Bottom of the 33rd: Hope and Redemption in Baseball's Longest Game

Dan Barry

Apr 2011 · Harper Collins

About this ebook

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.

“Destined to take its place among the classics of baseball literature.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Bottom of the 33rd is chaw-chewing, sunflower-spitting, pine tar proof that too much baseball is never enough.” —Jane Leavy, author of The Last Boy and Sandy Koufax

Ratings and reviews

I adored this book. I am a huge baseball fan, but I think anyone would enjoy it. It's lyrical, insightful, funny, sad, wistful...I wish the game (and the book) would have lasted even longer.

The greatest baseball book I have ever read. Do yourself a favor and read it while you have a minor league game softly playing in the background.

I didn't read this book but cal ripken Jr played in this game. I'm a baseball geek

About the author

Dan Barry is a reporter and columnist for the New York Times. In 1994 he was part of an investigative team at the Providence Journal that won the Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles on Rhode Island’s justice system. He is the author of a memoir, a collection of his About New York columns, and Bottom of the 33rd, for which he won the 2012 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Maplewood, New Jersey.