-field distance, giving off enough warmth to allow the umpires to wear their light blue short-sleeve shirts. About the only element this cozy night seems to share with its cold Holy Saturday counterpart, in fact, is the leveling air of the absurd. In the dugout, a British reporter quiets the never-quiet Joe Morgan by asking the baseball lifer when he expects this “match” to end. In the press box, Bob Drew, who was fired as Rochester’s general manager just days after broadcasting the game’s first 32 innings, is preparing to call the 33rd inning for a Baltimore radio station, making him perhaps the first broadcaster in baseball history to start a game for one station and end it with another. In the stands, the man in street clothes who casually sits down beside the sportswriter Peter Gammons turns out to be Win Remmerswaal, Pawtucket’s enigmatic and, until this moment, AWOL pitcher, who was last seen a few days ago in Columbus, performing a late-night striptease in a bar, as if to live up to his nickname of “Last Call” Remmerswaal. And somewhere around here, maybe, just maybe, there lurks a prominent American novelist. A few weeks ago, a man telephoned McCoy Stadium to say that news of the longest game had inspired him to consider writing a play about it. He wanted to know how far Pawtucket is from Manhattan, and whether he could reserve a seat for this curious game’s conclusion. The call could easily have been a prank or a misunderstanding. Just in case, a press pass has been set aside for a Philip Roth, never to be claimed.

  All these reporters, scrambling to record the chorus of just-glad-to-be-here clichés. All these photographers, seeking that unguarded hint of ambition revealed in a Triple-A face. All these people in the stands, talking at once to create an ocean’s hum that washes over the anxious players like an affirming wave. Elsewhere, Major League Baseball is on strike. But here, the cruel truth that professional baseball is an often ruthless business has been left outside the gate. What is unfolding at McCoy tonight is a purer interpretation of the game—baseball without sin—in which the story line includes the Pawtucket right fielder’s throwing out a runner at home in the top of the 32nd inning, but not the freezing Rochester center fielder’s mutterings to the cold, cold night, fuck, fuck, fuck. Up in Cooperstown, the Hall of Fame has already prepared an exhibit on this game, still in need of conclusion.

  Taking in all the hoopla is a left-handed pitcher named Bob Ojeda, warming up now in Pawtucket’s left-field bullpen. He’s already acquainted with the major leagues, and he knows that he will return. The Red Sox front office has just informed him that he will soon be called up to Boston, no matter that his major-league debut last year was just short of forgettable. Still, he is grateful for the attention being paid now to beleaguered McCoy—grateful not for himself, but for his team-mates, his brothers, many of whom will never know the rush of taking your position on a major-league field, and sensing the respect, even the adulation, of tens of thousands at once. He has experienced that high, but what about the men he eats, sleeps, and travels with? Here are three of them now, Boggs, Laribee, and Koza, heroic in their virgin white uniforms of polyester, stretching their legs and swinging their weighted bats along the left-field foul line, their shadows reaching far across the outfield’s olive grass. Boggs, left unprotected by the Boston organization over the winter, but attracting no interest from other major-league teams. Laribee, a big deal in Double-A, but clearly out of sorts at this level. And Koza, earnest, lionhearted Koza, with that big hole in his swing; just can’t seem to get his batting average up. Some of these guys, you know—you just know—that they are not going to make it, Ojeda thinks. But at least they will have this night.

  Ojeda is twenty-three. Three years ago, he was the married father of a six-month-old girl, working as a landscaper for his brother-in-law in Visalia, the hub of central California’s San Joaquin Valley, when the Boston Red Sox offered him a shot. He signed for very little money and a plane ticket to rookie league at the other end of the continent, in Elmira, New York. He bought a suit, a pair of shoes, and a farewell dinner for his parents. His father, who upholsters furniture, and his mother, who works for the school system as an interpreter for Mexican migrants, will always have a photograph of their smiling son, standing at the doorway of a plane that will take him away.

  What Ojeda knew of New York came from movies and television, so he imagined Elmira to be a sophisticated suburb of Manhattan, which it is not. Elmira is an old railroad and manufacturing city of about thirty-five thousand people, some 235 miles to the northwest, where a notorious Civil War prisoner-of-war camp was once located, where Mark Twain once lived, and where Bob Ojeda experienced daily discouragement. Owning no car and crammed into a shoebox apartment with his young family, Ojeda’s enduring image of his time in Elmira will be of pushing a wobbly cart filled with groceries down a wet, busy road, while in the midst of compiling a record of six losses and just one win.

  But Ojeda had a determination about him that intrigued his superiors. He imagines that his evaluation back then read something like: “Sucks. But he’s hungry. He’s trying.” He got himself invited to an off-season instructional league in Florida, where he became the willing student of Johnny Podres, a retired left-handed pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers who was known for his mental toughness. Podres taught Ojeda how to throw a changeup and how to give more snap to his curveball. The next year, in Single-A ball in Winter Haven, Ojeda was 15 and 7.

  Last year, after pitching without distinction in seven games for Boston, where he half expected the security guards at Fenway to tackle him before he reached the mound, Ojeda was sent back to Pawtucket. When the season ended, he bought a weather-beaten Dodge van and drove the three thousand miles back to Visalia, where he promptly enrolled in a martial-arts class. If he had to drill a batter during a game, he wanted to be able to defend himself when that batter charged the mound.

  Warming up on the sidel
ines now, his bushy brown hair billowing out from under his blue baseball cap, his mustache lending a touch of menace, Bob Ojeda has set aside his thoughts of gratitude for this special night. The longest game will be the career highlight for others, but not for him. He will pitch for the Boston Red Sox and then for the New York Mets; while with New York, he will beat Boston in a World Series game and share a championship at the expense of several of his teammates tonight. He will pitch for the Los Angeles Dodgers for two years. Then, in 1993, he will report to spring training in Florida for the Cleveland Indians, only to suffer a horrible head injury in a boating accident that will kill two of his new teammates. Four and a half months later, after scalp surgery and counseling and a mind-clearing trip to Sweden, he will return to the mound. His 2 innings in relief on that night will be remembered less for the home run that Cal Ripken Jr. hit off him than for the healing ovation he received from the Baltimore fans, and for the image of Bob Ojeda tugging on a baseball cap that covered the scars. After playing out the season with the Indians, Ojeda will pitch 3 poor innings for the New York Yankees in 1994, before accepting a major-league wink that it was time to retire.

  Now, though, as Ojeda finishes his warm-ups, he summons the gritty resolve that will someday guide him through trauma and loss. He knows that a few hours ago, he cockily told Mondor not to worry: that the PawSox will win; that he will win. His thoughts turn to his Rochester opponents. Fuck these guys.

  Time, again.

  The same three umpires are back: Jack Lietz, Tony Maners, and, behind the plate, Denny Cregg. They shoo away the gaggle of photographers and camera operators curled around home plate, but not before posing for photographs with the Rochester manager, Doc Edwards, and Pawtucket’s pitching coach, Mike Roarke, standing in place of the manager, Joe Morgan, who was thrown out back in the 22nd inning—sixty-five days ago—and is returning again to his secret vantage point, where he can watch the game from a peephole a few yards from home plate. It is the top of the 33rd inning, the score is tied, 2–2, and the country is listening and watching by radio and television broadcast, in Seattle, in St. Louis, in Chicago and Baltimore and Boston and New York. Pawtucket is everywhere.

  Play ball.

  The assembled ballplayers have waited for this rare moment—this exquisite chance to excel in the spotlight. “Being the hero of that game would be the ultimate,” Wade Boggs said the other day. “You’d like to win the MVP, the batting title, things like that, but nothing compares to winning the longest game.”

  Angelo Cataldi agreed, writing: “Emerge as the hero in baseball’s longest game, and everyone from Kennebunkport to Podunk is going to know your name and your story.”

  Right now, though, they are all nobodies, including Bob Ojeda, who stands on the McCoy mound, comfortable, at home. The Pizzeria Regina billboard over his left shoulder, the Miller High Life sign over his right: his wall art. The many fans: his guests. The Red Wings: fuck them. Easter’s over. He waits impatiently for the leadoff hitter, Dallas Williams, to set himself at home plate. Williams is only twenty-three, but he feels the imminence of history’s sneering judgment. He knows that the game’s box score has shadowed him for weeks:

  Dallas Williams: 0 for 12.

  Flied to left in the 1st inning. Flied to right in the 4th. Grounded to short in the 6th. Laid down a sacrifice bunt in the 8th. Popped to third in the 11th. Flied to left in the 13th. Struck out in the 15th. Popped to third in the 17th. Lined to short in the 19th. Grounded to first in the 22nd. Grounded to second in the 23rd. Grounded to second in the 26th. Laid down a sacrifice bunt in the 28th. Grounded to the pitcher in the 31st.

  Yes, he knows that the box score chronicles a game of singular futility by Williams, Dallas, center field. But here is another chance, probably his last, to get a hit and halt the repetition of failure reflected in the game’s statistics. A left-handed hitter, he seeks the same comfort in the batter’s box that Ojeda feels on the mound, setting his left foot at the back edge of the plate, then planting his right foot so that his feet and shoulders are square, natural. He prefers a lighter bat, a 31-ouncer, to help him be quick to the ball. He begins to spin that light bat now, finding in this athletic movement a winding up of focus. He does not believe in stillness. A few weeks ago, Earl Weaver, Baltimore’s manager, told him that he needs to put up better numbers in Triple-A to justify a promotion to the major leagues. This game will not help that cause, but he has to put his previous 12 at bats, along with Weaver’s words, out of his mind. Focus on this at bat.

  Ojeda is fuck-you ready. It is left-hander against left-hander. He rears back, then snaps a hard curveball that paralyzes Williams as it pops across the plate for a called strike one. The game begins, again. The crowd calls out its approval in a collective “Yeahhhhhh.”

  His next pitch is a ball, his third a fastball that Williams can only hit foul to the left side. Then comes another nasty Ojeda epithet. Williams swings mightily, but a little late. The ball arcs into the air, toward left field.

  The box score will never reflect that Dallas Williams grew up in the Gowanus Houses project in Brooklyn—a “red-brick mini-city” of five thousand people, as the New York Times once called it; that he was one of ten children raised by a father who drove buses and a mother who sang gospel; and that he almost chose singing hymns over playing baseball. The Williamses are a singing family, good enough to be known as the King Family of the Gowanus Houses, and to have recorded an album some fifteen years ago called The Irresistible Gospel Chords. Its cover features his mother and his five older siblings, all smiles in their choir gowns of powder blue. Williams will hear them forever in his head:

  Tell me, how did you feel when you

  Come out the wilderness, come out the wilderness

  Come out the wilderness, come out the wilderness

  Tell me how did you feel when you

  Come out the wilderness

  Leaning on the Lord…

  When he was old enough, Williams joined the group, eager to entwine his voice with those of his mother and siblings. But he also wanted to play sports, in emulation of his beloved older brother Mickey, a school-yard star. Before long his two emerging talents, singing gospel and playing baseball, were competing for his time, occasionally forcing him to skip baseball practice at Abraham Lincoln High School to rehearse with his family. These interruptions, though, did little to hinder his eye-opening skills as a hitter and a pitcher. In his senior year, he was voted the best high school baseball player in New York City, and was drafted in the first round by the Baltimore Orioles. So began twelve years of wandering through the minor leagues; of stepping up to bat more than five thousand times; of hitting a respectable .285; of constantly wondering why, why he was not getting much of a chance in the major leagues. When his playing days end, he will have appeared in just twenty big-league games, hitting 3 singles in 38 at bats for a lifetime average of .079.

  Williams will spend more time in the major leagues as a first-base coach, first for the Colorado Rockies and then for the Boston Red Sox, than as a player. But his career will remain mostly rooted in the minor leagues, where he will coach in Hickory, North Carolina; Springfield, Missouri; Gary, Indiana; on and on. Still, as demanding and as frustrating as the game can be, he will find comfort in its essential silliness. Three of his nine siblings will succumb to the crack and heroin plague that will sweep through the Gowanus Houses and all of New York City in a few years, including Mickey, who will smile forever into the future from the cover of the family’s gospel album. At times, Mickey’s ball-playing younger brother will not be able to listen to that album without choking up. Thank God for the distraction, the game, the job of baseball.

  The ball sails foul, and not that deep. The shortstop jogs over to track it down along the foul line. A lame pop fly to short. One out.

  Williams trots back to the Rochester dugout, his legacy cemented. From now on, whenever the longest game is discussed, it will be customary to recall that Dallas Williams went 0 for 13. Reporters
will joke that Williams had a bad month in one game. Players will assess their own poor performances with feigned humility before noting that at least they had a better game than Dallas Williams. His failure to get a hit will become an integral part of the game’s lore, taking its place beside the refusal of Luis Aponte’s wife to let him into their apartment, Sam Bowen’s near home run, Russ Laribee’s seven strikeouts, and Joe Morgan’s ejection. The cold wind blew, broken bats burned, and Dallas Williams went 0 for 13.

  But.

  One down. “And here comes J.R.,” a radio announcer from Baltimore says. “Cal Ripken Jr.”

  Ripken steps up to the plate, once again imagining himself whipping his barrel-heavy bat so fast it nearly bends. Every at bat matters; every at bat is with two outs, the bases loaded, in the bottom of the ninth of the seventh game of the World Series. Every at bat. He has been this way since he was a boy, wearing a baseball uniform as his everyday summer attire, emulating his father, committing himself to a life in which every at bat is life. It’s just who he is.

  What Ojeda is thinking, with all due respect, is fuck this guy. Ball one. A breaking pitch for ball two. Heater down the middle, strike one. Fuck this guy. Even after Ripken whips a single into left center field, Ojeda’s interior reaction is who gives a shit? A single? Go fuck yourself. Who’s up next? It’s just who he is.

  The batter is the catcher, Floyd Rayford, who entered the game back in the 18th inning as a pinch runner, which makes him a relative late-comer. He is twenty-three and goes by “Sugar Bear,” a nickname that refers to his disarming, will-do-anything personality as much as to his roly-poly physique. Don’t let the nickname fool you. Sugar Bear spent part of last year with the Orioles; he has already survived Earl Weaver in all his apoplectic glory. Bob Ojeda does not scare him.