Bottom of the 33rd

by Dan Barry

  Sugar Bear swings at a third strike for the 60th strikeout of the game.

  Ojeda paces about the mound, wanting no interruption to his momentum, eager to face his next conquest, thinking: Whoever the fuck you are, just get in the box, make your out, and get out of the way. It’s the pinch hitter John Valle, entering his tenth minor-league season at the age of twenty-six. By the time Ojeda graduated from high school, Valle had already played for the Clinton Pilots in Iowa, the Lakeland Tigers in Florida, the Montgomery Rebels in Alabama, and the Evansville Triplets in Indiana, all of which is to say that John Valle is not intimidated by the pitcher before him. His younger brother, Dave, will rise from the minors to play thirteen years as a major-league catcher, but John will never get there. After fouling off three consecutive pitches, he hits a harmless fly ball to left field, a footnote.

  Three outs. Pawtucket roars. Ojeda jogs straight into the clubhouse, in search of a cup of tea to calm his nerves.

  In the press box, Bill George can hardly contain himself, so proud is he to be the official scorer, the artist of the uncompleted score sheet—the Book of Pawtucket—that he carefully preserved for two months, and which is now a bit of an attraction for broadcasters, reporters, and baseball aficionados. Though he normally dresses casually for games, George is wearing a blazer and tie tonight; it seemed appropriate. He has decided to use green ink for the start of the 33rd inning.

  Down in the home dugout, the batboy, Billy Broadbent, feels as though he is a part of a Yankees–Red Sox playoff game. He left his house especially early today, taking a shortcut up Greeley, across the railroad tracks, past the place that gives him a few bucks for recycled newspapers, past Palagi’s Ice Cream warehouse, and across Pariseau Field—all to see how big a deal this day would be. The answer: Big; real big. When Koza tossed the warm-up ball to him before the top of the 33rd, it seemed as though six thousand people watched Billy Broadbent make the catch.

  And in the third-base grandstand, Bob Brex, the state government employee who spent the longest night sitting by himself, in cold, mind-clearing seclusion, is now experiencing that night’s opposite. For the last week, reporters from newspapers, television stations, and radio programs have been interviewing him about his recollections of being one of the hardy few to endure the first 32 innings. And just a few minutes ago, a producer from NBC Nightly News accessorized Brex’s tan corduroy blazer with a remote microphone. The network apparently wants to share his reactions during the game’s resumption—with the nation. Two months ago, he watched this game alone; now he will have virtual millions sitting beside him.

  This faithful fan, the official scorer, the batboy, and thousands of others now watch as the Rochester pitcher strides toward the mound. A veteran of the major leagues, this pitcher, Steve Grilli, seems businesslike calm as he takes his warm-ups. You wouldn’t know to look at him, but not ten minutes ago, during the national anthem, he confided in a teammate that he hasn’t felt stomach butterflies like this in a long, long time. He feels like an outsider—a rookie, really—because he did not suffer through the eight-hour cold two months ago, or see the wind stop Sam Bowen’s sure home run, or share in any of the moments that have become part of the game’s epic narrative. He is also taken aback by the outsized attention that this one game is receiving.

  A child of Long Island, by way of Brooklyn, Grilli’s decade of professional baseball includes two full seasons and parts of two others in the major leagues, working mostly as a fastball-slider setup man out of the bullpen for the Detroit Tigers. But he is thirty-two years old, he has spent the last two years mired in the minor leagues, and he strongly senses that professional baseball is trying to tell him something. The game tried first with polite silence in 1979, when he pitched well for the Syracuse Chiefs but was not included in the September call-ups by the Toronto Blue Jays—a team that, to Grilli, seemed inordinately obsessed with youth. By last month, though, the game could no longer keep silent, and was all but shouting at Grilli as the Chiefs released him during a road trip to Columbus.

  Maybe Grilli should listen to the game. The road trips were getting harder, and he and his wife, Kathleen, have a two-year-old daughter, Stephanie, and a four-year-old son, Jason, who likes to play catch with his dad at their home in the Syracuse suburbs. Maybe the game was right; maybe it was time.

  Then, a few days after Grilli’s release, the game changed its mind. A Baltimore Orioles executive called him at home, around midnight, to offer him a job with the Rochester Red Wings, but said that the team needed an answer now, or else it would continue down its list of available pitchers and find someone else to fill the position. Although he was an experienced veteran, almost mentally prepared to start his life’s next adventure, Grilli could not suppress the faint but so familiar sensation of the possible. Maybe something will happen. Maybe the breaks will fall his way. Maybe he can make it back to the big leagues.

  If Grilli did not quite realize how old he seemed when he joined the Rochester team a couple of weeks ago, he got the message while making his introductory rounds in the clubhouse, and the young third baseman, Cal Ripken Jr., said he knew exactly who Steve Grilli was. He had seen Grilli pitch when Grilli was tearing up the Southern League for the Montgomery Rebels, and Ripken was with the Asheville Orioles—as its batboy. At this point, Grilli wishes the game would just make up its mind.

  Pawtucket’s leadoff hitter, the second baseman Marty Barrett, steps into the batter’s box and raises his eyes to meet Grilli’s downward glance, his uniform like a Rhode Island manifestation of Old Glory: blue helmet, white uniform, bright red number 4 on the back. Barrett plans to celebrate his twenty-third birthday today by doing something he rarely does, which is to swing at the first pitch. He expects a fastball. Grilli, who has faced the best hitters in baseball, winds up, throws—and releases a nervous pitch, one that catches Barrett unawares. He swivels to get out of the way, but the high-and-tight ball glances off his shoulder. In one seamless balletic move, Barrett drops his bat, breaks his fall with his outstretched hands, bounces up, and jogs off to accept the base he has just been awarded.

  Pawtucket’s acting manager, Mike Roarke, has said that if the PawSox win this game, he will accept all the praise, but if they lose, well, he was just following the orders of his friend and boss, Joe Morgan. Determined to advance Barrett to second base—where he can possibly score on a single—Roarke gives the signal for the hit-and-run, which means that Barrett will be running on the pitch to the batter, Chico Walker. Roarke figures that Grilli is a low-ball pitcher, Walker is a good low-ball hitter, and something good might happen. He figures right. Walker, crouched in concentration, his blue sliding glove dangling from his back pocket, grounds a 3-2 pitch past Grilli’s outstretched glove and into center field, allowing Barrett to round second base and easily reach third base, no sliding necessary.

  The murmurs and sporadic barks of the instantly invested crowd grow louder, as Pawtucket’s designated hitter, big Russ Laribee, approaches the plate, carrying a heavy bat and the heavier burden of his statistics in this game. He has struck out seven times—so often that players on the Rochester bench have been arguing about what the baseball term is for such failure. Seven strikeouts! If three strikeouts is a hat trick, has Laribee completed a double hat trick plus one? Laribee feels the embarrassment of his multiple whiffs more than he lets on, and is eager, make that determined, to seize his moment of redemption. Attuned to the come-on cheers of six thousand, he plans to hit the ball high and far enough for a home run—or, at least, for a sacrifice fly. Barrett will score, and Laribee, big Russ Laribee, will be the game-winning hero.

  This will not happen. The Rochester manager walks out to the mound to talk with his rattled pitcher, and their topic of discussion is so obvious that Laribee might as well participate in the conversation himself: intentional walk, a scheme to load the bases and create a force-out at home. And there is nothing that Laribee can do. An intentional walk is a formality in which the catcher stands to receive each pit
ch, purposely thrown far from the strike zone, and the batter is reduced to passive participant.

  Ball one. Laribee aches to swing. Ball two. But he cannot. Ball three. Each pitch is beyond his bat’s reach. Ball four.

  The walk thwarts the plans of Russ Laribee, who, a few weeks from now, will quit the team. “I just wanted to redeem myself,” he says after the game.

  No outs and the bases are loaded, a baseball term that suggests imminent explosion. All this awaits the next batter, Dave Koza. Since the early-morning suspension of this game sixty-five days ago, Koza has known that when play resumed, he would be Pawtucket’s fourth batter up. He has visualized this at bat on an endless loop in hotel rooms along the International League circuit and in his own bedroom just down the street from McCoy, his new wife snuggled by his side, the two of them talking so much about it that they finally agreed to stop talking about it altogether. He has dreamed of it, really, ever since his father strung up some chicken wire to transform a plot of Wyoming nothingness into a Little League ball field; dreamed of the pitch, his game-winning hit, and the world’s joyous reaction. Now he carries the Louisville Slugger that the awed batboy placed in the bat-rack slot reserved for Koza, and he wears the blue helmet stained with the sweat of his teammate Mike Ongarato, a hat that lately seems to be granting him good luck at the plate. Moments ago, Ongarato urged him to wear this helmet once more, saying something that makes sense only in a baseball dugout: The helmet’s got a lot of hits in it.

  Across the field, Doc Edwards hitches his uniform belt and ambles out to remove the baseball from the grasp of a dejected Steve Grilli, who, in eleven quick pitches, has allowed all three batters he has faced to reach base. This will be Grilli’s last season in professional baseball; he will not return to the major leagues—although twenty years from now, his little son, Jason, always itching to play catch, will follow his father onto the fields of the major leagues.

  A new pitcher, a right-hander named Cliff Speck, approaches from the visiting team’s bullpen, a barren stretch beside a large roll of green tarp, on the first-base side. Like Grilli, the six-foot-four Speck only joined the Red Wings a few weeks ago, after his promotion from Double-A, and so does not share the depth of emotional investment that his teammates have in this game. Still, for all the disproportionate hysteria surrounding what is really nothing more than another minor-league game in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, he enjoys when everything is on the line and up to him. Besides, he has no time to get nervous. It’s either do it or don’t.

  While Speck warms up, a thought occurs to Roarke, Pawtucket’s third-base coach and acting manager. He motions for Koza to meet him halfway between third and home. With arms folded across his chest, the veteran coach asks the young player: Have you ever laid down a squeeze bunt? In other words, do you have the confidence and bat skill to participate in one of baseball’s most daring and difficult plays by dropping a surprise bunt at the precise moment that Barrett comes charging home from third? If you miss the ball, Barrett is a sure out. If you pop the ball up, both you and Barrett are out. So, the question is, young man: Have you ever laid down a squeeze bunt?

  The young man’s stunned expression seems to suggest that one of the two people in this conversation has suddenly gone mad. Never mind, Roarke says. Go get ’em.

  Koza steps into the batter’s box to begin his brief maintenance routine of mind and space, smoothing out the dirt with his left cleat, working a chunk of Dubble Bubble chewing gum hard enough to tighten the definition of his jaw. His chest pounds as his subconscious processes all the hitting advice he has received over the years, from his father on Torrington grass to Ted Williams in the Pawtucket clubhouse. Ted Williams, who made him cry once. But Koza is clear-eyed now. Keep the bat close to your body, he is thinking. Hold the handle light, on the fingertips. Protect the plate, but don’t get suckered. Drive the ball into the outfield. Drive the ball.

  Up in the stands, Bob Brex, wired with a microphone to the nation, fears a ground-out double play. He wishes for a sacrifice fly. He speaks for all of Pawtucket as he commands Koza from afar: Get it in the air! Get it in the air!

  Before Koza even knows it, the count is 1 and 1.

  “This is the most attention that the city of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, has had since a number of years back, when, believe it or not, the camel at the local zoo here got drunk,” says Tom Marr, a radio announcer who normally handles Baltimore Orioles games. “That’s true. It is true. And they got a lot of national attention because the camel trampled the watchman and had to be shot. Here’s the next pitch. It’s out of the strike zone, two-and-one count.

  “Well, it happened. It actually happened. The camel went berserk, they had to shoot the camel, and animal lovers from all over the country sent nasty letters to the mayor of Pawtucket. Bases loaded.

  “Here’s the pitch to the next batter. It’s fouled off again, two balls and two strikes the count.”

  With two strikes on him, Koza fouls off another pitch; in baseball parlance, he stays alive. Somewhere to his left, waiting to bat next, is Wade Boggs, so gifted a hitter that he will surely drive in the winning run if given the chance. And directly behind Koza, as always, is his wife, Ann, sitting in one of the choice seats reserved for the wives and girlfriends of the players. Every pitch seems to rob her of breath as she prays for Dave to hit a home run—a grand slam!—only to pull back, out of fear that she might be asking too much of God. A hit. That’s all. A hit to win the game.

  Speck is a statue, his very stillness a form of intimidation. He cradles the precious ball in his right hand, out of Koza’s view, and peers from under the bill of his red Rochester cap in the direction of home plate. Koza steps out of the batter’s box to compose himself. Two strikes. He engages again in an at bat’s subtle formalities, equal parts courtesy, anxiety, and focus. He smooths the dirt. He takes a practice swing. He steps back in and taps his raised left cleat with the barrel of the bat held in his left hand. He taps the plate with the bat’s nose at precisely the same time that he adjusts his blue helmet with his right hand. Finally, he points his bat at the pitcher in a manner that lacks any hint of threat; that says, almost politely, Ready when you are. Behind him, the crouching catcher, Floyd Rayford, waves his mitt down, down, down, reminding Speck to keep the ball low.

  Koza catches sight of the ball just as it unscrews from Speck’s grasp: a curve. A knee-buckler, spinning with the promise of evasion, heading directly for Koza. At this moment he is forced to confront his demon, the curveball, which, more than anything else, has kept him from playing in the major leagues. Undermining his years of hard work, making him look foolish, derailing his plans. He cannot escape it, the curve. Speck, meanwhile, bent at the waist and with his face recalibrating from the exertion, is happy with this low, away, and nearly unhittable pitch. He is thinking: “No way.”

  Koza’s waist snaps, his upper body follows, his powerful arms extend. His bat of ash transforms into an extension of himself, all his hopes and fears carried in its barrel. He’s chasing a pitch just as he has chased a major-league career, hoping to make contact with the elusive. He reaches out and, almost apologetically, connects. His discarded bat twirls to the ground, as time slows again in Pawtucket.

  The softly hit ball flutters past the runner on third base, Marty Barrett, who stutters in place as he tries to discern its destination and meaning. It floats in a tease over the head of the helpless third baseman, Cal Ripken Jr., whose storied major-league career has yet to begin, and descends well in front of the defeated left fielder, Keith Smith, whose brief major-league career has already passed. Then, having served its purpose, the ball falls to deliver a good-night kiss to the grass.

  Barrett scores, confirming the victory with a foot touch of home plate, his right hand raised to create what will become the game’s iconic image. The Pawtucket Red Sox win, 3–2. After 33 innings, this game is blessedly, mercifully, over.

  Only eighteen minutes were needed to finish what had taken eight hours and seven min
utes to begin, an American opera whose cast included sons from the east and the west, the north and the far, far south; children of farmers and mill workers, bus drivers and truck drivers, firefighters and aerospace engineers, soldiers and toy-store owners and gospel singers, all trying to get someplace else.

  Here comes a whooping Wade Boggs, clutching his unneeded bat, to slap Barrett’s hand. Here comes Ojeda, now the winning pitcher of the longest game in baseball history, and Bowen, and Smithson, and Gedman, and Aponte, and Valdez, and the rest of the Pawtucket players, charging onto the field as if they have just won the major-league world championship, and not a midseason minor-league game of little consequence. Here comes Billy Broadbent, the batboy, to retrieve the bat for safekeeping, until it is forwarded to the Hall of Fame. And here, here is Dave Koza, who has leapt onto the first-base bag in triumph and is now jogging back to receive hugs and handshakes and helmet taps of affirmation. His giddy teammates, jumping up and down, create a cocoon around Koza as they all but carry him into the clubhouse, where a crush of reporters wait to chronicle his words and announce his heroics to a country deprived of its baseball. The conclusion elicits a prolonged exhalation from the ghosts and girders of McCoy Stadium, as the smoky voice of Peggy Lee teases from its loudspeakers:

  Is that all there is? Is that all there is? If that’s all there is, my friends, then let’s keep dancing. Let’s break out the booze and have a ball…

  The official scorekeeper, Bill George, applies the final touches to his score sheet, a multicolored study of baseball codes that has taken more than two months to complete. He began recording this game in blue ink, then moved to red, then black. Now, in his ink of hopeful green, he meticulously prints the following at the bottom of his artwork, soon to be acquired by the Hall of Fame: