Hope Springs Eternal
With less than two weeks until pitchers and catchers report (11 days to be exact, but who’s counting?), it seemed like a good time to get into baseball shape…with a visit to the bookshelf. I had picked up Dan Barry’s 2011 book Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball’s Longest Game while on a recent trip to Politics and Prose bookstore (home, by the way, of one of the best baseball sections of any bookstore in the Washington area). I thought it looked like a fun read – a story about the longest game in baseball history. But what I found was much more – a little gem. The game began at 8 p.m. after a 30 minute delay due to faulty lighting on April 18, 1981 – Holy Saturday – and was extended until 4 a.m. on Easter morning, April 19th, when the game was suspended after 32 innings and 8 hours with a 2-2 tie. Two months later, on June 23rd, the Rochester Red Wings and Pawtucket Red Sox resumed the game …