Bottom of the 33rd

Hope and Redemption in Baseball's Longest Game

By: Dan Barry

Narrated by: Dan Barry

Length: 8 hrs and 36 mins

Publisher's summary

On April 18, 1981, a ball game sprang eternal. What began as a modestly attended minor-league game between the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings became not only the longest ever played in baseball history, but something else entirely. The first pitch was thrown after dusk on Holy Saturday, and for the next eight hours, the night seemed to suspend its participants between their collective pasts and futures, between their collective sorrows and joys - the ballplayers; the umpires; Pawtucket's ejected manager, peering through a hole in the backstop; the sportswriters and broadcasters; a few stalwart fans shivering in the cold.

With Bottom of the 33rd, celebrated New York Times journalist Dan Barry has written a lyrical meditation on small-town lives, minor-league dreams, and the elements of time and community that conspired one fateful night to produce a baseball game seemingly without end. Bottom of the 33rd captures the sport's essence: the purity of purpose, the crazy adherence to rules, the commitment of both players and fans.

This genre-bending book, a reportorial triumph, portrays the myriad lives held in the night's unrelenting grip. Consider, for instance, the team owner determined to revivify a decrepit stadium, built atop a swampy bog, or the batboy approaching manhood, nervous and earnest, or the umpire with a new family and a new home, or the wives watching or waiting up, listening to a radio broadcast slip into giddy exhaustion. Consider the small city of Pawtucket itself, its ghosts and relics, and the players, two destined for the Hall of Fame (Cal Ripken and Wade Boggs), a few to play only briefly or forgettably in the big leagues, and the many stuck in minor-league purgatory, duty bound and loyal to the game.

An unforgettable portrait of ambition and endurance, Bottom of the 33rd is the rare sports book that changes the way we perceive America's pastime, and America's past.

©2011 Dan Barry (P)2011 HarperCollins Publishers

Juuuust toooo slooooowwww

What would have made Bottom of the 33rd better?

Different reader, different author. More specifically, don't try to milk the subject quite so hard.

How did the narrator detract from the book?

Great lack of animation.

You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?

He did a very good job researching the whole world described in the book.