Time Is on Angels’ Side as They Outlast Yankees, 11-4

Play the game of baseball long enough and certain things are going to happen.

Sooner or later, Don Mattingly is going to hit a home run.

Sooner or later, Lee Guetterman is going to give up a run.

Sooner or later, an Angel record that stood for 28 years is going to fall.

Wednesday night, the Angels and the New York Yankees played long enough. Nine innings, nearly four hours--baseball set to the tempo of a melting glacier. Clocking in at 3 hours 55 minutes, the Angels’ 11-4 victory at Yankee Stadium now stands as the longest nine-inning game in franchise history, breaking the 3-hour 47-minute mark set on July 6, 1961 by the expansion Angels and the Minnesota Twins.

Along the way, a weary crowd of 19,144 watched a few more historic moments crawl by.

Mattingly, the Yankees’ All-Star first baseman, hit his first home run in 171 at-bats. Guetterman, the man with the 0.00 ERA, finally yielded his first run of 1989 after stringing together 30 2/3 scoreless innings. Jim Abbott, making his New York debut, earned his fourth big-league victory and a startling standing ovation from the normally rude and crude Yankee Stadium denizens.

Which was all very interesting.

But did it have to take four hours to get it done?

Angel Manager Doug Rader shook his head, laughed and cursed.

“Four . . . hours,” he said. “What the hell was going on out there? If you can’t play a game in four hours. . .”

Rader’s voice trailed off, unlike the game he had witnessed. How long did it take to play this game? Ask Greg Minton, who, after sitting in the bullpen for more than three hours, was finally called upon to stretch his legs and record his fifth save of the season.

“I could tell it was getting long when we were completely out of sunflower seeds by the fourth inning,” Minton said. “It was terrible. After the fourth inning, I had to come back in and get another can of (chewing tobacco) for the bullpen.”

Supplies replenished, Minton rejoined the Angel relievers who, one by one, were summoned in procession to bail out Abbott. Rader used a total of three relievers, with Yankee Manager Dallas Green matching him man for man.

“There were a few words said about the managers going out to the mound,” Minton said, smiling. “I knew we were getting close to the record. I figured, ‘I’ll come in and walk three and we’ll get out of here at 1:45.”

Before there was Minton, there had been Bob McClure and Dan Petry, and before them, there had been Abbott. Although the memory fades, Abbott was indeed the Angels’ starting pitcher on this evening and he left after working 5 1/3 innings, somewhere around the 2 1/2-hour mark.

In those innings, Abbott was hardly masterful--10 hits, three walks, four runs--but he exited with a 6-4 lead and the Yankee Stadium crowd on his side. In years past, fans here greeted a rookie named Wally Joyner by flinging a knife onto the field, but with Abbott, appreciative of the one-handed pitcher’s effort, they rose to their feet and applauded as he made his way off the mound.

“This town, you hear, is so mean,” Abbott said, “but that response was as nice as any I’ve received outside of Anaheim. I enjoyed that.”

Later, much later, he enjoyed the fruits of victory, as the Angel bullpen and a 13-hit Angel attack enabled Abbott to improve to 4-3.

Five of the Angels’ 11 runs came at the expense of Guetterman, the journeyman who began this season by not allowing any runs in his first 19 appearances. Before Chili Davis homered in the ninth inning Wednesday night, beginning Guetterman’s second inning of work, the 30-year-old left-hander had not yielded a run in 30 2/3 innings--the longest scoreless streak by a Yankee pitcher in 20 years.

“I’m sure he’d tell you it wasn’t going to last all year,” said Davis, who hit his sixth home run of the season.

Rader, meanwhile, suggested that the game’s length had finally taken its toll on Guetterman.

“That was part of the plan,” Rader deadpanned. “Guetterman doesn’t work well in bad weather or late at night. We wanted to screw him up.”

Davis’ home run started a landslide. Minutes later, Johnny Ray was clearing the bases with a three-run double and was scoring on another double by Devon White.

By the time Guetterman got the inning’s last out, his ERA had jumped from 0.00 to 1.42.

Earlier, another streak of note ended when Mattingly homered off Petry in the seventh inning. For Mattingly, who hit 30 home runs in 1987, it broke a drought that dated to last Sept. 29., when he homered against the Baltimore Orioles.

“Next, we’re going for five hours,” Rader joked. “We’re working on it. We’ll get to five before the All-Star game.

“This was just practice.”

Angel Notes

By batting around in the top of the ninth inning against Lee Guetterman, the Angels pushed the game to the four-hour threshold but hit the wall three minutes too soon. Wally Joyner made the last out of the inning but according to the man on deck, Chili Davis, “If Wally got a hit, I was going to hit a home run and trot for seven minutes. That would’ve gotten it done.” The American League record for the longest nine-inning game is 4 hours 16 minutes; the major league record is 4:18. . . . Devon White stole two bases to tie Rickey Henderson with 19, including one in the seventh inning that completely boggled the Yankee defense. With White on second base and Davis on first, White took off for third, drawing a throw from catcher Don Slaught--with no one covering third. Yankee third baseman Tom Brookens never broke for third to take the throw, with the ball bounding down the left-field line for an error that enabled White to score. “The catcher was supposed to eat the ball on that play,” New York Manager Dallas Green said. “We would’ve still had a chance to make the double play. Brookens didn’t expect a throw on that play because there wasn’t supposed to be one.”

Dick Schofield made his first start since May 13 after missing seven games with his latest injury, a groin pull. Having also been sidelined with a strained chest muscle, Schofield has appeared in just 16 of the Angels’ first 44 games. . . . As a consequence of Tuesday’s rainout, Angels’ longest trip of the season will last a little longer. The Angels’ 13-game, 14-day swing through Kansas City, Texas, Boston and New York was originally supposed to end on Sunday, Sept. 3. But now the Angels and the Yankees will play a makeup game on Sept. 4, thus costing the Angels a day off at home and forcing them to travel coast-to-coast Monday night before opening a home stand Tuesday against Milwaukee. . . . Yankee pitcher Ron Guidry, recuperating from arthroscopic elbow surgery in March, will begin a 20-day rehabilitative assignment Saturday with New York’s triple-A affiliate in Columbus, Ohio. Guidry is scheduled to start Saturday for Columbus against Denver.