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Long Memories From a Baseball Classic
"I'll never forget how cold it was, and how hard the wind was blowing -- straight in," said Marty Barrett, crossing the plate with the game-winning run in the 33rd inning, above. "You felt it as soon as you got out there. We all just wanted the night to go real fast."
(Courtesy Pawtucket Red Sox)
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Boggs, a career .328 hitter in 18 big league seasons, was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2005, while Ripken went on to play in a record 2,632 consecutive games for the Orioles -- a feat that has its own Cooperstown treatment -- and is expected to be elected to the Hall on his first ballot as part of the Class of 2007.
"All the guys who played in that game -- it's something we share," Ripken said. "We were all in the same boat, trying to make it to the big leagues. A lot of us [25, to be exact] went on to the big leagues, and we were able to accomplish a lot of great things, but I think everyone would agree, myself included, that that moment was as special as anything else we've done."
Special? Try telling that to Dallas Williams. He's the poor "Williams cf" from the box score, the guy with the 13 at-bats and all zeroes -- no runs, no hits, no RBI. Only a generous official scorer -- who credited Williams with a pair of sacrifices on one-out bunts that could be more accurately described as failed attempts to bunt for hits -- kept him from going 0 for 15.
For the following two months, as the teams awaited the continuation of the game the next time Rochester traveled to Pawtucket, Williams carried around the baggage of that 0 for 13, knowing that as soon as the game was completed -- thus making official the individual statistics -- his batting average would take a major hit.
"It went down about 15 points," Williams said bitterly. "I consider that day the worst day of my baseball life."
Out at Home
If you're walking in your front door at 3 o'clock on a Sunday morning and you have not called your wife to tell her where you have been, you're taking your marriage into your own hands. But Luis Aponte figured that on this night, of all nights, it would be all right.
Aponte, a right-handed reliever for Pawtucket, threw four dazzling, scoreless innings of relief that night -- the seventh through 10th innings -- and some time after 2 a.m., with no end in sight, Pawtucket Manager Joe Morgan allowed him to go home.
What happened next is part of the lore surrounding that night, the story told and retold in various versions. As the story goes, Aponte was confronted at his front door by his wife, Xiomara, who wanted no part of his explanation that he had been at the ballpark all night.
"Yeah, it's true," Aponte said recently in a telephone interview from Venezuela, where he is a scout for the Cleveland Indians. "She didn't believe me. Whenever we had a game, I was usually home by 11:30."
Aponte finally convinced his wife to let him in, promising that the morning newspaper, with its account of the extra-long game, would prove his story correct. Of course, the game went too late to make the paper, so there was no such proof, and Aponte was forced a second time to plead with his wife to believe him.
It took another entire news cycle -- until the Monday newspaper hit the doorstep -- for Aponte to convince his wife, once and for all, that he had been telling the truth.
"She finally believed me," he said. "But it wasn't easy."
