The story is told that John Kruk, a major league baseball first baseman and outfielder of the 80s and 90s, was having dinner in a restaurant and afterwards, as one could in those days, he lit a cigarette. A woman patron of the restaurant had recognized Kruk and went over to him to lecture him about the bad example he was setting for the youth of America for them to see an athlete, in public, smoking. “Lady,” Kruk pointed out, “I ain’t an athlete, I’m a ball player.” Bottom of the 33rd, ain’t a work of art, which the cover might try to make you believe, but it is a very good baseball book. It is, ostensibly, the story of the longest professional baseball game, some 33 innings, played in Pawtucket, Rhode Island starting on Easter Eve in 1981. Because of a foul up in the instructions issued to umpires each year nobody knew they didn’t have to keep playing through the night until nearly dawn, 4:07am. The book is at its best when the author, Dan Barry, tells stories and there are a lot of them. About the orphaned ball club playing in the misbegotten park in a struggling city. Pawtucket is still the top Red Sox farm team in the International League, a “Triple A” league, one step on the baseball ladder and light years below Major League Baseball. The top of professional baseball. The Big Time, The Show. But what really makes it as good a book as it is, is that Barry tells us about the people and it’s quite a cast of characters. Two of them were on their way to having Hall of Fame careers, Wade Boggs and Cal Ripken Jr. A few others would have careers worthy of note either because of the length or a specific accomplishment. Some were on their way up, others on their way down although they didn’t necessarily know it. Some were stuck, that close to the top, 90 miles from Boston’s Fenway Park and would never get the chance, or would get the chance and not play well enough to convince their club, the Orioles or the Red Sox, that they belonged. Sad tales like that of the Pawtucket pitcher who could go AWOL for days at a time whose major league career was 22 games and whose later life is in assisted living and Rochester shortstop whose budding career may have been sabotaged by a single ground ball that he didn’t catch. Or the star athlete, can’t miss prospect who returned home every winter to the increasing skepticism of the people he had known all his life who thought him a failure when he didn’t make the big leagues but whose real success came years after he left baseball when he finally joined A.A. There are also stories of the bat boys, the managers of the two clubs, even lineage of the Pawtucket team’s ownership makes a good story. But every once in a while there is an effort to link the game to Easter and to find significance in the fact that it extended till almost dawn on Easter morning. There is meaning in this. It means the game lasted, unresolved, for nearly eight and a half hours. Barry is a magnificent story teller but a lackluster theologian. You’ll enjoy the read though.