Pawtucket 3, Rochester 2 (33 innings)
No, that's not a typo. It's the final score of the longest professional baseball game of all time. It took two months to play.... Well, okay, it was suspended late and resumed two months later, but it probably felt like two months to the players and fans who spent the night at the ballpark. But don't panic, the story of this amazing game is considerably shorter.
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| McCoy Stadium |
It all started on April 18, 1981 at McCoy Stadium in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The Rochester Red Wings were in town to play the Pawtucket Red Sox in an International League game. The Sox were the minor league AAA affiliate of the Boston Red Sox and the Red Wings were the Baltimore Orioles' AAA franchise. Both rosters had familiar names, including future Hall-of-Famers Cal Ripkin of Rochester and Pawtucket’s Wade Boggs, who along with teammates Marty Barrett, Rich Gedman, Bruce Hurst and Bobby Ojeda would play major roles for the Red Sox and the New York Mets in the unforgettable 1986 World Series.
It was very chilly and breezy, more conducive for football. At any rate, the evening began ominously. The game was scheduled to start at 7:05 PM but there was a problem with one of the supports for the stadium lights and the first pitch wasn’t delivered until 8. The pitchers dominated from the start and the game was scoreless through six innings. Rochester broke through in the seventh and took a 1-0 lead but in the bottom of the ninth Pawtucket tied it up and they were off to extra innings. A whole lotta extra innings.
Each team marched an army of pitchers to the mound, keeping the hitters at bay. After twelve innings it was still deadlocked. Fifteen innings. Eighteen. Twenty. In the top of the 21st the Red Wings scored to take a 2-1 lead but the Pawsox tied it again. So the bands played on past midnight.
There was a curfew rule in the International League stating that no inning could start after 12:50 AM. Pawtucket informed the home plate umpire Dennis Gregg. He replied that he didn’t know of any such rule and ordered play to continue, so on they went. 23 innings. 25. It was getting ridiculous. After 27 innings the exhausted teams had, in effect, played a tripleheader with no decision – and no breaks. 29 innings. 31. No end in sight. It was well after 3 AM when the umpires finally found out about the 12:50 curfew regulation. It turned out that the league's rule book they recieved at the start of the season didn’t include that information. Everyone shrugged and continued the game anyway. Hey, why stop now?
In the 32nd inning the league president called and ordered play to be stopped at the end of that inning, regardless. Neither team scored, so after 8 hours, 25 minutes, 32 innings and the score tied 2-2, the ubermarathon was finally halted just a half-hour before dawn. Normally they would have resumed the next day before the scheduled game, but instead they decided to complete it two months later on June 23, Rochester’s next visit to Pawtucket.
The game drew attention around the country and after the Major League players went on strike on June 12, it became a big news event. The media descended on Pawtucket to witness baseball history (provided the game ever ended). However the Red Sox, no longer burdened by having played eight straight hours of baseball, took only 18 minutes to win it when Dave Koza (in his 14th at-bat of the game) drove in Marty Barrett with a single in the bottom of the 33rd inning, thus completing the longest game, by time and innings, in the history of professional baseball. One wonders how much longer this game would have gone on if the commissioner hadn't intervened because suspending it eliminated the continuous dynamics, particularly physical and emotional fatigue, which is a major part of extra-inning games.
Highlights and Lowlights
- Rochester’s Dallas Williams went 0-13, the longest one game O-fer in baseball history.
- Between the teams there was a total of 882 pitches to 246 batters and home plate umpire Dennis Gregg was there for every single one of them.
"Baseball. Damndest game I ever saw."
~ Keith Hernandez
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| A wall at McCoy Stadium commemorating the historic game |
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