Title: Bottom of the 33rd: Hope and Redemption in Baseball's Longest Game
Author: Dan Barry
Narrator: Dan Barry
REVIEW:
4.5 Stars
I saw this book and I knew I had to read it. Just from the title I knew what it was about. This is part of the history for my minor league baseball team that I've been going to see play since I was 8 months old. I knew the history of this game from my grandparents who listened to the game on the radio. When in this book when they asked who would still be up listening back in Rochester I knew my grandma was one of them. My grandpa used tell the story how he woke up in bed and smelled hotdogs to turn over to see my grandma eating a hotdog still listening to the game in the wee hours of the morning. I enjoyed this book so much. The names of players my grandparents used to talk about all the time. Floyd Rayford would become my first favorite ballplayer when I came along a few years down the line. I loved the backstory of pretty much everyone involved and the stadium itself. We even get some updates on players how their lives turned out after this record setting game. One thing that stood out is how back then no cellphones so when family members didn't make it home calls were made to local hospitals and police stations looking for their loved ones in a panic. I remember going to the baseball hall of fame the year Cal Rikpen Jr was going in and the scorecard or lineup sheet from this game was on display. I thought it was so cool to see. For anyone who is truly a fan of the game and it's history this is a book is worth reading. I wish I knew this book existed years ago because my grandparents would have loved reading this.
BLURB:
In "a worthy companion to . . . Boys of Summer," a Pulitzer prize winning journalist "exploits the power of memory and nostalgia with literary grace" (New York Times).
From award-winning New York Times columnist Dan Barry comes the beautifully recounted story of the longest game in baseball history—a tale celebrating not only the robust intensity of baseball, but the aspirational ideal epitomized by the hard-fighting players of the minor leagues.
On April 18, 1981, a ball game sprang eternal. For eight hours, the night seemed to suspend a town and two teams between their collective pasts and futures, between their collective sorrows and joys—the shivering fans; their wives at home; the umpires; the batboys approaching manhood; the ejected manager, peering through a hole in the backstop; the sportswriters and broadcasters; and the players themselves—two destined for the Hall of Fame (Cal Ripken and Wade Boggs), the few to play only briefly or forgettably in the big leagues, and the many stuck in minor-league purgatory, duty bound and loyal forever to the game.
With Bottom of the 33rd, Barry delivers 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. 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.
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