Dan Barry’s lyrical love letter to baseball, Rhode Island and the longest game

Dan Barry is the New York Times literate Everyman, a writer who finds poetry in the quotidian struggles of America’s obscure places and people. This talent is once again on display in his new book, a meditation on baseball, Rhode Island and the longest professional baseball game ever played.

Barry’s work, entitled “Bottom of the 33^rd: Hope, Redemption and Baseball’s Longest Game,’’ reels us back to 1981, when history’s longest game was played at a minor-league stadium in Pawtucket that can be generously described as scruffy, on an Easter weekend, in weather more suited to a November football game than any summer sport.

It harkens to an era when the future of professional baseball at McCoy Stadium was at best precarious. Just a few innings removed from the rescue of a bankrupt franchise by a retired textile mill flipper from Woonsocket named Ben Mondor, the man who will forever be beloved by Rhode Islanders for saving professional baseball for our state.

This book will resonate with Rhode Islanders who throng McCoy every summer and especially for those of a certain age who recall the rundown old ballyard and the players who toiled there. It is a narrative for every kid who ever tossed a baseball against a barn door and pretended that he was pitching in the World Series in Fenway Park or Yankee Stadium.

Yet Barry’s book strikes a more universal chord. The baseball-as- metaphor-for- life trope has been done before, but rarely as well as in this meticulously reported and lyrical love letter to the characters who flit across the stage of this infamous minor-league game between the PawSox and the Rochester Red Wings, the minor league affiliate of the Baltimore Orioles.

The narrative unspools like a baseball game, with the reminder that this is our only major sport that measures time in a 19^th Century measure called innings, rather than the 20^th Century imperative of an electronic time clock. “How short, now, the longest game seems,’’ writes Barry. “On a night and early morning set aside for prayer, reflection, and everlasting joy, a baseball game insisted on the suspension of ordinary time. It forces those watching the game to contemplate cosmic issues that transcend the successive crisis of balls and strikes.’’

In Barry’s ballard we meet future Cooperstown inductees Wade Boggs and Cal Ripken Jr., both of whom played in this game. And more memorably, a cast of whatever-happened-tos, never-heard ofs and what-ifs.

There is high comedy sprinkled among the hopes and dreams of men playing a child’s game, a game so frustrating that a hitter who connects but 30 percent of the time is a standout. We are introduced to the young wives from the one-stoplight towns in flyover America, yoked to their husbands’ dreams. Ten years have gone by since she and baseball sweetheart were the prom king and queen. Now, she drags two toddlers to the stadium to cheer on hubby’s flailing quest at a curve ball, worried that he is too old to ever achieve his boyhood dream of making the majors.

Barry reminds is that this child’s game enforces its own harsh rules on those who choose it.  Rare is that job or profession where if you are not a star at age 25 you are as good as done. But that’s baseball; Raymond Carver meets Peter Gammons.

Barry takes us to the innards of the game’s lore and lure and such lifers as Joe Morgan, the longtime Paw Sox manager who finally makes it to Fenway Park as Boston skipper.

And every time you worry that Barry is about to descend into treacle and cliché, he snaps us back to the game with a narrative thread – the radio play-by-play by a Rochester general manager who was about to be fired and a washed up player as color man.

Anyone who knows anything about baseball realizes that making it to a triple-A team such as Pawtucket means you are one of the world’s best baseball players. But these guys didn’t live their lives in a ball park to make it to a seen-better-days mill town in New England. They all strive for the shot at the big leagues. Barry’s book gives us a visceral understanding of what that means for the players and their families, how one error, or the unserendipitous fate of playing a position a team is stacked in,  can doom a career. The fragility of life meets the reality of baseball.

Full disclosure is required here: Yours truly is a former colleague of Barry. A cancer survivor, Barry is Celtic enough to meet W. B. Yeats’ description: “Being Irish he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.’’

He has the skepticism and curiosity of the best journalists, without the cynicism that is too often a byproduct of staring with a jeweler’s eye at human frailty and foolishness. He was smart and lucky enough to marry the much loved and admired Mary Trinity.

Barry is also a generous and caring man. He has always had time for his old Rhode Island friends. He dedicates this book to Mondor, who died shortly after the last pitch of the 2010 season. It is a pity Mondor was not alive last Friday evening, when hundreds jammed a function room at McCoy to relive the longest game and have books signed by Barry. In Mondor’s absence it was comforting to know that this franchise still does things the right way, thanks to Lou and Mike.

So it isn’t surprising that Barry has developed such a wonderful tale in the shadows of McCoy Stadium.

His gift is not only in the felicity of  his language. It lies in a studied avoidance, even disdain, for the conventions of pack journalism. When the media flock lands, Barry flies away. The recent labor protests in the Madison, Wisconsin State House drew hundreds of journalists hanging on every word of governors, legislators and labor leaders. Barry churned out a gem of column by interviewing the $10-an hour janitors who cleaned up the capitol after the demonstrations.

He finds columns in the mundane and out-of-the way. The sleepy Nebraska hamlet that finds its identity via a highway sign. A neglected graveyard in South County. The wiener shop owner in North Providence who is indignant that that town’s crooked pols tried to shake him down for a bribe.

In “Bottom of the 33^rd’’ Barry has once again found a compelling story in such a place: a 30-year old baseball game in a gritty red brick Rhode Island factory town.