One of the many fantastic things about baseball is that time may not run out. In baseball, a comeback is always possible. The game’s not over until you get the 27th outside — or, sometimes, a lot more than that.
Extra-inning games are not anything uncommon in Major League Baseball, of course. But some games in MLB history have truly gone to the extreme. Every once in a while, two teams meet on the field and generate a game far longer than one game has any business going — even beyond the 20-inning mark.
MLB.com takes a look back in these marathon competitions. Here are the longest games played, by amount of innings, in Major League history since 1900.
1. May 1, 1920: Brooklyn Robins 1, Boston Braves 1
Length: 26 innings
The longest game by innings in Major League history might have gone even longer — after 26 innings, the game was called due to darkness. The Robins (the predecessors to the Dodgers) and Braves were tied at 1, and that is how the game finished. The entire episode took just 3 hours and 50 minutes.
Brooklyn’s conduct came courtesy of leadoff man Ivy Olson, who lined an RBI single over Hall of Fame shortstop Rabbit Maranville’s head in the fifth. Boston’s Tony Boeckel drove in the tying run with a single to center at the bottom of the sixth. The teams exchanged zeros for 20 innings until night fell at Braves Field.
The following day’s New York Times story joked that umpire Barry McCormick”remembered he had an appointment pretty shortly with a succulent beefsteak. He wondered whether it wasn’t getting dim. He held out one hand as a test and decided that in the gloaming it resembled a Virginia ham. He knew it was not a Virginia ham and became convinced that it had been too dark to play ball. Thereupon, he called the match, to the satisfaction of himself (fellow umpire Bob Hart) and the chagrin of everyone else ”
This game is incredible by today’s standards. Not only for its sheer length, but on account of the pitchers’ duel it contained. Both starting pitchers, Brooklyn’s Leon Cadore and Boston’s Joe Oeschger, pitched the entire 26 innings of this game. Somehow, they only allowed one run apiece.
“If a pitcher could not go the distance,” Oeschger would let the Sarasota Herald-Tribune decades later,”he soon found himself some other form of job.”
About admin
