Today in 1981, day one of a baseball game that just kept going and going and going.
This record-setter was a Triple A game between the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings.
Ironically, some of the players were hoping for a quick game, since it was a cold, windy night at McCoy Stadium in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
There was no score until Rochester picked up a run in the 7th inning.
And that would have been it, if Pawtucket hadn’t tied it up in the bottom of the 9th.
The two teams went into extra innings, and because baseball doesn’t end unless somebody scores a run, they just kept playing.
The league did have a rule at the time that no inning should start past 12:50 am, but somehow that had been left out of the printed rulebook.
So the umpires kept everyone at it, at least until the league president found out and he told everyone to stop playing at the end of the inning… which was at 4am.
The remaining 19 fans on hand all headed home, though most of them had fallen asleep and needed to wake up.
One of the players came home after play was postponed, but his wife wouldn’t let him in!
She thought he’d been out running wild instead of trying to break a baseball deadlock.
The two teams finally finished the game during their next series.
That was in June, though fortunately it only took one more inning for Pawtucket to win 3-2.
The game had taken so long, the losing pitcher hadn’t even with the Red Wings when the game started!
Also on hand: two future Hall of Famers, though neither really had a Hall of Fame performance.
Wade Boggs had four hits, but one of them was the tying run in the bottom of the 21st inning back.
He said his teammates were furious that he’d kept them from losing!
And Cal Ripken Jr. went 2 for 13 in the contest.
He joked of the record-setting game, “a lot of us had a bad week that day.”
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The schedule includes live pirate music, pirate combat demonstrations and a pirate-themed magic show.
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The Most Incredible Performance In Baseball’s Longest Game (Heard It From Hoard)
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Photo by jpellgen via Flickr/Creative Commons