Bottom of the 33rd

February 14, 2011
New York Times columnist Barry provides a charming, meditative portrait of a minor league baseball game that seemed to last forever. Because of a rule-book glitch, the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings played for 33 innings on a chilly Saturday night into the Easter morning of 1981. Using the game as a focal point, Barry examines the lives and future careers of many of the players, including the then unknown Wade Boggs and Cal Ripken. Barry also profiles the Red Sox team owner, the fans and workers, and even the stadium and the depressed industrial town of Pawtucket, R.I. The game gives Barry ample opportunity to explore the world that surrounds it. Not every Triple-A player becomes a Cal Ripken, and Barry gives generous attention to those who didn't make it—the powerful outfielder who can't hit a curve, the eccentric Dutch relief pitcher with the unlikely name of Win Remmerswaal, the 26-year-old who feels like an old man among younger prospects. The three decades that have passed since the game allow Barry to track the arc of entire lives, adding emotional resonance. Barry is equally adept at describing the allure of a ballpark and the boost it can give to a struggling town like Pawtucket.

February 1, 2011

Barry tells the story of the longest game in baseball history, an eight-hour and 25-minute affair between two Triple-A teams in the spring and early summer of 1981. He explores the lives of the players (many career minor leaguers but also such future stars as Wade Boggs and Cal Ripken Jr.) on the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings, along with others associated with the game, focusing more on the Pawtucket team as the game was held there. He tries, not entirely successfully, to show special spiritual meaning in the game's progression from Holy Saturday to Easter Sunday. Unfortunately, Barry does not write well enough to make the topic of a very long game deserve a long book, additionally because the 33rd inning of victory did not in fact take place until more than two months after the other 32 innings. Still, it may appeal to some baseball fans, notably of the Red Sox or Orioles.--R.L.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 15, 2011

New York Times columnist Barry (City Lights: Stories About New York, 2007, etc.) delivers an all-angle take on the longest, and surely the strangest, game in baseball history.

On a frigid evening in April 1981, 1,740 Pawtucket, R.I., Red Sox fans settled into their seats for a game with the Rochester Red Wings of the AAA International League. With the score tied 1-1 at the end of regulation, the teams played on. And on. On past 12:50 a.m., when the curfew provision, mysteriously missing from that year's edition of the rule book, would have suspended the contest; on past the 21st inning, when each team maddeningly scored a run; on past the 29th and record-tying inning; on past 4:00 a.m., the bottom of the 32nd, when the league president was finally reached and ordered the umpires to suspend the contest. Wittily and gracefully, Barry works out his Easter themes of hope and redemption, providing, of course, an account of the game, but most memorably capturing the atmosphere of the city and the stories of the people who shared this weird moment in baseball's long history: the players, two headed for the Hall of Fame, a few who would establish substantial major league careers, scrubs who would never make it, others only on their way to or back from the proverbial cup of coffee in the bigs; the dutiful umpires and the team managers, baseball lifers both; the hardy double-handful of fans who stayed the course, including a father and son bound by their promise never to leave a game; the clubhouse attendants, batboys and devoted player wives; the makeshift radio broadcasters and jaded newsmen sentenced to cover the game; the millionaire, blue-collar PawSox owner and the dismal team and decrepit stadium he inherited; the burned-out but still-defiant city of Pawtucket, where baseball would, indeed, eventually rise from the dead. When play resumed two months later, the entire baseball world descended upon the stadium, eager to participate in the historic game's conclusion, prefiguring the enthusiastic attention Barry's wonderful story richly inspires.

Destined to take its place among the classics of baseball literature.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

April 15, 2011
Cultural scholars questioning Jacques Barzuns famous assertion that baseball holds the key to the American character would find full substantiation in the chilly night of April 1819, 1981, when two minor-league teams played 32 grueling inningsonly to suspend the contest at 4 a.m. on Easter morning, completing the game two months later in one quick inning. Barry, indeed, tells his readers much about distinctively American toughness in chronicling this unprecedented marathon. The gritty narrative allows readers to share in the heroism of players meeting the singular challenge of a game that becomes a trial of the spirit. Even the umps, managers, sportswriters, and fans take on larger-than-life dimensions, as Barry draws piquant contrasts between the religious hopes for salvation inspired by Easter and the seemingly endless game devoted to earthbound hopes for immortality through sports. Though only a few players (Wade Boggs, Bruce Hurst, Cal Ripkin Jr.) fully realize those hopes, everyone involved feels how intenselyand persistentlyAmerican ardor for its national game still burns. A gripping recollection.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)