Fred Bowen's "The Score" column,
April 18, 2003, Washington Post

One Game, 33 Innings

Twenty-two years ago, on April 18, 1981, two minor league baseball teams, the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings, started a game that did not end until June 23, 1981.

The teams did not play all 66 days. That, as they say on ESPN "SportsCenter," would be a record. But they did play 33 innings, and that is the record for the longest game in the history of baseball. And an incredible story.

When the umpire called out, "Play ball," at 8 o'clock on that April night, the 1,740 fans at Pawtucket, Rhode Island's McCoy Stadium figured that the game would last two or three hours, like most nine-inning baseball games. It didn't.

The night was cold and a strong wind whipped in toward home plate. The wind and cold made it hard for the batters to hit and impossible for anyone to knock a ball out of the park. Even the young Cal Ripken Jr., who was playing third base for the Red Wings, was having trouble getting on base.

The Red Wings scored one run in the top of the seventh inning. That looked like it would be enough to win until the Red Sox scored a run in the bottom of the ninth to tie the score at 1-1. The game was going into extra innings. A lot of them.

Neither team could score again and the game stayed tied. About 1 a.m., Red Sox officials tried to stop the game, pointing out a section of the league's rule book that said no inning could start after 12:50 a.m. However, the umpires' rule book did not have that rule. The teams tried calling the league commissioner to find out the right rule, but the commissioner wasn't home. (And he wasn't one of the very few people with a cell phone in 1981.)

So the umpires told the teams to keep playing. The Red Wings scored a run in the top of the 21st inning, but the Red Sox's Wade Boggs, who became a star in the major leagues, drove in a run in the bottom of the inning to tie the score again, 2-2. The innings kept piling up. The game was going so long that the official scorer had to use four different colored pens to keep the scorebook straight.

By now, the players were freezing. They were drinking hot chocolate and coffee and putting on extra clothes to try to stay warm. Some players even put broken wooden bats in a garbage barrel and lit them on fire so they could warm their hands over the flames.

Finally, the teams reached the commissioner. He said that if the game was still tied after the inning they were playing, they should stop. The Red Wings almost scored in that last inning, but Red Sox outfielder Sam Bowen (great last name, but no relation!) threw a Red Wings runner out at the plate.

So, after 32 innings and more than eight hours of baseball, the game finally stopped. But the score was still tied. The commissioner decided that the teams were too tired to finish the game the next day. (It was 4 in the morning, after all.) So the teams finished the game on June 23, 1981, the next time the Red Wings were in Pawtucket, before a packed house of 5,756 fans. The Red Sox won the longest game in one quick inning, 3-2, on a single by first baseman Dave Koza.

Steve Krasner, a sports reporter for the Providence Journal, covered the longest game and wrote a book about it. He says, "Even though I have covered two Super Bowls, a bunch of World Series and three no-hitters, people still ask me about that game."

And why not? There's never been a game quite like it.