Baseball According to Beckett: A Game That Wouldn’t End

By then only 19 fans remained in frigid McCoy Stadium, along with players, coaches and staff; two reporters; one scorer; and two broadcasters sending play-by-play after play-by-play to a few sleepless listeners in upstate New York. “We’ll hear birds chirping anytime now,” one of them said. A Pawtucket player lay down with his head on third base as if it were a pillow. It was baseball by Beckett, “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” with minor-league ballplayers instead of marathon dancers.

Professional baseball’s longest game confounded time, history and, most of all, common sense, and yielded the sort of signature oddity submitted as evidence of the sport’s charm. (Baseball has no clock!) But in an era when drug revelations and statistical reformulations have left fans wary of proclamations of pastoral innocence, baseball sentiment is rough terrain. Myth and Romance sit at the end of the bench, near the water cooler, replaced in the lineup by VORP (value over replacement player) and H.G.H. (human growth hormone).

So what’s a writer to do? In “Bottom of the 33rd” Dan Barry, a national columnist for The New York Times, acknowledges that an early-season contest between two bush-league teams is, in a cosmic sense, meaningless. Then he plunges fearlessly into the realm of baseball poetry and pathos, and Myth and Romance too. A baseball is a “white orb,” the game is played “in a Rhode Island place called Pawtucket,” balky stadium lights “refused to share their blessings of illumination,” the popcorn machine is “summoning memories of happy childhoods that never were.”

“Why did you keep playing? Why did you stay?” Mr. Barry asks rhetorically of the players and fans. “Because we are bound by duty. Because we aspire to greater things. Because we are loyal. Because, in our own secular way, we are celebrating communion, and resurrection, and possibility.” We get it. Baseball is sacred, especially when a game is contested endlessly in a near-empty stadium in the middle of the night on Easter.

And yet, despite its sometimes breathless tone and metaphorical overreaching, “Bottom of the 33rd” is as good a book about, yes, communion and possibility in baseball as any, a worthy companion to Roger Kahn’s classic “Boys of Summer,” about the Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s. While the books’ subjects are baseball opposites — one bizarre minor-league game versus a historically beloved major-league team — Mr. Barry, like Mr. Kahn, exploits the power of memory and nostalgia with literary grace and journalistic exactitude. He blends a vivid, moment-by-moment re-creation of the game with what happens to its participants in the next 30 years. (Mr. Barry wasn’t present that night, but he lived in Pawtucket and was a reporter for The Providence Journal several years later.)

This is a fastball of literary devices — hindsight, like Ted Williams’s vision, can be 20/10 — but it works wonderfully here, thanks to a diverse roster of characters. The third basemen, Cal Ripken Jr. for Rochester and Wade Boggs for Pawtucket, will enjoy careers that lead to baseball’s Hall of Fame. A free-spirited Dutchman named Win Remmerswaal, who pitches in the 18th through the 22nd innings for Pawtucket, will become an alcoholic, suffer brain damage and wind up confined to a wheelchair in a nursing home in The Hague. The exquisitely named Rochester right fielder, Drungo Hazewood, will exit baseball bitterly, drive a truck and think about “the best time of his life: the days he spent playing baseball on nights like this, as cold as it is, with got-your-back teammates close by, and the Baltimore organization invested in his future.”

During the final game of the 1986 World Series two former Pawtucket teammates, Bruce Hurst and Bob Ojeda, “will spot each other, one in a Red Sox uniform, one in a Mets uniform, and their eyes will lock in wordless communication, conveying so much, including: Pawtucket.” The Pawtucket club owner, Ben Mondor, and his two young lieutenants will run the team for the next three decades. The game’s eventual hero, the Pawtucket first baseman Dave Koza, will struggle in and then out of baseball before righting his life back in the city where he enjoyed his moment of fame.

The foreknowledge imbues “Bottom of the 33rd” with resonance and depth. Participants tell Mr. Barry that a day doesn’t go by that they don’t think about the game, or that it defined their lives, or that it gave them a great story — like that of the Rochester pitcher Jim Umbarger, who consumed “20 or so cups of coffee” and threw 10 scoreless innings, the 23rd through the 32nd; or Danny Card, 9 years old at the time, who stayed because his father had once pledged never to leave a game early. “I learned what a promise meant,” Mr. Card tells Mr. Barry.

Mostly the participants remember the surreal nature of a game that wouldn’t end. By the 24th inning Mr. Barry wonders: “Is this even a baseball game anymore? Maybe it has morphed into some kind of extravagant form of performance art, in which the failure to reach climax is the point; in which the repetition of scoreless innings signals the meaninglessness of existence. Then again, maybe the performance is intended to convey the opposite message: That this is all a celebration of mystery, a divine reminder that the human condition is too complex and unpredictable, so enjoy this party while you can.”

A bit over the top? Sure, but asking existential questions seems not only reasonable but also necessary when it comes to a game in which players burned broken bats in garbage drums to stay warm, and family members called hospitals searching for loved ones who should have come home hours earlier.

It’s fitting, and for Mr. Barry narratively ideal, that baseball’s longest game occurred in the rung just below the majors, Triple-A, populated by has-beens and will-bes and those in between. Everyone in Triple-A is at a life-changing crossroads, even if they don’t yet know it, but for one night there in April 1981 time simply stopped. In the moment those present wanted the insanity to end; three decades later they are grateful that it didn’t.

The tie game was resumed on a warm Tuesday evening in June. This time McCoy Stadium was packed with 6,000 fans and 150 journalists, all of them intruders on a private moment. What took 8 hours 7 minutes and 32 innings to start required just 18 minutes and 1 inning to finish, with a bases-loaded bloop single by Mr. Koza. He never went on to play in the majors. But the bat he used to stroke that winning hit is in the Hall of Fame.