Book Review: Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball's Longest Game by Dan Barry
Published 8:41 pm, Monday, December 26, 2011
What's fun about baseball is that the game itself creates such great stories. Like anything interesting, however, even baseball requires a storyteller who engages the reader in ways that not only report the box scores that are published in the newspapers, but one who knows, appreciates, and respects the people who are the story's characters.
Dan Barry is such a writer. A columnist for the New York Times, and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, Barry's repertoire in Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball's Longest Game" title="Link to Amazon's book page" target="_blank">Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball's Longest Game, expands to America's national pastime: baseball.
Versatile enough to write about a problem with crows in Terre Haute, Indiana, or the struggle of the small town, Hooper, Nebraska, to retain its identity in a country that is ever growing larger, Barry lends his art to the personality of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, where the longest baseball game in history was played.
On April 18, 1981, on the evening of Holy Saturday, the night before Easter Sunday, a minor league baseball game between the Rochester Red Wings and Pawtucket Red Sox was scheduled to start, and, to end.
It was a cold night, with the wind blowing in from the outfield, as if baseball history itself was posted there to contain the fly balls to the field of play where they could be caught routinely by players from both teams. Nothing, except the length of the game itself, was extraordinary about it.
The town of Pawtucket, pronounced "P'tucket" at the insistence of local citizens, was prepared for its day in history. A team of owners, players, equipment managers, coaches, a scorekeeper, and loyal fans, could never have imagined, or wanted, such a reason to justify being recorded in a history book.
Among the players were many who never played in a major league game, the plight of many a minor league baseball player. There were some, however, who did make a name for themselves: Cal Ripken, Jr., Wade Boggs, and Bob Ojeda, among them.
The story is not about any of them. It is about what Dan Barry does so well: small towns, high hopes, and a stubborn disposition not to be rendered irrelevant by the ways the "real world" does things, things like promoting and marketing a sports team, how and where to build a stadium, or making heroes of mere men playing a sport that is played by children.
Among the many subplots of Bottom of the 33rd, are those about children watching the game with their dads, husbands who can't get back into their apartments because their wives won't believe they were out all night just playing baseball, relief pitchers catching some shut-eye during the game, and a scorekeeper who prepares his scorebook the same way he has done for every game, every day, every year, as if it will be encased in a shrine, as though every errant pitch might be found later to have historic significance.
Baseball is a game of statistics, considerable skill, and rules. The one rule about baseball that no other major American sport has is that it is played without the use of a clock. Baseball games aren't over, until, as Yogi Berra is quoted as saying, "'til it's over."
Barry's masterful treatment of baseball and its traditions is like reading one's own triumphal biography, pure enjoyment. The value of this alone is pleasurable enough.
However, the greater reading experience, one that soothes the anxiety of those everyday Americans who see the world passing them by, unabated, is the author's connection with the people who see it all happening, and his prophetic account of how one minor league baseball game refused to end gracefully, as most do, thus announcing to baseball fans everywhere, "I am here, and I will not go away."