Bottom of the 33rd

by Dan Barry

  LONGEST GAME IN BASEBALL HISTORY

  PAWTUCKET 3—ROCHESTER 2

  33 INNINGS—8:25

  MCCOY STADIUM—PAWTUCKET, R.I.

  APRIL 18–19 JUNE 23, 1981

  Who notices the others, the Rochester Red Wings, the bills of their scarlet caps pointed downward, following their long shadows toward the refuge of the dugout reserved for visitors? Their failure has rendered them all but invisible. A form of some redemption will soon come. Wise Doc Edwards will ease Steve Grilli’s pain by sending him back out to the mound for tonight’s second game, where he will pitch three nearly perfect innings in a Rochester win almost instantly forgotten. Years from now, as the father of a major-league pitcher, Jason Grilli, and as the approachable owner of a sports bar in Syracuse called the Change of Pace, Grilli will enjoy the distinction this loss grants him. Tonight, though, aching with the sense that he has miserably failed his new teammates, he exudes only maturity and class while answering question after question about how it feels to be the losing pitcher in baseball’s longest game.

  “This is more than a loss for Steve Grilli,” he says. “I let the team down. I wasn’t even here back in April when they struggled for the first thirty-two innings. I missed all that cold and all that wind. I come in and pitch one inning and lose it all for them.”

  His downcast teammate, Cliff Speck, who will briefly reach the major leagues five long years from now, is answering similar questions about history, and legacy, and how does it feel to give up the walk-off single that he still cannot believe Koza managed to golf for a hit.

  “I guess I’ll be like that fellow who gave up that homer to Bobby Thomson,” he says, referring to the hit that won the National League pennant for the New York Giants in 1951. “What was his name?”

  “Ralph Branca,” someone answers, as if to confirm for the twenty-four-year-old how, in baseball, some moments do not fade.

  A few paces from there, in the home team’s clubhouse, a water pipe bursts to baptize some of the joyous Pawtucket players and to assert the old stadium’s dominion, while Ben Mondor hugs anyone in a PawSox uniform, and Russ Laribee tells people how much he wishes he had gotten his chance, and Lou Schwechheimer helps to compile the eye-popping final statistics—219 at bats? 60 strikeouts?—and Joe Morgan keeps saying that the elevation of the hardworking Koza to hero is pure justice. “He’s been here about as long as anyone,” he says.

  Ah, but for how long? Surely, Boston’s front office will take notice that Dave Koza can hit in the clutch. And if there’s no room on the Red Sox roster, every team in the country will know who Koza is by morning, when his name and photograph will adorn the nation’s sports pages, and he and Cal Ripken Jr. will appear, live, on Good Morning America, his triumph shared between news of President Reagan’s plan for the lagging economy and a review of Cannonball Run, a new movie starring Burt Reynolds, Farrah Fawcett, and Dom DeLuise. In a moment of pure, absurd Americana, Koza and Ripken will stand in McCoy’s left field while the show’s host, the urbane actor John Forsythe, who in his youth worked as a public-address announcer for the Brooklyn Dodgers, sits in a studio in New York City, directing his somewhat misinformed questions to a small television screen.

  FORSYTHE (polished): Now you, Dave, you tied the ball game, didn’t you, in the 32nd inning. And then you won it last night. How’d you do that?

  KOZA (nervous): Well, we led off the inning. Marty Barrett led it off, he got hit by a pitch. Then Chico Walker came up—(a pause to swallow)—had a base hit up the middle. Doc Edwards, their manager, came out and decided to walk Russ Laribee. Well, there it was, bases loaded, no one out, and I’m up at the plate. I just—I just wouldn’t want to be anywhere else right then.

  FORSYTHE (joking): You made sure you touched first base, though, didn’t you?

  KOZA (earnest): Yes, I did….

  FORSYTHE (concluding): Well, you’ve created history, fellas. It was a great ball game. And congratulations to you all, winners and losers.

  KOZA AND RIPKEN (relieved): Thank you.

  FORSYTHE (moving on): We’ll find out how to take advantage of the hot weather to change your eating habits and get yourself in better shape. After this…

  That will be tomorrow’s glory. Tonight, the hero, still wearing his Pawtucket Red Sox uniform and cap, stands just outside the home team clubhouse, in front of a sign on the pale yellow wall that reads, NO AD-MITTANCE, TEAM PERSONNEL AND CLUBHOUSE PASSES ONLY. He has blue eyes, shaggy brown-blond hair, and a full mustache that suggests he knows the wide-open spaces. Behind him stands a Pawtucket police officer, his distended belly testing the fabric of his light blue uniform shirt, his smiling face a beam of admiration and envy. And embracing the hero, his new wife, in crisp white shirt and dungarees, her blond hair lustrous and long down her back. He gently rocks her back and forth, as though preparing them both for their next springing step.

  The ballplayer kisses his wife, and pulls her closer with a hand snug in a batting glove.

  Koza connects.

  Pawtucket Red Sox

  Barrett scores.

  Pawtucket Red Sox

  THIRTY YEARS LATER

  Dave Koza at Ben Mondor’s funeral, October 2010.

  Providence Journal

  Dave Koza stores his baseball memories in plastic bins that he tucks away in the spare bedroom of his small home in Pawtucket, less than three miles from McCoy Stadium. Pry open the lid to any one of these tubs and his boyish past is released: the intermingled hints of Skoal, Ben-Gay, and fresh-cut grass; the hand-clap echoes of hits, the swing-and-miss grunts, the last calls at My Brother’s Pub. He keeps them all here, the bits and pieces of his baseball years, jumbled together, measured less by the passage of days than by the statistics of the seasons, the singular moments: 1976 (.281 batting average); 1979 (27 home runs); 1981 (the longest game).

  In the thirty years since Koza ended a 33-inning baseball marathon with a soft, dreamy single over Cal Ripken’s head, the story of this sporting event has proven susceptible to the truth-altering charms of myth and memory. There is no malicious intent in the retold tales, no evidence of self-promoting embellishment. But the improbable nature of that Holy Saturday night and Easter Sunday morning seems to have encouraged narrative embroidery, as though the participants and witnesses of baseball’s longest game remain hypnotized by the flames dancing and writhing from the burning bats in the dugout barrels. Some will remember that a cold mist fell, that temperatures dropped below freezing, and that a car hit a transformer on a Pawtucket street, knocking out power to the stadium lights right before the game’s scheduled start; none of this is true. Some accounts will say that twenty-seven fans were present at the end of the 32nd inning; Ben Mondor, the owner, swore by nineteen. Some will say that Harold Cooper, the president of the International League, did not pick up the telephone that night because he was at a wedding, or was driving home to Ohio from Indianapolis; Cooper said he was at home that night, asleep, when Pawtucket called with news of a runaway game. Some will insist that Luis Aponte, the pitcher whose unhappy wife turned him away at their apartment door, slept on the trainer’s table; he insisted he returned home and slept cozily beside his wife. The Pawtucket pitcher Bruce Hurst, future major-league hero, genetically incapable of telling an untruth, often recalls how he struck out Ripken on a 3-2 curve at four o’clock in the morning. In his major-league career, Hurst struck out Ripken seven times in 45 at bats—but he did not strike Ripken out in the longest game. This is a reflection not on the decent, straight-up Bruce Hurst, but of the late-hour exhaustion that infused the night with certain enchantment.

  Dave Koza often encounters these exaggerations. People will approach him at, say, Chelo’s restaurant on Newport Avenue, or maybe at the Ground Round restaurant, next to where the old Howard Johnson motor inn used to be, and ask: Aren’t you the guy who hit the home run to win the longest game? “No, no,” he always answers, in a gee-whiz sort of way. “It was just a little base hit to left.”

  But the
se plastic bins of his, sitting in an extra room of his house, contain no embellishments or misunderstandings about the past. They hold only facts: baseball ephemera and personal scraps that, when assembled in rough chronology, tell part of the story of one man’s heroic journey.

  Plaques and photographs and Florida State League yearbooks. Some minor-league baseball cards. A couple of Association of Professional Ball Players of America identification cards. A photograph of Pawtucket first baseman Dave Koza standing beside Boston first baseman Carl Yastrzemski. A letter that Koza wrote to his parents in Wyoming, on Boston Red Sox Baseball Club stationery, back in 1979: Baseball is still trying to treat me good. I’ve been hitting the ball better. 16 HRs, 45 RBIs out of about 45 hits! My average is .223. Darn that ave. anyway….

  A copy of Koza’s 1981 contract: Club hereby employs Player to render, and Player agrees to render, skilled services as a professional baseball player for Club… For the performance of all of the skilled services as aforesaid by Player and for Player’s promises herein contained, Club will pay Player, therefore, at the rate of $2,400 per month…

  Here are some videocassettes, labeled in pen along their black spines. One reads, “Dave Baseball” another, “Dave—Ball—1981.” A third reads, “Star Trek and Good Morning America,” as if to confirm the oddity of that long-ago interview with John Forsythe, the two of them, Ripken and Koza, standing in McCoy’s left field, talking by remote to an actor who once starred for Alfred Hitchcock:

  “Hello, fellas!”

  “Hello.”

  “’Lo.”

  Here is a yellowed letter from the United States Senate:

  June 25, 1981

  Dear Dave:

  I might have known that it would take a Wyoming boy to end the longest game in the history of baseball. Congratulations!

  …I hope things go well for you this season and throughout a long and distinguished career. If they would just settle this disheartening strike, maybe you could make your major-league debut yet this year.

  Congratulations and best wishes,

  Malcolm Wallop

  United States Senator

  And here is a note that Ann Koza sent to his parents. She was always so diligent that way—the president, treasurer, and secretary of her own private Dave Koza Fan Club:

  July 10, 1981

  Hello Everybody!!!…

  Things are still coming in from that big game for Dave. He won a travel bag from the Gillette “This Week in Baseball” show. Fan mail is still coming by the heaps. He got a letter from his first-grade teacher in Florida….

  Dave got another home run last night. Number 13. His average is now .280, give or take a point. Hopefully the strike will end and his chances of being sent up at the end of the season are looking mighty good….

  It never happened.

  During the 1981 season, the Boston Red Sox summoned six players from Pawtucket. Dave Koza, the hero of the longest game in baseball history, was not among them. He finished the year with 18 home runs and a .268 batting average, learned that he would not be among the so-called September call-ups, again, and turned to Ann, again, to pose the question that she had no hope of answering: Why?

  Then, as always, he filled the aching silence with an “Oh well,” or a “Maybe it’s not meant to be,” and Ann just wanted to yell at him to say something, do something, let Boston know how you feel! “But I couldn’t,” she recalled, many years later, tears trickling down from her large eyes. “I didn’t want to make him feel bad. And I would just feel—so bad.”

  Once more, they took that long 1,900-mile drive back to Wyoming, where some of the excitement and importance of the longest game got lost in transit between Pennsylvania and Colorado. People had heard about the game, of course, and were impressed by the letter Dave had received from a United States senator, but down at the Broncho Bar, a few still rudely asked why he hadn’t made it yet—as though reaching the major leagues was merely a matter of promotion based on seniority. Cactus, his good buddy from Torrington, often changed the subject. Dave, meanwhile, returned to working construction, turned twenty-seven years old, got his head straight, and prepared for another spring by throwing a ball against the town gymnasium’s concrete wall, whop, whop, whop.

  For Koza, the 1982 season mirrored his 1981 season, save for the absence of any heroics worthy of national celebration. Of course, there was the time that Cactus and his wife surprised Dave by showing up at McCoy one night. Cactus arrived just as Dave was swinging a bat in the on-deck circle, and started calling out a nickname from the old days that only Dave would know.

  “Hey, Hutch! Hutcher!”

  The all-business mask dropped from Koza’s face, the bat from his hands. He ran over and greeted his pal in the stands, who knew him when. “And then he hit a home run for us,” Cactus later recalled.

  They heard about this remarkable moment back in Torrington, but no one in Pawtucket, or Boston, particularly cared. Koza hit the same number of home runs (18), hit for nearly the same average (.259), and hit up against the same spirit-crushing disappointment. Ojeda, Hurst, and Gedman were up with Boston for good now, it seemed, and Wade Boggs had made the most of his long-awaited chance, hitting .349 to end any doubt that he belonged in the major leagues. Marty Barrett spent some time with the Boston Red Sox, as did Julio Valdez, and Roger LaFrancois—but not Koza. His exclusion from the list of September call-ups surprised several of his colleagues in Pawtucket, from the dugout to the front office. The Elkman, they agreed, at least had earned a sip of coffee.

  By the end of 1982, with the Pawtucket Red Sox some 14 games out of first place, and winter approaching for the uninvited, Koza could no longer keep to himself a question that had nagged at him for the better part of six years. He had wearied of dreaming the same teasing dream, over and over, only to wake up to his Pawtucket reality. One evening in Syracuse, while shagging some fly balls during batting practice, Koza saw Joe Morgan standing alone, fungo bat in hand, and decided that now was as good a time as any to ask.

  “What do you think, Joe?”

  In many ways, these two men were east-west opposites. Morgan had that sideways Irish wit, and seemed to enjoy savoring the etymological taste of every one of the many words to pour from his mouth; Koza seemed to wait an extra beat before speaking a single earnest word. Morgan externalized his anger; Koza kept his in, mostly. Morgan liked to bet on horses; Koza liked to shoot elk. Still, they had spent much of the last six years together, sharing in the daily dramas at McCoy, traveling from Tidewater to Toledo and back again, staying in the same damn hotels, eating at the same damn restaurants. They understood each other.

  Morgan, a dreamer himself, did not relish this part of his job. You couldn’t very well go around telling most of your minor-league ballplayers that they’d never make the major leagues; if you did that, you wouldn’t be able to field a team. Still, Morgan never wanted to be complicit in another man’s delusions. He knew that baseball players often need to hear someone else articulate the thoughts they harbor but cannot bring themselves to say aloud. And if a young man, who in baseball terms may not be so young anymore, asked Morgan straight out—Hey, Joe, I won’t hold nothing against you, but do you think I’ll ever play in the big leagues?—he felt morally required to provide either encouragement or release. To say yes or no.

  Now comes the Elkman, Dave Koza, seeking a way out of baseball limbo. Big, strong, mature. A calming influence in the dugout, and someone who always had his teammates’ backs. (Who can forget that time a batter for the Toledo Mud Hens charged the mound, intent on harming the Pawtucket pitcher Mike Smithson, and Koza came out of nowhere and leveled the guy with a crushing tackle?) Good with the glove. Strong arm. Lots of power. And no question: He had put up some decent numbers over the years in Triple-A, the penultimate level of baseball, an extraordinarily difficult game to play well.

  But Dave Koza fell just short. He did not dominate. He lacked consistency. And Joe Morgan gently, firmly, told him so.

 
There it was. All those hot summers spent at that boys’ baseball camp in Oklahoma, raking the field, wearing itchy woolen uniforms; all those dozens of games played in college and in the semiprofessional summer leagues; all those hundreds of games with Elmira, Winter Haven, Bristol, and, of course, Pawtucket. The endless fielding drills: learning the proper footwork for covering first base; knowing where to stand as the cutoff man for a throw from the outfield; how to execute a 3-6-3 double play. The endless batting practice: Dave, you’re dropping your shoulder; Dave, you’ve got your shoulder too high; Dave, hips ahead of hands. The many injuries, including the time he wore a batting glove for several days to control the swelling and hide the discoloration on a bruised hand he wanted to keep secret. All the little things, the little things. How about the time in Rochester, when he got hit in the head by a fastball that cracked his helmet and left him flat in the dirt, stunned, looking up and seeing the concerned faces of Sammy Bowen and Joe Morgan. The next night in Syracuse, in his first at bat: home run.

  All of this, nearly two decades’ worth, dedicated to one pursuit: to become a major-league baseball player—even if just for one at bat that might not last a minute.

  His manager’s words stayed with him on the trip back to Pawtucket, as he cleaned out his locker at season’s end, and on the long ride with Ann, back to Wyoming for another winter. Whatever arguments he privately laid out before the Court of Baseball Fairness—Think of what I could learn just by being in a major-league clubhouse, talking baseball with major-league guys—were immediately shot down by the Morgan deposition, which might as well have been taken under oath. You lack consistency.

  Dave Koza turned twenty-eight. Ann Koza became pregnant. And from a gymnasium in Torrington came the lonely echoes of a ball bouncing against the wall. Whop. Whop. Whop.