Age has its advantages, and I missed this sleep-depriver at the Stadium last night, and thank God for that. I stayed with it at home until the tenth or eleventh but I somehow dozed through New York tying Boston in the bottom of the ninth, the matching home runs by Big Papi Ortiz and Mark Teixeira in the sixteenth, and Beltran’s re-tying double in the bottom of the eighteenth, and all and all, including the game-winning (it turned out) sac fly by the Sox Mookie Betts, in the top of the nineteenth. Great game, everyone is saying, but c’mon. Rob Manfred. the new commissioner, is working hard to speed up the game, and only needs now to step up with the Manfred Beddie-Bye Button.
But let’s call it by its honored old name. Curfew. I can’t find the last game that was shut down and carried over by this sensible old puritan edict, but we can see it at work in the midst of the longest game ever played in the American League, the two-day, twenty-five-inning game between the White Sox and the Milwaukee Brewers, on May 8-9, 1984, won by the Pale Hose, 7–6, in twenty-five innings. What was different about it was that everyone—players, coaches, fans, announcers, ushers, cops—went home at one in the morning, with the thing still tied after the seventeenth, thanks to the then reigning edict that no inning could start after 12:59 A.M. Resuming the next day, the teams played another eight, to a resolution, then played another game, a normal nine innings, also won by the White Sox, 5 to 4. Tom Seaver, pitching in late relief , won the first game, then started and won the second game as well. Both days supplied seventeen innings of play.
Seventeen innings, as against nineteen last night? So what’s the big deal, you’re asking. The difference is that we know what’s coming: a lifesaving pause. Anybody can stay up till one in the morning. What eats at you, numbs you, puts you into coma watching is the bottomless party: another pop-up, or another three-hop infield grounder that ends the inning and rolls around the next, on and on, perhaps forever. BB ad infinitum.
As stated, I’m glad I wasn’t there—and believe or strongly guess that the the later, game-tying Yankee runs were greeted by outer cheers and inner groans by some or many in pinstripes last night.
It’s all in “Henry V,” or sorta:
