Dan Barry - Bottom of the 33rd LP: Hope, Redemption, and Baseballs Longest Game

Three thirty in the morning.

Holy Saturday, the awkward Christian pause between the Sorrow and the Joy, has surrendered to the first hushed hours of Easter. The cold and dark cling to the rooftops in a Rhode Island place called Pawtucket. Triple-decker houses, packed with three, four, six sleeping families, loom over its empty, half-lit streets, while the river that cascades through its deserted downtown releases a steady, dreamy sigh. Yet somewhere in the almost sacred stillness, a white orb disturbs the peace, skipping along the night-damp grass, flitting through the night-crisp air, causing general unrest at three thirty in the morning on Sunday, Easter Sunday.

Pawtucket, it must be said, is not given to the supernatural. This is a city grounded by harsh reality, a city of striving and struggle. After all, it was herenot in Boston to the north or Providence to the immediate south, but right herethat an Englishman with a genius for business, Samuel Slater, arrived at the end of the eighteenth century to create the water-powered textile industry. It was here, then, that the muscular Blackstone River began turning the gears of the American Industrial Revolution, shifting life from farm to factory, from country to city, changing everything. Young children followed their parents into the time-hungry mills and came out old, searching for the decades that were theirs just a moment ago. Time was everything. In 1824, for example, women weavers led a raucous strike to protest longer hours, shorter pay, and lives dictated by the insistent clangs of the factory bell. Not long after, the people of Pawtucket took up a collection to install a clock at the top of the new Congregational church. Precious time is not a mill owners possession.

All those limbs lost to mill machinery, all those airborne fibers inhaled into the lungs, all those labor struggles and recessions and closings and reinventions over two centuries, would bequeath to Pawtucket more than just a poisoned river and a clutter of ghostly mill buildings, standing as dark brick taunts of what was. The city would also inherit a knowing hardness, an understanding to pass on to its children that life is a matter of endurance: Not everyone wins.

Tonight in Pawtucket, in some of the tidy colonial homes that border Providence, and in the cramped triple-deckers surrounding the Gothic hospital, and in the mobile homes clustered near an abandoned racetrack, baskets filled with green straw and chocolate bunnies, hollow and solid and wrapped in the thinnest foil, lie in wait. Beside them are nestled chocolate eggs filled with coconut-flavored goo, and those yellow marshmallow chicks so sweet you sense your teeth dissolving after the first decapitating bite. In a few hours these candy cornucopias will be discovered by children who are blessedly removed from mill-work, too young to have the Pawtucket worldview, and too innocent to question what possible connection could exist between the elusive white-furred rabbit who brought these gifts and the white-robed man who rose from the dead.

Then again, to a ten-year-old, anything is possible. Animals are magical and death is just sleep and you can grow up to be whatever you want to be: chief of the Pawtucket Fire Department; president of the United States; even first baseman for the Boston Red Sox. All possible.

But, now, at three thirty in the morning on April 19, 1981, these children are asleep, as are their parents, as is Pawtucketsave for one radiant swath, across from the Chinese restaurant called the Mei-King and beside the bookmakers social club called the Lily. There, in middle-aged and tired McCoy Stadium, powerful lights shine down on small clutches of people, two dozen, three dozen at most, huddled like straggling immigrants in the steerage of a ship, watching that white dot dance through the night. Some are drinking coffee and hot chocolate, even champagne and Chivas Regal, as a cold Easter wind slaps their faces for the audacity of their presence. They will not leave.

It is a baseball game; an early-season professional baseball game of no particular importance; an International League game between the Rochester Red Wings and the Pawtucket Red Sox. But why? Why are they playing now, at three thirty in the morning, on the holiest day of the Christian calendar? In frigid, unconscious Pawtucket?

To begin with, the game is tied, inextricably, maddeningly knotted to the nightin the 31st inning. The Rochester team has two runs and the Pawtucket team has two runs, and baseball rarely abides a tie ball game. You win or you lose.

Other reasons may wither in the light of day, when mornings logic arrives to temper nights emotions. But right now they include miscommunication; stubbornness; questionable judgment; what appears to be a clerical error made several months earlier, in distant Ohio; and, finally, this: Baseball players play baseball. They hit and catch and throw and chase after a white ball until the call and signal of the final out.

Thatll bring up Dan Logan. Struck out his last time up in the twenty-ninth inning. Singled in the twenty-seventh. Runner at first base. Two away. Heres the pitch to Logan. Misses outside , ball one.

Among the very few watching the game are several miserable men in the press box, a glorified term for a weathered trailer that appears to be suspended from the old stadiums rafters behind home plate. It has no insulation, no heat, no bathroom, and the wind howling in from the outfield is doing little to fill those inside with the hallelujah joy of the risen Lord. For the last eight hours, a sportswriter from the Pawtucket Evening Times has gazed from this vantage; he is underdressed and shivering. Beside him sits his competitor from the Providence Journal ; he is unimpressed and annoyed. A talented writer who hopes to ascend soon to the big-league Philadelphia Inquirer , he has never liked the inferior level of baseball at uninviting McCoy Stadium. Everything is sominor league. A never-ending Pawtucket Red Sox game might as well be sportswriting hell. The coffee is never hot, the editors never stop calling, you can never escape.

Also huddling in the press box are the public-address announcer, who has been calling out the same surnames for nearly eight hours now; a McCoy Stadium aide, who has been playing the same music between the incessant innings and pitching changes; and the official scorer, who has recorded every at bataround 200 so far, and counting. On the other side of a cheap partition are Bob Drew and Pete Torrez, broadcasting the game for WPXN in Rochester, 1280 on your AM dial. Drew, believe it or not, is the general manager of the Rochester Red Wings. He has fallen so far from favor with his superiors that he is doing the radio play-by-play for this entire road trip: ten games in ten days. Torrez, beside him, is an injured Red Wings relief pitcher of modest talent, whether on the field or in the broadcast booth. He often begins his brief observations with, I tell ya, Bob.

But Drew has been the one doing the telling. For nearly eight hours now, he has described this game in kinetic bursts of baseball wordsGround ball, Valdez at shortstop, got it, throw to first base, in timethat have crackled and carried four hundred miles through the night air, across southern New England, over the Hudson River and into central New York State, to Rochester, a city of 240,000 that has proudly supported its hometown team since the late nineteenth century.

But at three thirty in the morning, Drew wonders: Is anyone listening?

He and Torrez are feeling a fatigue that streams of free coffee can no longer keep at bay, leading to mistakes, exhausted pauses, even brief eruptions of laughter at the absurdity of the mission. It is the 31st inning, with no end in sight.