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A review by verybaddogs
Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball's Longest Game by Dan Barry
4.0
I felt cold reading this book. Cold, lonely, and tired. Dan Barry does an excellent job of evoking the feeling of professional baseball's longest game, on a Easter eve in 1981. He places the reader there at McCoy stadium, watching a game unfold and then go on forever, one scoreless inning after another, briefly explaining how such a thing could happen.
Like it must have been for the fans who stayed in the stands, Barry wanders, and takes the reader with him. The 33-inning game brings up thoughts of ballparks, batboys, managers, and mostly ballplayers - players who desperately hope to make the major leagues. Some will, some won't, and two who played this game will eventually make the Hall of Fame. As Barry tells the story of the longest games, he flits away for the player's stories, for the beginnings and the endings of the stories that have a middle in Pawtucket. I appreciated this artistically, but it made the book hard to follow, and the information hard to digest. Someone with a stronger baseball background coming in would probably be able to enjoy it more.
Timing is everything, right? The book's release coincides with the 30th anniversary of the longest game ever. Such a long game happened in part because of weird coincidences of timing. Players' careers, we learn, are made or ended in part by accidents of timing, of what sort of talent is needed when. The randomness makes it hard to call this a pleasant story. But it's not exactly a sad one, either. It's cold. Cold and late and with a sense of being much longer than it really is, and once it's over you feel like you've gone from looking at a game through a kid's eyes to growing up and seeing what it takes from people, and that, ultimately, maybe you're OK knowing that.
I received my copy of Bottom of the 33rd from the Goodreads First Reads program.
Like it must have been for the fans who stayed in the stands, Barry wanders, and takes the reader with him. The 33-inning game brings up thoughts of ballparks, batboys, managers, and mostly ballplayers - players who desperately hope to make the major leagues. Some will, some won't, and two who played this game will eventually make the Hall of Fame. As Barry tells the story of the longest games, he flits away for the player's stories, for the beginnings and the endings of the stories that have a middle in Pawtucket. I appreciated this artistically, but it made the book hard to follow, and the information hard to digest. Someone with a stronger baseball background coming in would probably be able to enjoy it more.
Timing is everything, right? The book's release coincides with the 30th anniversary of the longest game ever. Such a long game happened in part because of weird coincidences of timing. Players' careers, we learn, are made or ended in part by accidents of timing, of what sort of talent is needed when. The randomness makes it hard to call this a pleasant story. But it's not exactly a sad one, either. It's cold. Cold and late and with a sense of being much longer than it really is, and once it's over you feel like you've gone from looking at a game through a kid's eyes to growing up and seeing what it takes from people, and that, ultimately, maybe you're OK knowing that.
I received my copy of Bottom of the 33rd from the Goodreads First Reads program.