Some sports fans will try and tell you that a baseball game is boring but I have to disagree. The game of baseball is the only game that has a one vs. one showdown as big as the pitcher vs. the hitter while the game as a whole is still a team game. Baseball might be slow but there is more strategy and more of a mental game than the other popular sports.
I enjoy baseball games and often hope the games go longer than nine innings. There are not many things better in sports than a good extra inning game that goes until 1 AM. There are not many things in sports that beat a walk-off homerun in the 13th or the team’s stud closer coming in to close the 16th inning.
I would’ve enjoyed the longest Major League Baseball game ever played but unfortunately I was not around to see it. The longest game in Major League Baseball history in terms of innings was played on May 1, 1920 between the Brooklyn Robins and Boston Braves.
This epic game between the Robins and Braves was a twenty-six-inning affair. If a baseball game went that long in baseball today how many pitchers do you think the two teams would use combined? Probably all of them. Well in those days pitchers played a lot of complete games, even complete twenty-six-inning games.
That’s right, both of the starting pitchers, Leon Cadore of the Brooklyn Robins and Joe Oeschger of the Boston Braves threw every pitch of the game. Leo Oeschger gave up a run in the fifth inning and then shut out the Dodgers for the last twenty-one innings, a record for consecutive scoreless innings. Even after twenty-six innings the game was still not decided though. The Robins and Dodgers were still locked in a 1 – 1 game but the game was called because of darkness (they had no lights in stadiums then) and the game went down in the record books as a tie.
The twenty-six inning performances were truly great. The longest amount of innings a pitcher has thrown in recent years was when Aaron Harang pitched 10 innings earlier this year. The last time anyone pitched longer than ten innings was back in 1990 and the last fifteen-inning performance was 1974.
That is the longest game in terms of innings though. There was one game that came one inning short in terms of innings but lasted longer in amount of time.
In 1984 the Chicago White Sox and Milwaukee Brewers played a game that went 8 hours and 6 minutes on May 8th (and on into May 9th). The game lasted 25 innings when the Chicago White Sox finally pulled out a 7 – 6 victory. Four batters, including Carlton Fisk and Cecil Cooper, had eleven at-bats during the game and another five batters had ten at-bats.
By 1984 pitchers no longer pitched for twenty plus innings. The longest any pitcher lasted in the game was seven innings. Don Sutton started for the Milwaukee Brewers and pitched the first seven innings and Juan Agosto pitched seven innings in relief for the Chicago White Sox. The Milwaukee Brewers and Chicago White Sox used fourteen pitchers combined and forty-five players in all, including Tom Seaver who came in as a reliever in the twenty-fifth inning and got the win.
