Bottom of the 33rd

by Dan Barry

  The Pawtucket Red Sox began the 1983 season with a new manager and a new first baseman. After nine years in Pawtucket, with nothing more to prove, Joe Morgan moved on to become a scout in the Boston Red Sox organization. Ben Mondor, the owner of the PawSox, who once offered Morgan the world if he promised to stay, understood: Joe wanted his shot, too. And after four years as the team’s starting first baseman, Dave Koza was relegated to a secondary role as a late-inning defensive replacement, designated hitter, and bench warmer. The new manager who marginalized Koza had spent thirteen years in the minors, mostly as a first baseman, and had never played in the major leagues, while the player who replaced Koza at first was, like him, an inconsistent power hitter who would also never rise above Triple-A.

  When the season finally ended, Koza had 14 home runs, 44 runs batted in, and a lingering case of the baseball player maybes. Maybe I’m misreading the situation. Maybe another team will see what Boston clearly does not. Maybe the opinion of Joe Morgan, God love him, is not shared in Boston. He called Boston and made an appointment with Ed Kenney, a Red Sox vice president who, for many years, had been the organization’s director of player development. Soon Koza was taking the forty-five-mile drive to Fenway Park, a drive he had always imagined would be made under happier circumstances. His meeting with Kenney lasted ten minutes, if that. Their conversation was matter-of-fact, all business.

  Koza: Mr. Kenney, I’ve come up here to find out where I stand.

  Kenney: Well, Dave, you’re a free agent now, and no other team has expressed any interest in you.

  Koza: Does that mean that the Red Sox aren’t interested in me, either?

  Kenney: No, we’re not.

  Although the two men were sitting in an office in Boston, the moment drew Koza spiritually closer to all those brown-brick textile mills that defined his landscape in Pawtucket. A century and a half ago, an anonymous New England mill manager bluntly explained: When my machinery breaks down, I replace it; so too with my workers. And what was minor-league baseball, really, but pleasant millwork conducted outdoors? In exchange for setting aside your education and the development of marketable skills, you receive clubhouse pampering, fan adulation, and the faint chance of major-league ascension—but only as long as you stay healthy, put up numbers, and do not age. Ed Kenney had effectively informed Dave Koza, just short of twenty-nine years old, that he was a worn piece of machinery, no longer of use to the company. That most of us would love to play professional baseball—would gladly trade places with Dave Koza for the chance to hit even one home run before a cheering hometown crowd, in Pawtucket, or Bristol, or Elmira—only complicates the moment’s essential cruelty.

  The fired mill worker thanked the busy mill manager for his time, and returned to brown-brick Pawtucket. A few days later, his wife gave birth to their first child, Rebecca. His prolonged boyhood was over.

  The Koza family headed west again, first to Tunkhannock, to see Ann’s relatives, and then on to Torrington, where they moved in with Dave’s parents for the winter. All they knew of their future was that it now included this precious baby girl. Dave, though, struggled with the uncertainty. He had always been a baseball player pursuing a big-league dream, and now, suddenly, he was not. Like so many professional athletes before him, his career had ended abruptly, against his will, and he could no longer count on a grassy buffer to separate him from the real world. His mother even gave him a lunch pail with a thermos, as if to say: It’s time to go to work.

  Ann Koza could not bear to see her husband suffer. She sent Dave’s résumé to every major-league ball club, save for Boston, to alert them to the availability of Dave Koza, power-hitting first baseman, and the man who drove in the winning run in the longest game in baseball history. Several teams wrote back, saying that of course they knew who Dave Koza was, but, unfortunately, there were no suitable openings at this time. Without his knowledge, Ann also wrote a letter from the nonexistent Dave Koza Fan Club to the Boston Red Sox (going so far as to have a friend mail it from Rhode Island, so that the envelope would not have the telltale postage mark of Torrington, Wyoming). The letter all but begged Boston not to give up on Koza. No player gave more of himself.

  The Dave Koza Fan Club did not receive a response. The regret, the pain—the grief, really, over the death of a career—began to strain the relationship between Dave and Ann. For so long she had lived and died with her husband’s every at bat. Now she began to wonder whether Dave’s failure to reach the major leagues was her fault. Maybe if they hadn’t gotten married. Maybe if they hadn’t started a family….

  After a vague offer for Dave to become a player-coach in the Dominican Republic fell through, the Kozas returned to Pawtucket to figure out what to do next. Dave understood that his primary role in life was to be a father—and Becky gave him such joy—but, as he will put it, he was still wearing his career around his neck, like a gold medallion that said, Look at me. He could still walk into any bar in Pawtucket, be recognized, and enjoy a drink or two on the house. But he soon wearied of being asked about how he had almost, almost made it to the big leagues; in effect, he was being celebrated for his failure. He stopped going to games at McCoy Stadium.

  In 1984, a prominent local contractor, who had been a longtime booster of the PawSox, the kind of supporter who sponsored the annual Tenth Player Award, hired Koza as the manager and bartender of the Mill River Tavern, a restaurant in an old five-and-dime store in downtown Pawtucket that had been converted into a pleasant but unnervingly quiet warren of small shops. Koza had absolutely no experience in the food-service industry, but the job came with a salary and health benefits—plus tips. After more than a decade of worrying about curveballs and bat speed, he now focused on providing cups of soup and halves of sandwiches to the lunch crowd, then grappling with how to attract a dinner crowd to an emptied city core. He started taking a drink or two toward the end of his day to unwind and think.

  You could say that Dave Koza had been drinking ever since he was a fifteen-year-old high school sophomore, and two older women—high school juniors—took him down to the canal, one of the preferred Torrington places for underage drinking, to sample some Boone’s Farm apple wine. He did what most first-time drinkers do when this sickly sweet liquor passes their lips: He got dizzy drunk and puked. But a connection had been made. Here it was, courage in a bottle.

  His career as a professional baseball player did not exactly discourage drinking. If anything, the postgame beer or two was part of the time-honored ritual. The clubbies stocked beer for the ballplayers the same way they stocked chewing tobacco and bubble gum. Then, after you left the clubhouse, you’d go down to My Brother’s Pub to drink some more and relive the game just played, all the while commiserating over Boston’s failure to appreciate what you had to offer. Christ, Morgan’s fast to pull a pitcher in trouble. Jesus, did you see how far Sammy hit that ball tonight? Hell, we’re all just insurance, in case Yaz pulls a hammy, or Eckersley goes on the DL.

  Four for four? Let’s drink.

  Oh for four? Let’s drink.

  Koza always thought that he would never be as alcohol-dependent as his dad—a good, good guy, beloved by many, but it was no secret in small-town Torrington how, every once in a while, Dave would have to collect his dad down at the American Legion hall. But now, even with a child of his own, Koza felt handcuffed by the stuff that real life was throwing at him. In his misery, he felt entitled. After all, he was Pawtucket’s own tragic hero, winner of the longest game in baseball history, and a guy who came within a bottle cap’s width of making it to the major leagues.

  Dave, that guy down the bar wants to buy you a drink. What’ll it be?

  In 1986, the year that several of his former teammates—Boggs and Barrett, Hurst and Gedman, and Ojeda—made it to the World Series, a new boss took over the restaurant and said he couldn’t offer to pay Koza the same salary. While looking for employment, he never seriously considered uprooting the family and moving to Torrington. Beyond the lack of any jo
bs out there, he knew the arc that the collective conversation with his hometown would take.

  Geez, you didn’t make it.

  Nope.

  In 1987, Koza joined the Teamsters union and found a local job with the Yellow Freight System trucking company. He began working the dock at one of the company’s terminals, driving a forklift, loading and unloading pallets of goods. Some of his new colleagues recognized him and began recalling this game-winning hit, or that game-saving catch, and wasn’t he the guy who won the longest game in baseball history? Koza enjoyed the distinction that his baseball heroics had granted him, but he will later say that he was not particularly gracious to his colleagues. He still felt as though he rightfully belonged someplace else—holding a baseball glove in the clubhouse of the pennant-winning Boston Red Sox, for example, and not wearing work gloves on some loading dock. But on the loading dock he stayed, putting in his time; it was the only way to get promoted one day to driver.

  And there was Koza, four years later, on the dock in the early spring of 1991, wearing work gloves and loading boxes onto a delivery truck bound for McCoy Stadium. And in those boxes were stacks and stacks of sixteen-ounce plastic cups, each one commemorating the tenth anniversary of the game that he had won.

  McCoy Stadium

  Home of Baseball’s Longest Game

  Pawtucket 3, Rochester 2

  33 Innings, April 18–19, June 23, 1981

  Koza got promoted to part-time driver just as his drinking intensified. He could guide a forty-five-foot truck through impossibly tight spaces, but he could not navigate everyday life without that liquid courage: vodka and beer, mostly. He and Ann were living with their young children—Becky, Samantha, and Christopher, whom everyone called Topher—in a large home on a double lot in Pawtucket, where Dave’s alcoholism took up most of the space. He tried to control his drinking during the week by working the evening and overnight shifts, but he still seemed to measure every moment by the glass. The trip to Kmart, for example: a three-beer ride. Ann asked him to stop, then begged him to stop, but her pleas only made him more upset, which meant that he had all the more justification for a drink.

  If you ask an old baseball player to name his worst year, he will often oblige with seasons that ultimately lowered his batting average, raised his earned run average, or fell far short of his usual capability; he might even cite an injury, or some crazy front-office decision, as the reason. But if you ask Dave Koza to name his worst year, it is 1994, a full eleven years after he stopped playing baseball.

  In March of that year, when Koza’s father came east to visit his son, daughter-in-law, and three grandchildren, he was proudly carrying a bronze coin inscribed with the words “To Thine Own Self Be True.” It signified that Gene Koza, the gregarious alcoholic so often found at the American Legion, had achieved three months of sobriety by surrendering to the philosophy of Alcoholics Anonymous. One morning during his stay, Gene asked his son to find an A.A. meeting in the area, and Dave obliged, driving him to a church basement in Central Falls. As the father got out of the Ford pickup to make the noontime meeting, he asked his son to join him. Dave declined, in part because he had laced the coffee he was drinking with vodka. So he sat in his truck in the late winter cold, sipping his drink, and wanting, really wanting, to stop. But he could not.

  Two months later, Gene Koza died of a heart attack in his bed in Torrington; he was sixty-nine. While home for the wake and funeral, Dave happened to open the top dresser drawer that nightly received his father’s tossed fistful of loose change. He spotted the bronze A.A. coin, slipped it into his pocket, and kept drinking.

  And three months after that, Ann told Dave that she had taken all that she could, and was leaving him. At first he thought she was testing him, the way a base runner might feign a steal to test a pitcher’s pickoff move. But here he was, disbelieving and needing a drink, helping Ann load up a U-Haul truck and watching, with tears in his eyes, as she left him, taking their three children with her to her Pennsylvania hometown of Tunkhannock. He carried those wrenching images, of crying, uncomprehending children, back into his spacious, empty house, and closed the door. For the next several months, he drank, kept the shades lowered, drank, felt sorry for himself, drank, left for work, came home, and drank. Somewhere in this house, among his accumulation of baseball detritus, was that videotape of his triumphant Good Morning America appearance so long ago.

  FORSYTHE: Dave, I understand your wife hung on until the bitter end.

  KOZA: Yes, she did. I came out of the locker room the night we left off in the 32nd inning. I came outside. The sun started to come up, and I said, “You gotta be kidding me.”

  How short, now, the longest game seems. How ephemeral. On a night and early morning set aside for prayer, reflection, and everlasting joy, a baseball game insisted on the suspension of ordinary time. It gathered together a few dozen hopefuls in a poorly lit coliseum and refused them release for more than eight hours, providing them little comfort from the harsh elements beyond the heat generated by the burning of wood. It forced those watching the game to contemplate cosmic issues that transcend the successive crises of balls and strikes. The interdependence we all share. The inadequacy of statistics to measure one’s worth. The existence of God. The dominion of nature over humankind, reflected by the howl of the night’s wind, whoooosh, rising to muffle the profane howl of the Rochester center fielder.

  Then, as if in jest, the game freed its captives to an Easter dawn’s chorus of birds, only to summon them again, two months later, to complete the unfinished business of an unimportant ball game—a final point about the illusion of time. After 1 inning that lasted just eighteen minutes, the longest game released its participants for good, like a mother nudging her large brood into the world and wondering: What’s to become of them?

  What about the central player, McCoy Stadium itself, the weary concrete hulk that could never seem to shake the mucky cap-and-overall specters of its Depression-era birth? Today it is a renovated and remodeled pleasure of a minor-league ballpark, with ten thousand seats, an expanded concourse, a million-dollar JumboTron in center field—and, in the labyrinthine corridor beneath the stands, a shrine to that godsend for Pawtucket, the Longest Game. Among the holy relics on display is the home plate that received the touch of Marty Barrett’s cleat as he jogged home, smiling with the knowledge that Dave Koza’s soft line drive had found grass.

  In 1977, the year that Ben Mondor assumed ownership of the Pawtucket Red Sox, the team had a paid attendance of a paltry 111,000, and the conditions at McCoy were so unappealing that the PawSox “couldn’t draw maggots, let alone flies,” as one sportswriter put it. Mondor, being Mondor, promptly framed the article. For the next thirty-three years, he, Mike Tamburro, and Lou Schwechheimer stayed together, executing their mission to provide working-class families with an affordable place to see the future stars of the Boston Red Sox. They saw the rewards of their labor in a rising popularity that consistently placed the PawSox among the top half dozen minor-league franchises in the country (in 2010, for example, the PawSox had a paid attendance of more than 600,000 for the seventh consecutive year). And Mondor, being Mondor, took pains every year to send a copy of that maggots-and-flies article to the offending author, as a polite but persistent way of saying screw you.

  On a Sunday in early October 2010, Ben Mondor, eighty-five, died at his waterfront home in Warwick Neck, Rhode Island, his beloved wife, Madeleine, by his side. Several days earlier, in his bedroom on the second floor, he had gazed out the window at the gray-blue waters of Narragansett Bay, fully aware that he was terminally ill. After a few moments, he had shrugged his shoulders and said, with no regret: “I’ve had a good life.”

  The morning of his funeral Mass, a dozen uniformed police officers—several from Pawtucket, a few from a smattering of other departments—gathered outside the funeral home in Warwick, waiting to form an honor guard, while those closest to him said their last goodbyes. When it was time, Madeleine, along with
Tamburro and Schwechheimer, emerged into the cool autumn morning, slightly ahead of the casket. One of the police officers, tears blurring his eyes, suddenly rushed over to hug Madeleine. This was Deputy Chief Michael Kinch of the Cumberland Police Department.

  Hood.

  After Hood composed himself, the officer leading the honor guard called out the commands of attention. Hood fell back into line and joined the other officers in saluting the casket of the man who had saved baseball for Pawtucket—a man who had been the private benefactor of so many people that McCoy’s front office was still fielding stories of his generosity weeks after his death. Then Hood got into his black-and-white Ford Crown Victoria and joined the police escort that guided the funeral cortege the several miles to Providence, to the stone steps of the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, where hundreds waited in the pews. Here was the governor of the state, Donald Carcieri; there, the former manager of the Pawtucket Red Sox, Joe Morgan. Here, Sam Bowen, and beside him, Dave Koza.

  And what of the longest night’s other elder statesmen? The two managers, who, through one degree of separation, linked the least known of the night’s ballplayers to Hall of Fame teammates of theirs, Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford, Hank Aaron and Warren Spahn? Rochester’s Doc Edwards went on to manage the Cleveland Indians for a couple of years, and at the close of 2010 he was still in professional baseball, completing his fifty-third year in the game as the manager of the San Angelo Colts, in Texas’s independent United League. As for Pawtucket’s Joe Morgan, he was savoring his stature as Walpole Joe, New England icon, available for games of golf and the dispensing of baseball wisdom. After leveling with Dave Koza and leaving Pawtucket at the end of 1982, he became a Boston Red Sox scout and coach who seemed destined to retire without ever managing at the major-league level. Then, suddenly, in the middle of the 1988 season, he was reluctantly appointed the “interim” manager of the Red Sox by front-office suits who seemed impervious to the charms of his many minor-league anecdotes. Those suits never counted on what came to be known as “Morgan’s Miracle.” The Red Sox went on to win 19 of their next 20 games, catapulting a lackluster team to the front of the pack to win the American League East title. Soon, all of New England spoke in nonsensical Morgan-speak—“Six, two and even,” and “See you in St. Paul”—and the Red Sox had no choice but to quickly name as its full-time manager a guy from Walpole who could tell you a thing or two about plowing snow on the turnpike, or how Win Remmerswaal—remember Win Remmerswaal?—would go AWOL for days at a time. Morgan’s penchant for acting on hunches baffled and even irritated people at times, but he led the Red Sox to another American League East title, in 1990, before he was unceremoniously fired, in 1991. A few days later, a hundred people, along with the Walpole High School marching band, gathered on the front lawn of Joe Morgan’s home, just to say thanks.