Bottom of the 33rd audiobook

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. Dan Barry - image from Roger Williams UniversityHis 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, some wag 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 forty years ago. I can tell you from painful personal experience that it is generally a bad idea to go to a ballgame in New York City in April. Hell, May, and maybe even June, can feel like a wind-blown tundra in NY stadiums. 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. =============================EXTRA STUFFLinks to the author’s FB and Twitter pagesBarry's articles for the New York Times2/24/15 - Barry wrote a heart-wrenching piece about the decision to move the Pawtucket team to Providence. Baseball writing at its best. A must-read for any real baseball fan. Brought tears to my eyes - A City Braces for Its Ballpark to Go the Way of Its Mills - Through Years of Change, Pawtucket, R.I., Always Had McCoy Stadium5/12/21 - A follow up to the above, Barry looks at the state of McCoy Stadium now that the PawSox have become the WooSox of Worcester, MA, and the aging facility stands empty - The PawSox Moved, but Pawtucket Has Yet to Move On

Posted to The Literary Lawyer.ca My #2 Read of 2014 Best Baseball Book I Have Ever Read - 5 Stars I am writing this review about 9 months after having read this. I have been putting off writing this review as I have been finding it difficult to express my feelings on the subject. For me, the game of baseball holds a special place in my heart. Whenever I have a chance to sit down and watch a game, it brings back feelings that I have had since childhood. Feelings of excitement, anticipation, potential and awe. My first heroes (that were not within my own family) were all out on the baseball diamond and graced the faces of my baseball card collection. Maybe Kelly Gruber is no one to you, but the former third baseman for the Toronto Blue Jays was my hero! For me, this story distills these feelings and infuses them into the real life people in this real life story.In short, the book tells the story of the longest baseball game played. It was a 33 inning affair that occurred between two minor league baseball teams. The game was filled with players who would go on to successful careers and players who would go on to non baseball related jobs. The author does a superb job of detailing the game itself while at the same time providing insight and back story into the players playing the game and various persons connected with the game and in the stands. If you thought that authors such as Patrick Rothfuss and Anthony Ryan were skilled at detailing the creation of myth over thousands of pages, than you will be amazed at the authors ability to create legend within a mere 257 pages. The book also serves a case study in myth making. He takes a game that is a footnote to history and an unimportant game in the career of future hall of famers, Cal Ripken Jr. and Wade Boggs but by adding the emotion of the game, the history of the players and a wide array of other stories, he has created something bigger than the sum of its parts.This is my best effort at reviewing what may be the best piece of non-fiction I have ever read. My reaction to the book was quite emotional. It may hold interest to a passive fan but it will be absorbed and understood by everyone who knows that baseball is more than just a game.

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.

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.

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.

There's an old joke about baseball that goes something like this: "Baseball can technically last forever, and some times it seems like it does." This book is about that joke. It's filled with fascinating anecdotes that made me laugh and feel sadness. But for lovers of baseball, as I am, it was a terrific book to read. It was like baseball sex; heck, it was baseball pornography, and I loved every page of it.

Wonderful look at baseball as metaphor for life. Sometimes we engage in activities well past the point of reason or relative importance because, well, that is the human condition. Also a bittersweet look at minor league players' trials and tribulations, high expectations, and hopes fulfilled and dashed.Highly recommend even to non-baseball fans.

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, the people are disparate; failing ballplayers, players on the way to the Hall of Fame, a local guy who forages for ticket stubs, a local kid who's worked his way up to be the clubhouse manager, wives, kids, owners, umpires and on. That's a lot of people to put into 350 pages let alone in context. The story succeeds in telling the stories over 30 years. Its more a story about the characters not the game. And it works.A brilliant book.A great baseball book, an amazing story.

Great book, particularly if you're a baseball fan, and even if you're not. The author apparently is, as this story is steeped in historical baseball lore that only a total devotee could have the persistence to dig up. What I really liked about it was that Dan Barry not only wrote the book, he narrated it too (it was an audiobook from Hoopla). So with his knowledge of the subject matter, he was able to give just the right inflection and emphasis at the exact right times. Plus, as it is an expansive story of a Boston AAA baseball farm team's record-setting - in length and number of innings - 1981 game, Barry, having a Boston/New England accent (I know - there are lots of variations in the region) was able to make it all seem sincerely true-to-life, as it actually was. I thoroughly enjoyed this.