by Dan Barry
Finally, there are the others, scattered across the country, down to Latin America, and across to the Netherlands, many of them gone back to where they came from, many of them thankful for the salvation from obscurity that an endless night in Pawtucket has granted them. A poster commemorating the longest game hangs in South Bend, Indiana, in the home of Joel Finch, the former Pawtucket Red Sox pitcher, now a corporate account executive with a trucking company; in Tryon, Georgia, in the office of Dan Logan, the former Rochester Red Wings first baseman, now an insurance manager with the Georgia Farm Bureau; in Syracuse, New York, in Steve Grilli’s Change of Pace. On the televisions at the Change of Pace and other bars, and on the televisions in their living rooms and recreation rooms and hotel rooms, they watched their fellow Longest Game alums move on to even greater glory, in the 1983 World Series, in the 1986 World Series, in various All Star games.
That skinny kid who played third base for Rochester that night? The one who banged his helmet to the ground after grounding out in the 6th inning? Cal Ripken Jr.? The bronze plaque from his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, in 2007, reads:
ARRIVED AT THE BALLPARK EVERY DAY WITH A BURNING DESIRE TO PERFORM AT HIS HIGHEST LEVEL. DEDICATION AND WORK ETHIC RESULTED IN A RECORD 2,632 CONSECUTIVE GAMES PLAYED FROM MAY 30, 1982 THROUGH SEPTEMBER 19, 1998, EARNING HIM THE TITLE OF BASEBALL’S “IRON MAN.” IN 21 SEASONS, COLLECTED 3,184 HITS AND 431 HOME RUNS, AND WAS NAMED TO 19 CONSECUTIVE ALL-STAR TEAMS. WON ROOKIE OF THE YEAR HONORS, TWO MVPS, AND TWO GOLD GLOVE AWARDS. HIS ORIOLES WON THE 1983 WORLD SERIES AND HE HIT .336 LIFETIME IN 28 POSTSEASON GAMES.
And that ambitious bundle of superstition who played third base for Pawtucket that night? The one who used the third-base bag as a pillow in the late innings, while his little daughter slept under a desk in the owner’s office? Wade Boggs? The plaque from his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, in 2005, reads:
A DISCIPLINED HITTER WHOSE COMMANDING KNOWLEDGE OF THE STRIKE ZONE MADE HIM ONE OF BASEBALL’S TOUGHEST OUTS. ONLY 20TH CENTURY PLAYER WITH SEVEN STRAIGHT 200-HIT SEASONS. REACHED BASE SAFELY IN 80 PERCENT OF GAMES PLAYED. BEGAN CAREER WITH 10 CONSECUTIVE SEASONS HITTING ABOVE .300. A FIVE-TIME BATTING CHAMPION WHO ALSO LED THE LEAGUE IN ON-BASE PERCENTAGE AND INTENTIONAL WALKS SIX TIMES EACH. A 12-TIME ALL-STAR, HIT .328 WITH 3,010 HITS AND 1,412 WALKS. MEMBER OF THE 1996 WORLD SERIES CHAMPION YANKEES AND WON TWO GOLD GLOVES. LEGENDARY FOR HIS SUPERSTITIONS.
Strange how life works out. A couple of years ago, Wade Boggs, of all people, wound up in Torrington, Wyoming, of all places, for a two-shot goose-hunt tournament that helps to promote economic development in Goshen County. And, of all people, one of his hosts in town was Paul Covello Jr., also known as Cactus. Boggs could not have been nicer to the people of Torrington and Goshen County. After going goose hunting down by the North Platte River, he attended the afternoon luncheon and the evening awards banquet, posed for photographs, autographed baseballs, and passed on some encouraging advice to a local ballplayer who was struggling a bit in the minor leagues. When young boys and girls approached him with their baseball caps on backward, Boggs would gently instruct them on the proper way to wear one; it’s all about discipline. After the dinner, the gang headed through the snow drifts to Cactus’s house for a cocktail hour that lasted until three in the morning. Over a few Miller Lites, Boggs and Cactus got to talking about their mutual acquaintance. Boggs said that Dave Koza just had the bad luck to be playing first base at a time when that position was clogged at the top with superstars—namely, Carl Yastrzemski and Tony Perez. He remembered how Dave caught everything and anything that he threw from third base, how Dave helped younger players in the clubhouse feel as though they belonged—how, when Dave drove in the winning run in the longest game, the batter on deck was yours truly, Wade Boggs.
Then the Hall of Famer asked: So, Cactus. You ever hear from Koza?
Dave Koza knows the many statistics of his career, but none better than this: He got sober on Monday, January 9, 1995.
On the Thursday before, he was whining and complaining about his life during a talk with his brother, Rick, out west, when Rick suddenly said: I think you’ve got a problem with booze. The words coming over the telephone nearly knocked Dave down. Though stunned, he was also relieved. If he wasn’t fooling anyone with his impersonation of a sober person, he could finally be honest with himself. He reached for the Yellow Pages and looked up Alcoholics Anonymous.
That Friday, he attended an A.A. meeting in East Providence, half hoping to hear tips on how to drink responsibly.
That Saturday, he drank. He had always been a big weekend boozer and, well, it was Saturday.
That Sunday, he attended another A.A. meeting, this one at Jenks Junior High School, directly across Division Street from McCoy Stadium. There, at the meeting, a coffeemaker named Dave T. and a fire-fighter named Billy M. decided to take him under their wing. Billy’s firehouse was a baseball toss away from the entrance to McCoy, and he had often seen Dave play. The two men told Dave not to drink, so he returned home and finished up what liquor he still had in the house.
And that Monday, the morning of January 9, the two men threw Dave in the back of Billy’s twenty-year-old Oldsmobile and drove him to a meeting in the Salvation Army’s Freedom Hall building on Pitman Street in Providence. He had his father’s coin in his pocket. He hasn’t had a drink since.
Koza traded the large house in Pawtucket for a small house in Pawtucket, and began focusing on doing his very best with every day, the way he once did with every at bat. As the days turned to weeks and then to years, the cheers he heard came not from thousands gathered at McCoy but from a few gathered in a church basement or some rented hall. They also came from Ann and the children, in long-distance conversations between Pawtucket and Tunkhannock, where she remarried, and then between Pawtucket and Las Vegas, where she relocated. When Dave reached his twelfth year of sobriety, Ann happened to be in Rhode Island, and she decided to surprise him by showing up at the small celebration that would be part of his A.A. group’s next meeting. She hid in a back room, and when the time came, she emerged with his twelfth anniversary cake, bringing him—and then her—to tears.
It was hard at first. For a while, Dave resented the fact that Ann had gotten remarried, but time and discussions with his A.A. support group have made him realize that Ann didn’t leave him; rather, he—through his drinking—pushed her out of his life. Now Ann and Dave talk a few times a week. And when Dave comes to visit his kids, he often stays in a spare bedroom in Ann’s house, where, tucked away somewhere, she has her own box of baseball memories, including a quilt that she and a few other PawSox wives started long ago to commemorate the longest game, but never finished. She can’t get rid of the thing, she says, because that game, that time, remains a part of her. Who knows? Maybe someday she’ll finish the quilt.
If ten years after that game found Dave Koza working the loading docks and drinking heavily, twenty years after found him working on his seventh year of sobriety, making truck deliveries all over Rhode Island (including, on occasion, to McCoy Stadium, to drop off more of those souvenir cups)—and trying to be a good father to his three children. In August of that year, 2001, he drove from Pawtucket to Tunkhannock in his silver Taurus, and spent the Friday night with Ann and the family. Then, early the next morning, he and the three children—Becky, seventeen, Sami, thirteen, and Topher, twelve—drove the nearly three hours to Cooperstown. Sami was getting more and more serious about competing with the boys in baseball, and Topher, a Little League outfielder, had recently written a school paper about Jackie Robinson. But there was another reason for making the trip.
When they reached the Hall of Fame, they found an endless line snaking down Main Street. Koza noticed a members-only entrance to the side, and somehow summoned the nerve to approach the employee at the door and say that he thought he was kind of, sort of, in the Hall of Fame, but wasn’t sure. I played in the longest game, he explained. I had the game-winning hit.
Within minutes he and his children were handed complimentary tickets and welcomed inside. And there, on the second floor of the Baseball Hall of Fame, this family from Rhode Island, by way of Pennsylvania and Wyoming, came upon a glass display dedicated to the Longest Game in Professional Baseball History. It included a scoreboard stretching for 33 innings; a photograph of several Pawtucket Red Sox players congratulating one another; the Louisville Slugger bat that was used to drive in the game-winning single; and a large portrait of the hero who swung it: Dave Koza, former ballplayer, truck driver, recovering alcoholic—dad.
Today, ten years after that family trip to Cooperstown, and thirty years after the longest game, Dave Koza no longer drives a truck for a living. Two decades of playing baseball, followed by two more decades of climbing in and out of his truck, loading and unloading, took their toll. After he required the replacement of one hip and both knees, his doctors told him the time had come to retire. He hits his A.A. meetings, attends several PawSox games a year, and gets out to Las Vegas as often as possible to see his three grown children and the couple of grandchildren who have come along.
But the man from Wyoming always comes home—to Pawtucket. Every once in a while, he agrees to speak at a gathering of baseball enthusiasts, answering their questions. What was it like to play for Joe Morgan? What was it like to play with Marty Barrett? Bruce Hurst? Rich Gedman? Wade Boggs? Then, of course, this question:
Why didn’t you make it to the major leagues?
Not consistent enough, he will say.
And if you search Dave Koza’s home for celebratory mementoes of his baseball past, you will not find much. In the bedroom, across from a display of the Serenity Prayer (“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change…”), one of Norman Rockwell’s baseball illustrations hangs on the wall. Near the bathroom, a framed copy of the Longest Game poster. And down in the basement, slightly askew, a small magnet bought in a Cooperstown souvenir shop.
“National Baseball Hall of Fame,” it says. “DAVE.”
The magnet is the smallest token of a trip that has come to stand out in the family narrative. The children will remember how their father drew Topher’s attention to an exhibit about the African American baseball experience; how he pointed Sami to a display devoted to Dorothy Kamenshek and the other women who played in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League; and how much he downplayed the Longest Game exhibit.
After lingering a long, long while in the corridors of a game’s past, the Koza family left Cooperstown and began the journey back to Tunkhannock. Dave steered his sedan south onto Route 28 and then turned onto Interstate 88, hugging the Susquehanna River all the way. It was a pure August evening and baseball was breaking out all over. In New York, the first-place Yankees had just beaten the Anaheim Angels, thanks to an 8th-inning home run by Tino Martinez, while in Boston, the second-place Red Sox were planning to start their ageless knuckleball pitcher, Tim Wakefield, against the Texas Rangers. In Toronto, the gray-haired third baseman for the Baltimore Orioles was sitting out his team’s loss to the Blue Jays; with two months to go before his retirement, though, no one would begrudge a day off to Cal Ripken Jr. In Chicago, the redheaded hitting coach for the weak Tampa Bay Devil Rays was also close to calling it quits; it seemed that what had made him Wade Boggs was not transferable.
And in a car moving west through the undulating hills of central New York, the talk was of baseball and nothing but baseball, until the children of Dave and Ann sleepily surrendered to the rhythms of the rutted road.
SOURCES, THANK-YOUS, AND CRACKER JACK
This is a book of informed imagination. It could not have been conjured without the assistance of many people who generously shared their memories of a time, a place, and a game—from the two future members of the Baseball Hall of Fame to the clubhouse kid who made sure that McCoy Stadium was well stocked with Dubble Bubble and Skoal. I am grateful to all of them, but especially to Ann Life, who abided my disruptions with a rare generosity of spirit, and, of course, to Dave Koza. He allowed me to intrude upon his past and present not for his personal glory, but because he believed that the story of his life’s journey might help someone else. He answered my many questions, endured my many visits, and never once engaged in self-aggrandizement. His humility humbles me. Thank you, all.
I lived in Pawtucket for four years, close enough to McCoy Stadium to hear the roars and sighs of the beckoning crowd. I played on a Sunday morning basketball team sponsored by the Weiner Genie Restaurant, found my day’s fuel at the Modern Diner, and spent many evenings at the Irish Social Club. Pawtucket took me in, and I am forever grateful.
The idea for this book came to me while flipping again through The Longest Game, a charming children’s picture book by Steven Krasner, a former colleague of mine at the Providence Journal. That led me to call another former Providence Journal colleague, the gracious Paige Van Antwerp, who had gone on to work for a while for the Pawtucket Red Sox, and who put me in touch with Lou Schwechheimer, the vice president and general manager for the Pawtucket Red Sox. This book would not have been written without the ever-patient Mr. Schwechheimer. It bears repeating. This book would not have been written without the ever-patient Mr. Schwechheimer. With the blessing and encouragement of team owner Ben Mondor and team president Mike Tamburro, Mr. Schwechheimer tracked down former ballplayers, dug up old newspaper clippings and photographs, provided constant counsel, and brought to bear the formidable PawSox army, whose ranks include Becky Berta, Kevin Galligan, Bonnie Goff, Michael Gwynn, Mary Beth Kelly, Rick Medeiros, Eric Petterson, Au-gusto “Cookie” Rojas Jr., and Bill Wanless. I cannot possibly repay you all for your cheerful assistance. Thank you.
Dan Mason, the general manager for the Rochester Red Wings, double-checked obscure facts (Was the Rochester team once called the Bronchos or the Broncos?), and located a number of former Red Wings players. Randy Mobley, the president of the International League, provided access to historical records and arranged a memorable lunchtime visit with that singular baseball personality, Harold Cooper (who died in October 2010 at the age of eighty-six—less than a day after the passing of Ben Mondor). Gabriel Schechter, baseball savant, guided me through the game’s dusty past, as did Freddy Berowski and Lenny DiFranza, of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, and the historian David W. Smith. Among those who tutored me in the history of Pawtucket and the Blackstone Valley were Chuck Arning, Albert Klyberg, Gary Kulik, William Jennings, Susan Millard, Scott Molloy, and the staffs at the Pawtucket Public Library, the Rhode Island Historical Society, and the Slater Mill Museum. In particular, I wish to thank Bob Drew, the former general manager and radio announcer for the Rochester Red Wings, whose broadcast of that game gives it breath, and Mike Scandura, the former Pawtucket Evening Times sportswriter, who patiently recited for me all 33 innings of balls and strikes, as rendered in his scorebook. Thank you.
I consulted many books during my research, among them The Only Way I Know How, by Cal Ripken Jr. and Mike Bryan, which remains one of the very best baseball memoirs, and the definitive Ted Williams, by Leigh Montville. Others include: Boggs!, by Wade Boggs; The Pawtucket Red Sox, by David Borges; The History of Pawtucket, 1635–1986, by Susan Marie Boucher; Working Lives: An Oral History of Rhode Island Labor, edited by Paul M. Buhle; Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston, by Howard Bryant; The Red Sox Fan Handbook, compiled by Leigh Grossman; Pawtucket, by Elizabeth J. Johnson, James L. Wheaton, and Susan L. Reed; Silver Seasons: The Story of the Rochester Red Wings, by Jim Mandelaro and Scott Pitoniak; Trolley Wars: Streetcar Workers on the Line, by Scott Molloy; A Game of Inches: The Story Behind the Innovations That Shaped Baseball, by Peter Morris; A Common Man for the Common People: The Life of Thomas P. McCoy, by Vernon C. Norton; The International League, by Bill O’Neal; Diamonds in the Rough: Life in Baseball’s Minor Leagues, by Ken Rappoport; Working in the Blackstone River Valley: Exploring the Heritage of Industrialization, edited by Douglas M. Reynolds and Marjory Myers; The Number
s Game: Baseball’s Lifelong Fascination with Statistics, by Alan Schwarz; and As They See ’Em: A Fan’s Travels in the Land of Umpires, by Bruce Weber.
I also relied on various papers and monographs, including: McCoy Stadium: Legacy or Folly, by Chuck Arning and Kevin Klyberg; Textile-Mill Labor in the Blackstone Valley: Work and Protest in the Nineteenth Century, by Gary Kulik; Pawtucket Village and the Strike of 1824: The Origins of Class Conflict in Rhode Island, also by Mr. Kulik; Triple A Baseball’s Oldest Stadium Turns 60, by Tom Mason; The Longest Game in Baseball History, an invaluable reference work by J. M. Murphy; The Game That Wouldn’t End, by Scott Pitoniak, for the Baseball Research Journal; Hardball Paternalism, Hardball Politics, by Douglas M. Reynolds; Samuel Slater: Father of American Manufactures, by Paul E. Rivard; and The Real McCoy in the Bloodless Revolution of 1935, by Matthew J. Smith. In addition, I came upon a valuable oral history provided by Jerry Sherlock, of Pawtucket, in 2007.