Bottom of the 33rd: Hope and Redemption in Baseball's Longest Game by Dan Barry

Feb 26, 2013 Will Byrnes rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: baseball, non-fiction

In the song Take Me Out to the Ballgame there is a particular line that comes into play here. Buy me some peanuts and cracker jack. I don’t care if I never get back. That sentiment was put to the test on April 18, 1981, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, when the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings played the longest game in professional baseball history. Given that the song is generally sung in the middle of the 7th inning, or after six and a half innings of play, the fans, had they been of...more In the song Take Me Out to the Ballgame there is a particular line that comes into play here. Buy me some peanuts and cracker jack. I don’t care if I never get back. That sentiment was put to the test on April 18, 1981, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, when the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings played the longest game in professional baseball history. Given that the song is generally sung in the middle of the 7th inning, or after six and a half innings of play, the fans, had they been of a mind, could have sung the tune four more times before the game was finally concluded.

Dan Barry, a sports columnist for the New York Times, a guy who had lived in Pawtucket for four years, uses this singular game as a structure around which to build his depiction of minor league baseball, more particularly Triple-A level baseball, using the example here to stand in for the whole.

His approach is one that would give anyone with a generous dose of OCD a thrill. I did not keep track of the number of individuals who are mentioned and for whom Barry offers at least a little biographical info, but I expect it easily squirts past the defenders into triple digit territory. There is no index available for cheating and coming up with a credible number. Leave it that if a cat had wandered into the field during that game, Barry probably interviewed it, and I expect had he been able to identify the gulls that were in attendance, they would undoubtedly be pretty sick of him asking them about the game, and checking their eggs to find out if the unborn heard anything their feathered parental units might have mentioned about it. I do not mean this as a knock, but merely to offer a sense of Barry’s overall approach. It is reminiscent of an actual baseball field, a wide swath, covered in grass, only inches deep, but with particular parts that emerge, and form the more significant elements of his story, the mound, the bases. One or two deserve mention.

In one of the true rarities in baseball, the owner of the Pawtucket Red Sox sounds like he was a pretty decent guy. We learn about him lending a helping hand when the help really was for someone else and not just a roundabout way of helping himself. The best element was Barry’s look at Dave Koza, a career minor-leaguer who was known for his home runs, but whose major league career only had warning track power, a Crash Davis sort. Barry looks at Koza (really, someone must have nicknamed him “Lost”, but we never come across that here.) His story carries all the hope-and-dream elements that drive so many of these young men. Dave was the fellow who would get the game-winning hit in the bottom of the 33rd.

Barry gives us an illuminating look at the history of the stadium in which the game was played, tells us about the umpires, the ball boy, the intern, the security guard, the where-are-they-nows, the whole nine ~~yards~~ innings, or in this case thirty three. In a way it struck me as having something in common with rain delays, when hapless broadcasters (yes, he looks at those guys too) have to work extra hard to come up with material to cover the dead air between pitches. Barry certainly does work hard, and manages not only to fill in the blanks, I think he may have actually created some to give himself more time to fill.

If you are a baseball fan, this is a fun book. It is nice to know that Rich Gedman, Wade Boggs, Bruce Hurst, Cal Ripkin Jr,. Bobby Ojeda, and a few other eventual pros took part in the game, and that a game of such duration was ultimately made possible by a cut-and-paste failure in the updating of the league rule book. It is nice to learn of Bobby O’s role in sparking behavior that had once gotten a batboy ejected from a game. It is fun to hear that Mike Hargrove’s extended at-bat preparations earned him the moniker “The Human Rain Delay.” If you are not a baseball fan, Bottom of the 33rd offers a look at a piece of American culture that is as true today as it was over thirty years ago.

I can tell you from painful personal experience here in New York City that it is generally a bad idea to go to a ballgame in April. Hell, May and maybe even June, can feel like a wind-blown tundra in our stadiums. And farther north and east it must be even worse. It is no shock that only nineteen spectators made it through the entirety of the game. The book will take a lot less time to read than the game took to be played, and you will not be in danger of having bodily parts crystallize and drop off while you are completing it.

Bottom of the 33rd may not be a grand slam, but it is at least a hustle-triple. And it is definitely a good idea to Root, root, root for the home team.
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Jan 05, 2013 ♥Bella★✰ rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: library-book, baseball, non-fiction

Baseball is my favorite sport, I am counting the days until it starts again. I’m not kidding, I have a countdown clock on my phone and every morning I look at it and get all excited about how many days until pitchers and catchers report for spring training. It therefore should not be surprising that when I was at the library and walking past the non-fiction section my eyes were drawn to the baseball books.

On September 22, 2012 the Yankees played the A’s, that game lasted 14 innings, 5 hours and...more

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Apr 20, 2011 Co2 rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: first-reads, sports

Many news reporters love to write about baseball, it has a lot of spaces which they can fill with some creativity. Not something you can do with news stories. Barry lives up to the challenge. He's first a great reporter and next has the story telling abilities to pull this off.

It’s hard for me to describe this book, my fault, not Barry's. The book takes people who have the longest game in the history of professional baseball in common and weaves their stories together. It's a daunting assignment...more

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Oct 13, 2011 Charly rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Anyone, especially baseball and Red Sox fans.

This was an absolutely wonderful approach to a wonderful story. Barry found a way to really humanize the tale of the longest game and made it about the players in the game and not the game. His approach of stepping aside from the narrative of the game to tell how a given player got to that point in the game and where he would go from there, was wonderful.

To have been at Mc Coy in the pre-Ben Mondor era, and having purchased this book at the current jewel of a AAA stadium that Mc Coy has become s...more

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Jan 01, 2013 Amber rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book recounts the longest professional baseball game in history, a 33-inning contest between the Pawtucket Red Sox and Rochester Red Wings in the early 1980s. For a baseball fan, this is an enjoyable read, recounting an interesting and (at least to me) relatively unknown portion of the game's history. It was interesting as well to me how many of the game's principals' names I recognized based on their children or relatives--Bourjos, Grilli, Valle--in addition to, of course, Cal Ripken Jr. a...more

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Oct 04, 2012 Byron rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: baseball

Bottom of the 33rd weaves a story about a single, mostly obscure and mundane baseball game with an incredible collection of stories about the careers of more than 20 baseball players and with a variety of other stories about owners, umpires, managers, announcers, and politicians. The result is a grand perspective on baseball and how it is intertwined in American life that enhanced my appreciation of the sport and of the myriad of stories all around.

I listened to the book, narrated by the author,...more Bottom of the 33rd weaves a story about a single, mostly obscure and mundane baseball game with an incredible collection of stories about the careers of more than 20 baseball players and with a variety of other stories about owners, umpires, managers, announcers, and politicians. The result is a grand perspective on baseball and how it is intertwined in American life that enhanced my appreciation of the sport and of the myriad of stories all around.

I listened to the book, narrated by the author, and for the most part, I could not stop reading. (I did get weary of some of the detail in the later innings, but I felt like that was as much a function of the extra inning game when you aren't sure when it is going to end.) It was not that there was some kind of mystery or plot or suspense, but there was the delivery of substance and depth to my appreciation of the game.

The book is about a game played in April 1981 that lasted 33 innings. There were less than 1500 fans at the beginning of the game, and less than 50 left in the wee hours of the morning as the 32nd inning ended in a 2 to 2 tie. There were TV clips of three innings, and a recording of the radio broadcast from the one station that broadcast the game. From this information, the official scorebook, and eyewitness accounts, the author has reconstructed the game story, giving a game in which only 4 runs were scored in 32 innings about as must interest as could be conceivably generated. To this he has added the stories of most of the key players, talking about where this game fit in their careers, ranging from future Hall of Famers Cal Ripken and Wade Boggs, and other well-known players like Bob Ojeda and Rich Gedman, to some obscure players who had already their cup of coffee in the majors, such as Drungo Hazewood, and others who would later have a cup or two, such as Roger LaFrancois, to many who would never get that chance. He tells us what happened to those players, some giving up later that season, some hanging on for years, and eventually having to move on to non-baseball careers.

The book tells the story of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, its baseball team, its owners, and its stadium, which apparently was built on quicksand, and may have a few cement trucks buried underneath it.

There is information about scorekeeping, about minor league rules, and about the life of minor league spouses and kids.

If you are a baseball fan, or if you are a person who enjoys knowing the stories behind the stories, I think you'll like this book.
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Jul 26, 2012 Sher rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Oh, what a game! It was fun to listen to the details of this game, played by 3A teams from Rhode Island and New York in 1981. It was very interesting to learn a little bit about the lives of some of the players, some who made it to major league, and more who did not. I grew up with a father and brothers who were crazy about baseball, so I learned a lot about it at an early age. Some people stake their whole life's dreams on making it in professional sports, but when it comes right down to it, it...more

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Apr 26, 2012 David rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Concerns the longest game in pro baseball history, Pawtucket vs Rochester AAA 1981 game that played out over 8 hours on a chilly Holy Saturday-into-Easter night, then was suspended after 32 innings and finished up a couple months later amid national media attention.

The game itself wasn't too significant, or seemingly exciting, so play by play is minimal and mainly an excuse to take off on tangents about the life stories of the managers, owners, fans, and of course players, some of whom went on t...more

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Mar 06, 2012 James rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

In the 30 years since Rochester's Red Wings and Pawtucket's Red Sox battled into the wee hours of a frigid Easter morning, the fascination with baseball's longest game hasn't waned. If anything, the marathon contest, which featured future Hall of Famers Cal Ripken and Wade Boggs, has ascended to legendary status, staking its claim among the sport's classic duels. What began as a routine Saturday night affair April 18, 1981, spilled into Sunday before eventually wrapping up two months later as a...more In the 30 years since Rochester's Red Wings and Pawtucket's Red Sox battled into the wee hours of a frigid Easter morning, the fascination with baseball's longest game hasn't waned. If anything, the marathon contest, which featured future Hall of Famers Cal Ripken and Wade Boggs, has ascended to legendary status, staking its claim among the sport's classic duels. What began as a routine Saturday night affair April 18, 1981, spilled into Sunday before eventually wrapping up two months later as a 3-2 Paw Sox win.

Pawtucket's McCoy Stadium was packed on June 23 for the game's almost anti-climactic conclusion, when the Red Sox needed only one inning to decide matters. The true witnesses to history, however, barely numbered in double digits. When the two weary clubs were mercifully shooed off the field at 4:09 Easter morning, just 19 fans remained in the grandstand.

Dan Barry wasn't among them. In fact, he was nowhere near Pawtucket for either the anonymous start or the spectacle of a conclusion, which drew media from as far away as England and Japan for a feel-good story in the early days of a strike that would shut down Major League Baseball for nearly two months. Which makes his gripping and lyrical retelling, Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball's Longest Game, all the more amazing, as he seems to have been everywhere all at once for the entire length of the game.

He's there in the visitor's bullpen, where Red Wings reliever Steve Luebber trades scuffed baseballs to youngsters in the early innings for wood to fuel the bonfire that warms a squadron of relievers. He's in the parking lot watching the stepson of the scoreboard operator drain the battery of a Ford Pinto as he falls blissfully asleep in the back seat long before the game is half over. He's under the stands, peering through a hole with Red Sox manager Joe Morgan for the last 10 innings after having been ejected for arguing a call in the top of the 22nd. And, of course, he's on the field, where he accounts for every plate appearance in the bedeviling affair.

The balls and strikes, base hits and fly balls are not what this story's about, however. Barry has gone both deeper and broader, rescuing the game's participants from a novelty of a box score, in which 219 at-bats were recorded. There's more to Rochester center fielder Dallas Williams than the 0-for-13 that followed him for the rest of his career. And as much as Jim Umbarger's 10 shutout innings of relief leap off the stat page, they reveal little about the man himself. Barry dug into every participant-on the field, in the front office, up in the press box, and down in the stands-to cull the true meaning of the sport.

He captures the spirit of minor league baseball in the days before the corporate ownership groups dotted the landscape with miniature versions of big league cathedrals. These were shoestring operations, run largely by fresh-faced kids just out of school. Or younger. The clubhouses in Pawtucket were managed by a pack of neighborhood youths, who pushed the team's uniforms to a coin-operated Laundromat each morning in stolen shopping carts in the late 1970s, before new owner Ben Mondor took over and installed on-premises washers and dryers.

While times have changed and minor league franchises are no longer run by the Little Rascals, today's generation of players can certainly relate to the mental grind their predecessors endured. Today's Triple-A rosters are populated with men just like Leubber, who in 1981 was fighting to return to the majors where he came within an out of a no-hitter for the Twins in 1976, and Dave Koza, the slugging first baseman who spent so long in Pawtucket he made it his long-time home after his career ended without a big league callup. For every Ripken there are a hundred more whose career will more closely resemble Bobby Bonner's brief big league stay.

Barry caught up with everyone he could find, crafting their recollections of that fateful night into a romance illustrating the game's often heart-breaking allure. It's not an entirely original concept. Within the past couple years alone works like Perfect, Lew Paper's retelling of Don Larson's World Series masterpiece, and Jim Kaplan's The Greatest Game Ever Pitched, about the legendary 16-inning Warren Spahn-Juan Marichal bout in 1963, have tried to apply a bigger-picture perspective to a single game. But where those books felt contrived at times, Bottom of the 33rd weaves the game seamlessly into the stories of the men who were there in 1981.

This International League classic is unlikely to ever be duplicated. The perfect storm that spawned it required a printing mishap, leaving the league's 12:50 a.m. curfew off the books; a hard-nosed, literalist interpretation of the rulebook by the head umpire; a league president who was so frequently hounded by inane phone calls that he didn't answer Pawtucket general manager Mike Tamburro's desperate plea for an end to the insanity; and a confounding wind knocking down a certain home-run blast off the bat of Sox outfielder Sam Bowen, which would have ended the game in the bottom of the 26th.

In today's world of cell phones and internet, even a rule book glitch wouldn't spin this far out of control. But a generation ago, it happened. Dan Barry has captured it-and so much more-in this essential book for minor league baseball lovers. (less)

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Oct 06, 2011 Amanda rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The second best thing to watching a baseball game(live and preferably sitting next to someone who knows all about at least one of the teams) is reading about baseball. Something about America's favorite pastime just translates so well to the written form. I think the slower, more focused pace of the game lends itself to storytelling, whether it's one crowd member to another or an author to a reader.

That being said, this book is not the absolute best example of baseball writing, but a very fair a...more

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May 08, 2011 Mark Ahrens rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Pure serendipity is the only way I can explain how I came to be at Pawtucket’s McCoy stadium a few weeks ago to see the PawSox, Boston’s AAA team, take on the Syracuse Chiefs the farm team of the Washington Nationals. I had opened the morning paper and, only two hours away, lay a perfect game for my son and I to attend during his spring break. The weather was raw, windy, and generally inhospitable for viewing baseball –just like a game played in the same stadium 30 years ago.

On April 18th, 1981,...more Pure serendipity is the only way I can explain how I came to be at Pawtucket’s McCoy stadium a few weeks ago to see the PawSox, Boston’s AAA team, take on the Syracuse Chiefs the farm team of the Washington Nationals. I had opened the morning paper and, only two hours away, lay a perfect game for my son and I to attend during his spring break. The weather was raw, windy, and generally inhospitable for viewing baseball –just like a game played in the same stadium 30 years ago.

On April 18th, 1981, starting at about 8pm, after a delay with the lights, and ending on Easter morning, April 19th, a little after 4am, the game was still tied at 2-2 after 32 innings!

Because of MLB’s strike in 1981, there was a huge focus on the game’s resumption on June 23rd with a sell-out crowd and over 150 journalists from many countries. The game ended after only 18 minutes with a walk-off single by Pawtucket’s Dave Koza in the 33rd inning giving the Sox a 3-2 victory. In all, the game lasted over 8 hours and was the longest in Major or Minor league history.

Because of its length, some statistical oddities surfaced including Dallas Williams’ 0-13, Jim Umbarger’s 10 innings of shutout relief pitching, Russ Laribee striking out 7 times, and hardscrabble New Englander, PawSox manager Joe Morgan having to watch the game from a hole in the wall after being ejected in the 22nd inning. The game even has its own Wikipedia Page!

The game is merely a stage prop for Dan Barry’s sensational book — Bottom of the 33rd — Hope, Redemption, and Baseball’s Longest Game. Beyond the game, Barry’s narrative is more a human interest story about the people involved in the game, a couple of Hall-of-Famers-to-be (Cal Ripken, Jr and Wade Boggs) but mostly about ordinary people; players who will never make the big show, those who have already had their “cup of coffee”, about the few rapid fans who stayed the course, the clubhouse attendants, the owners, and about McCoy stadium and and city of Pawtucket.

Barry does wonderful research giving us the back story of fans, players, radio announcers and the personalities who came together in this wonderful confluence of circumstances that created the seemingly never-ending game–the umpires’ ground rule handbook that had the pages omitted allowing the umpires to stop the game earlier, the league commissioner ignoring calls at home from the game umpires because he had been badgered at home by fans, and the howling wind which reduced home runs to fly balls.

Bottom of the 33rd tells how the previously ramshackle McCoy stadium and the moribund Pawtucket team are saved by local businessman Ben Mondoor and how he built the PawSox into one of the premier minor league franchises in all of baseball.

This is a wonderful book, part baseball, but mostly of the human condition, the good, the bad, and the ordinary. Like the game, you wish the book to go on and on and on….

www.booksonbaseball.com Rating: Home Run (A baseball bookshelf classic in the Roger Kahn, Roger Angell, Lawrence Ritter style)(less)

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Apr 18, 2011 Diane rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Major League Baseball just opened up another season, so the perfect book to read this week is Dan Barry's Bottom of the 33rd- Hope, Redemption, and Baseball's Longest Game.

The game took place on April 18, 1981, Holy Saturday, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The Triple A League Pawtucket Red Sox hosted the Rochester Red Wings. The Sox had future superstar Wade Boggs on their team, the Red Wings had the incomparable Cal Ripken Jr. at third base.

But Barry wisely does not put those superstars at the cen...more Major League Baseball just opened up another season, so the perfect book to read this week is Dan Barry's Bottom of the 33rd- Hope, Redemption, and Baseball's Longest Game.

The game took place on April 18, 1981, Holy Saturday, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. The Triple A League Pawtucket Red Sox hosted the Rochester Red Wings. The Sox had future superstar Wade Boggs on their team, the Red Wings had the incomparable Cal Ripken Jr. at third base.

But Barry wisely does not put those superstars at the center of his story. What makes this narrative interesting are the not-so-famous people. The Pawtucket owner, Ben Mondor, a wealthy businessman who grew up poor in Pawtucket and made it big, took the team at its lowest point and restored it to its former glory.

He prized loyalty above all, and when Budweiser refused to sell him beer because the former owners owed them money, he remembered that for a long time. Miller sold him beer, and even though Budweiser was the fan favorite, and Budweiser eventually begged him to buy their beer year after year, Mondor stuck with Miller because they were loyal to him.

Mondor put together a small but hardworking front office team, and they turned the bankrupt team into a success by "keeping prices low, making the stadium safe and family-friendly and emphasizing that the Pawtucket players on the field were the Boston Red Sox of tomorrow."

One of the most unforgettable characters is pitcher Win Remmerswaal. He is from the Netherlands, and "doesn't seem to accept basic social customs, such as adherence to the law or value of currency." His car license plate was a "piece of cardboard with a few meaningless numbers scribbled on it." At the end of one road trip, it was discovered that he was missing. He showed up several days later, explaining that he had never seen the nation's capital, so when they had a layover in Washington, he took a few days to sightsee. He is hilarious!

Triple A baseball is the last step before the major league team, so there is an interesting dynamic on those teams. There are the young players destined for future glory, like Boggs and Ripken. There are 'old guys'- the 25 and 26 year-olds- who have kicked around for awhile, and this is their last shot at making the big team. Some of them get called up to play in September on the parent club, only to be sent back to Triple A next spring to try again.

The agony of working to see your dream come true, knowing that there is a short time limit on it, is palpable in this book. First baseman Dave Koza has dragged his wife Ann from Florida to Pawtucket to Wyoming every year in pursuit of his dream. Ann finds some kind of factory work wherever they land, and she goes to every game. She is one of the 19 people who watched all 32 innings of the game, lasting until 4am on Easter morning when it was finally called. They are the heart of this marvelous book, and the end to their story is so moving.

The longest game, which is finally finished two months later in Pawtucket, is told in detail, alternating with the stories of the people who participated in it. I grew up in Auburn, NY, which has a Single A baseball team, and this book really resonated with me. I know my entire family will want to read it.

Barry gives the reader a close-up look at our national pasttime, and what that means for the cities where it is played. He tells the stories of the participants with honesty, humor, and heart. If you liked the movie, Bull Durham, this book is for you. It is a must-read for every baseball fan.
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Jan 15, 2013 Laurie rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2013-52in52

Bottom of the 33rd is the best of baseball, the best of sports writing, and the best of Americana all wrapped up in one quick read. So maybe I'm an easy sell - I'm a Redsox/Pawsox fan, I love local history, I love biographies. There isn't much for me not to like in this book. Writing about a game that took place decades ago is tricky because we all know the outcome. Barry handily relates this story of the longest game in baseball as it was experienced by the fans, the players, the media, and the...more

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Feb 23, 2012 Jay rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: baseball, audiobook

Dan Barry mines the longest baseball game for interesting things to talk about. He is like a color commentator for this game, describing the people in the stands, the ball players, the owner, all their wives and kids, the batboy, and on. He mentions the teams burned old bats to keep warm quite during the game a few times (maybe 5 times -- that's too repetitive). It was a lot like watching an 8 hour game would have been on TV, you start realizing you are hearing the same things over again. This a...more

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Apr 25, 2011 Tom Gase rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A really good book about a baseball game.that.just.wouldn't. end.

The author Dan Barry, takes the reader into what life was like in Pawtucket back in 1981 in a never-ending game. Due to some glitches in the rule book, this game started 30 years ago on the night before Easter and ended....on Easter. As the sun was rising. The scorebook looks like an earthquake seismograph. It was freezing for the players as they were burning bats and firewood in the duguout to stay warm. 33 innings is almost the...more

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Jul 16, 2011 Jim rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: baseball

This book is a wonder! It is an insightful look into professional baseball’s longest game and just about everyone who had some part in it, who they are, what brought them here on this historic night, and what became of them. The game began on a Holy Saturday night and spilled over to Easter morning, appropriate timing because the story though true seems unbelievable.

The game stayed in progress so long that it became equal parts inspiration and desperation, much like some of the player’s careers....more

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Jan 30, 2013 Jonathan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobook

Chaos. That’s the word that comes to mind when thinking of Bottom of the 33rd. That’s not to imply that the game, or this book, are chaotic in nature, it’s more an observation of the random chaotic events that conspire to make things happen. Part of my love of baseball is borne of my love for seeing so many different influences and factors come together in one place. Baseball is a beautiful illustration of the Buddhist chains of causality. A player might end up in Arizona rather than Seattle bec...more Chaos. That’s the word that comes to mind when thinking of Bottom of the 33rd. That’s not to imply that the game, or this book, are chaotic in nature, it’s more an observation of the random chaotic events that conspire to make things happen. Part of my love of baseball is borne of my love for seeing so many different influences and factors come together in one place. Baseball is a beautiful illustration of the Buddhist chains of causality. A player might end up in Arizona rather than Seattle because someone exercised their no-trade option, which might have resulted because of another player’s negative experience in Seattle, which in turn resulted from a chance collision in the outfield, and so on up the chain. Statistics may skew wildly in one direction or the other, but the laws of probability eventually pull them to an equilibrium, giving us a hint of some sort of order driving these random changes.

Bottom of the 33rd is about understanding how those causes converge into one place. Every game, viewed through this lens, is a miracle: the collection of talent from around the world, all brought into this one place in Pawtucket, Rhode Island; the hits that didn’t fall, the great pitches that just missed, the blown umpire call.

Bottom of the 33rd is, of course, about the longest baseball game ever played, in April, 1981, between two minor league teams, the Rochester Red Wings and the Pawtucket Red Sox; even more than that, it’s about the fates of the men that played that game, the many divergent paths that brought them to that one place in history and the paths that they would follow onward from there. Barry takes us through the game in chunks of ten innings each, hitting the high points of the game and casting a spotlight upon the lives of each key player in those points. Through this approach, he weaves a complex tapestry of lives, showing us that even one simple evening at the ballpark contains more guiding factors than we normally consider. It gives the reader a greater appreciation of not just the game, but of life in general and the enormous factors that must come together to put us at any given place at any given time. The book is highly recommended just for that, let alone the quality of the writing and the behind-the-scenes information that holds your attention throughout. If you’re a baseball fan, you can’t go wrong.(less)

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Dec 19, 2011 Kevin rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: baseball, non-fiction

Less about the baseball game than the participants in and around it. Still, a good book with many memorable anecdotes. Some of the highlights include the story of the bat boy who was ejected from a game for cursing at an umpire and the relief pitcher who was not allowed home at first because his wife refused to believe that grown men were still playing a baseball game so late. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the longest game is that nobody bothered to stop it until the league commission...more

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Jul 22, 2012 Lyn rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

In the cold night of a Rhode Island April, two minor league teams began a baseball game that would not be over for another 8 hours. Thus begins the journalistic novel by Dan Berry about the 1981 game between the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings both of the International League. Well researched and balanced, this entertaining account is more than just the story about the longest recorded game in baseball history, Berry has masterfully combined history, psychology and sociology to tel...more

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Feb 22, 2012 Matt Simmons rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A very, very enjoyable book. The allegory is perhaps too thick--it's a book about redemption, and the game in question takes place from Holy Saturday to Easter Sunday and lasts 33 innings, 33 being the age of Christ--but it seems, in its own odd way, charming. The best sportswriting is always about being a bit too sentimental, a bit too melodramatic; it almost has to be. After all, what we're talking about is essentially a children's game, and we're using this game to illustrate and find out abo...more A very, very enjoyable book. The allegory is perhaps too thick--it's a book about redemption, and the game in question takes place from Holy Saturday to Easter Sunday and lasts 33 innings, 33 being the age of Christ--but it seems, in its own odd way, charming. The best sportswriting is always about being a bit too sentimental, a bit too melodramatic; it almost has to be. After all, what we're talking about is essentially a children's game, and we're using this game to illustrate and find out about things that are a part of greater experience of being a human being. This would suggest that it'd have to be a bit over-written. And it is. But, again, that's a part of the genre--and Barry wonderfully overwrites with the best of them.

The thing I love most about Barry's approach to the book is how he treats the game itself: Barry doesn't spend time trying to explain exactly what happened. We often lose our place in the game--what inning are we in, exactly? And that's more than okay; in fact, it's very good. For Barry's approach is to use this game as a canvas on which he can paint the lives of human beings, the life of a city, the life of a ballpark itself. At times, the book almost feels like a poor man's The Naked and the Dead, with moments of the action punctuated by moments of life, by anecdotes of individual parts of the game, player and spectator and city and ballpark, much in the same way Mailer interrupts war to tell the stories of the soldiers in his magnificent novel.

But to the parts themselves: There's a young Wade Boggs and Cal Ripkin, Jr. There's the city of Pawtucket, and its strange ballpark, and its larger-than-life politicians. There's the wife convinced her husband's cheating on her, not playing baseball at this god-forsaken hour. There's the father and son who make a pact never to leave early on the night of this game. And then there's Dave Koza, a man who should be remembered as one of the great minor legends of the game, like Ralph Branca or Moonlight Graham. Koza's the hero, and a wonderfully American hero he is.

That, then, is ultimately the end of this book. It's a truism to talk about baseball and America; but cliché has some truth in it, no matter. If you meet a foreigner who wants to understand America, give them the Constitution, the Declaration, the Federalist Papers, Washington's farewell address, Jefferson's letters, Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack, Douglass' Autobiography, Lincoln and Kennedy's inaugural speeches, and Patton's speech to the Third Army. And then, after all that, explain baseball to them, take them to a game, and during the seventh-inning stretch, give them this book. This is America in a nutshell. And what a beautiful thing it is.(less)

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Jul 24, 2012 james rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The title says it all. Can you imagine writing a book about just one baseball game, and a minor league game at that?

The book describes a game played in Pawtucket, RI on a cold, blustery night in April 1981. Despite a rule about not starting an inning after 12:50AM, the game continued on and on through 32 innings. It was thereupon suspended and finished a few months later.

This was a game between the Rochester Red Wings and the Pawtucket Red Sox in a regular season AAA game. The participants wer...more

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Apr 17, 2011 Daniel Currie rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I won this book in a Goodreads giveaway. Thanx!

It sounds like an interesting premise and it is, but the execution...

It is all about the longest game in organized baseball history. But the game itself was not that interesting. Only a few runs scored. There are some future Hall of Famers in the game, but they didn't play an integral part.

Since there isn't that much of the game to write about (maybe 10% is about the actual game) it has to rely on the people and their backstories. It was obviously...more

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Mar 25, 2011 Kevin rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

An absolute gem of a book ! What's so wonderful about this little book about a very very long game is just how much the Author Dan Barry, is able to seamlessly include in the telling of a baseball game. In small little snippets that briefly take the reader away from "The Game" we learn about the past and future lives not only of the players, but of everyone involved in the game. And I mean everyone ; the owners, managers, coaches, wives, kids, concession workers, p.a. announcers, radio men, the...more

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Apr 11, 2011 Jeff Raymond rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-sports, arcs-manuscripts, goodreads-first-reads-wins, books-i-own

If you're a baseball fan, you understand how the pace, the flow, the movement of a game works. There's so much to a game, the little things, the details not only of the current game but of the impact they'll have on other games. I like reading books about baseball, but this is probably the first baseball book that has gotten the real feel of the game for me.

In 1981, the Pawtucket Red Sox and Rochester Red Wings played a baseball game that ended up going 33 innings. Cal Ripken Jr played in the ga...more

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Jan 24, 2012 John rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book gets better as it goes along. Barry describes the circumstances surrounding the longest game in baseball history - a 33-inning affair between Rochester and Pawtucket (Triple-A level) in 1981. The story is about more than the game - it's about the players and coaches, the town of Rochester, McCoy stadium, where they have come from, and where they are headed.

It is a well written book with dense language and excellent narrative. Sometimes it seems a bit overdone for something as simple a...more

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Dec 24, 2011 Dan rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

My interest in this book was increased because we were living in Rochester during the time of the Longest Game, and I remember when the game happened, though I was not one of the fans who listened to the game on the radio. That season when we went to Silver Stadium to watch the Red Wings there was one ball player who was chatting with children at the fence before the game. He seemed a different kind of ball player in that he seemed to really enjoy talking with the children. That player, of cours...more

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Feb 21, 2013 Tim rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

from Luther Spoehr's review.

Using what he modestly terms “informed imagination,” he has produced a small masterpiece of historical thinking that rescues baseball’s longest game from the “truth-altering charms of myth and memory” and is marvelously well written besides. When you finish it, you’ll feel that you know Win Remmerswaal, the eccentric, ill-fated pitcher from the Netherlands; shortstop Bobby Bonner, whose promising career seemed to go south after one misplay under the steely gaze of Ori...more

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Mar 20, 2013 Sean Kottke rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2013, adult-recreational

This is The Iliad of baseball books, a deeply poetic account of a quintessentially American epic battle. Experience the longest game ever played through the five senses of witnesses from nearly every possible perspective: players, managers, scorekeepers, batboys, announcers, fans ... ghosts, even! The precision of sensory detail throughout raises this from the ranks of narrative non-fiction to become a transcendent reading experience. I felt like I was in the presence of the time-travelling alie...more

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May 03, 2013 Catherine Borshuk rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A classic baseball story -- a long account of a long game, 33 innings long in facy, played in Pawtucket RI in the year of the Major Leagues Baseball strike. Nicely done, following different players whose lives come together for this historic game. I especially liked the focus on players who didn't end up in the Bigs and less emphasis on Boggs and Ripken who we already know lots about.

My only problem was this book was very Barry, as in that folksy style that I always associate with the CBC's Stua...more

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Jul 24, 2011 Alan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: baseball, boston-them, library-book

It's not always easy to explain to non-baseball fans the allure of the sport. Like no other it has quirks, stats, idiosyncrasies, and memorable characters. This book hooked me from page 1. Ostensibly it's the story of the longest game in organized baseball history - 33 innings. It started on Holy Saturday, continued into the wee hours of Easter Sunday until it was mercifully suspended until mid June (the story of the suspension is fascinating in and of itself). But just like Moby Dick really isn...more

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title link	preview: Bottom of the 33rd: Hope and Redemption in Baseball's Longest Game
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BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10478267-bottom-of-the-33rd?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348958421l/10478267.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10478267-bottom-of-the-33rd?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]Bottom of the 33rd: Hope and Redemption in Baseball's Longest Game by Dan Barry[/url]

Bottom of the 33rd: Hope and Redemption in Baseball's Longest Game

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