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Bottom Of The 33rd
Dan Barry
Hope, Redemption, and Baseball's Longest Game
HarperCollins
April 2011
On Sale: April 12, 2011
272 pages
ISBN: 006201448X
EAN: 9780062014481
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
On April 18, 1981, a ball game sprang eternal. What began as
a modestly attended minor-league game between the Pawtucket
Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings became not only the
longest ever played in baseball history, but something else
entirely. The first pitch was thrown after dusk on Holy
Saturday, and for the next eight hours the night seemed to
suspend its participants between their collective pasts and
futures, between their collective sorrows and joys—the
ballplayers; the umpires; Pawtucket's ejected manager,
peering through a hole in the backstop; the sportswriters
and broadcasters; a few stalwart fans shivering in the cold. With Bottom of the 33rd, celebrated New York Times
journalist Dan Barry has written a lyrical meditation on
small-town lives, minor-league dreams, and the elements of
time and community that conspired one fateful night to
produce a baseball game seemingly without end. Bottom of the
33rd captures the sport's essence: the purity of purpose,
the crazy adherence to rules, the commitment of both players
and fans. This genre-bending book, a reportorial triumph,
portrays the myriad lives held in the night's unrelenting
grip. Consider, for instance, the team owner determined to
revivify a decrepit stadium, built atop a swampy bog, or the
batboy approaching manhood, nervous and earnest, or the
umpire with a new family and a new home, or the wives
watching or waiting up, listening to a radio broadcast slip
into giddy exhaustion. Consider the small city of Pawtucket
itself, its ghosts and relics, and the players, two destined
for the Hall of Fame (Cal Ripken and Wade Boggs), a few to
play only briefly or forgettably in the big leagues, and the
many stuck in minor-league purgatory, duty bound and loyal
to the game. An unforgettable portrait of ambition and endurance, Bottom
of the 33rd is the rare sports book that changes the way we
perceive America's pastime, and America's past.
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