The Night Without End : An Unusual Baseball Game Was Played One Year Ago; It Seems Like Yesterday

Today marks not only the observance of a national holiday but also the first anniversary of a very special baseball game. Special not because of the day it was played, but because of the distinct possibility that there may never be another one quite like it.

You can call it: The night the lights didn’t go out in Georgia.

The game between the Atlanta Braves and the New York Mets at Atlanta, as you might remember, was a lengthy one. Now, length doesn’t make a game special, but this one, as dramatic as it was long, dragged on for 6 hours 10 minutes. Add 2 hours 10 minutes of rain delays, and it totals up to quite an event.

After finally getting under way at 9:04 p.m. EDT, the game ended at 3:55 a.m, the Mets wearily winning, 16-13, in 19 innings. Although few stuck around to see the end, it turned out to be quite a game.

And after the game, there were the traditional fireworks. After all, it was the Fourth of July. Actually, 4:01 a.m. makes it July 5, but the promised show had to go on.

“As long as there were people at the game, we were obligated to fire ‘em (the fireworks) off, I thought,” said Wayne Minshew, director of public relations and promotions for the Braves.

There were an estimated 8,000 fans left from a crowd of 44,947 when the fireworks started shortly before dawn. Ernie Johnson, Braves radio-TV announcer, wasn’t pleased, especially after he found out he was to emcee the fireworks.

“They told me they wanted me to do a play-by-play on the fireworks show after the game,” he said. “I mean the game itself was so long. I said to myself, ‘What do they want me to do here, go ohh and ahh as they light each one off?’ ”

Johnson was also concerned with the neighbors around the stadium. Minshew didn’t give it a second thought, and later found out the fireworks raised the ire of some of the stadium neighbors.

“We got about 30 calls (complaints) here, and the police precinct told me they got several,” Minshew said.

Jack Lang, a longtime baseball writer who works for the New York Daily News, figured the complaints weren’t directly concerning the fireworks.

“The neighbors thought they were being bombed,” he said. “They didn’t call to stop the fireworks, they called because they were alarmed and didn’t know what was going on.”

The game, the latest finish ever in the majors, and probably anywhere else, left workers reeling in a state somewhere between frustration and delirium.

Naturally, the players were tired. But since neither team was able to hold a lead, it was difficult to stir up a lot of sympathy for either.

Consider, for example, the agony on the part of those who, for one reason or another, had to watch the entire game.

“It was one of the more miserable experiences of my life,” said Gerry Fraley, who covers the Braves for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. “It was a night in hell is what it was. It was like slow torture. It’s bad enough to cover a team that loses 96 games, but to have to watch them lose for six hours in one sitting is ridiculous.”

Atlanta finished 66-96 last year.

“I didn’t leave the stadium til’ 6:30 in the morning, and my neighbors must have thought I was some sort of derelict or something for coming home at 7 in the morning,” Fraley said. “Oh God, it was a bad night.”

Lang, looking back, was one reporter who was glad to be there.

“Anytime you get involved in something historical, you can’t feel too bad,” he said. “Yeah, I was glad to be there. It was something different.”

Actually, the game shouldn’t have gone as long as it did. It probably should have been over long before dawn instead of just before sunrise. But it simply wouldn’t end.

Going into the bottom of the eighth, the Mets had a 7-4 lead. Reliever Jesse Orosco walked three batters and proceeded to give up four runs. The Mets’ Len Dykstra, however, drove in a run with an infield single off Bruce Sutter to send the game into extra innings.

Sutter wasn’t the only one to lose a lead. Both teams kept coming back.

With two outs in the 13th, Howard Johnson hit a two-run home run off now-Angel Terry Forster to give the Mets a 10-8 lead. It looked as though they would win the game. But Terry Harper wasn’t to be outdone by Johnson. He also hit a two-out, two-run shot off Tom Gorman in the bottom of the 13th, which tied the game again at 10-10.

In the 18th inning, Dykstra drove in Johnson with a sacrifice fly off Rick Camp, the seventh and final Atlanta pitcher, making it 11-10 Mets.

But Camp, with a .060 batting average, produced the strangest twist of the night. Batting because there was no one left to do so, he hit his first and only major league home run to tie the score again at 11-11.

“That was the most bizarre thing about the whole night,” Fraley said.

Finally in the 19th inning, the Mets, who out-hit the Braves 28-18, were finally able to put the game out of reach, scoring five runs off Camp.

However, the Braves scored twice in the bottom of the 19th and Camp had another chance to tie the game with runners on first and third. But this time he struck out and took the loss. Gorman, who had given up two two-out home runs, got the win.

“They had a lead in the ninth inning, and Sutter lost it,” Fraley said. “They always seemed to find a way to lose. It was just a horrible evening.”

Gorman said he could have ended the game much earlier. He had the chance.

“We should have won the game twice,” Gorman told the New York Times. “I could have easily picked up the save. I could have lost the game. Instead I won it. It was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.”

But, as Fraley said: “It just showed how bad the Braves were, it took ‘em 19 innings to lose. In a sense it kind of typified their whole season. It was all kind of ridiculous. I just try to blot it out of my memory as much as possible.”

At the end of the evening, there had been 155 official at-bats, 23 strikeouts and 22 walks.

The Mets’ Keith Hernandez said he “saw things I’ve never seen before.”

Ron Darling, who pitched the last inning (he was used as a reliever for the first time since a freshman at Yale), said, “It was a game everyone on this team will remember.”

The Mets set a club-record 28 hits; Hernandez had hit for the cycle (single, double, triple home run) by the 12th inning; Gary Carter caught the entire game, while going 5-for-9 at the plate and driving in two runs; Ray Knight, though providing a key run-scoring double in the 19th inning, left 11 runners on base, three times making an out with the bases loaded.

The Braves’ Terry Harper went 5-for-10 with 4 RBIs, and Camp hit the not-so-memorable home run, at least as far as he was concerned. “I couldn’t care less about the home run,” Camp told the New York Times. “If they have to rely on me to hit home runs, we’re in a lot of trouble.”

He was right.

Forty-three of a possible 50 players participated in the marathon, each team used seven pitchers (the starter for the Mets was Dwight Gooden, who pitched 2 innings, walking four batters and allowing two runs to score), and the teams combined to leave 37 men on base.

It was was surely a memorable evening, night and morning. By the way, the Braves play host to the Montreal Expos tonight. This time, the forecast is for clear skies.