Was anyone else at this game?
I was at the game on 25 Aug 2001 – 25 years ago today. It was at The Ballpark in Arlington vs the Boston Red Sox. That itself is not significant. What WAS significant was stats from the box score.
Basically this was the game that went 18 innings. The Rangers won in a walkoff on the bottom of the 18th. The total time of the game was 6 hours and 35 minutes according to the box score.
Some of the guys were having eight and nine at bats in a single game. Bill Haselman ended it in the 18th. I always love an extra inning game, but I know this one tested the patience of some people.
I stayed all the way to the end – and bless her heart, so did my wife. She was fond of saying that because it went so long, she went to get some pizza and it was super fresh since they had to make it new one we got past the 12th or 13th innings.
By the end of the game, there were very few people left, and those in the upper deck (I was in 326 in the old park) had mostly grouped together, as it became kind of a communal thing.
Check out the box score from the game – all kind of weirdness abounds.
However, the weirdness didn’t end there – I was scoring games on paper still there. There is NO SCORECARD ALIVE that can support an 18 inning game. It was shortly after this that I stopped scoring on paper and went digital. That was the era of the PalmPilot. But on top of just scoring the game, I also counted something that isn’t normally done. I counted the number of baseballs used in the game.
What I did was basically follow every baseball to see what happened to it. When it was taken out of service (foul ball, home run, being too scuffed, etc), I added to the count. It meant watching QUITE intently to see where the ball that ended an inning went – following it through warmups to see if it became the live ball once play started again (very rarely that happens). But the game I decide to do that is the game it goes 18 innings.
BTW, we used 169 baseballs in that game. 🙂
My scorecard was a nightmare. On this page is pictures of my scorecard – it took four to get all this monstrosity of a game in.
Here’s what I wrote on this blog 25 years ago about the game. :)
Leave a Reply