June 3rd
– June 9th
Beginnings
with No Ends
It was June 1st, but, of course it was June 1st. It had to be June 1st, because it
had to be the beginning of something. But
before the game began, June 1st was only the beginning of
normal
things: the beginning of the College World Series post-season
tournament, the
beginning of the Gary, Indiana
Regional, and the beginning of a double-header of baseball for me and
three
friends (Scott, Matt V, and his girlfriend, Lauren).
Little did we know, June 1st was the
beginning of much, much more.
We got to the field – The US Steel Yard – around
two,
after winding through the deserted, worn-down streets of Gary. Only in Gary,
by the way, could a baseball stadium be named “The US Steel
Yard.” Parking was free, fitting to
the small crowd,
small town feel of the place, and we found a spot near the back of the
lot
before ambling up to the ticket booth.
At the booth, the ticket lady asked which game we were there to
see. The Gary Regional was playing host
to four teams which would compete in a round-robin type tournament over
the
weekend; according to the ticket lady, we could buy tickets for any or
all of
the games to come. I said we were just
there
for the day and wanted tickets for both games: the 3:00 pm match-up between Kentucky
and Kent State,
and the late game, the 7:00 pm
match-up between Purdue and Valparaiso.
The truth was, we were really only there to see Purdue
play, as they were the first Big Ten team to get a national ranking in
several
years. But we figured that if we were
going to travel out to see Purdue play, we might as well take in a
couple of
Regional games while we were at it. It
cost sixteen dollars total; only eight bucks a game.
But before the lady printed our tickets, she
asked where we wanted to sit. I turned
to Scott and repeated the question.
Where did we want to sit?
It’s common at college baseball games for the stadium to
be divided into halves for the fans of each team, with the area behind
a team’s
dugout designated as their cheering section.
I interpreted the ticket lady’s question as, “Which
team’s section do
you want to sit in, Kentucky
or Kent State?” But because I had no particular interest in
either of the teams, I left the choice up to Scott.
He stepped to the ticket window and spoke,
“The best seats available.” It
made
sense to me. Why choose a side? Let fate and the ticket lady decide.
She gave us our tickets and we filed into the stadium to
find where fate had placed us. Looking
back, it makes perfect sense where we ended up: on Kent
State’s
side…directly behind their
dugout. The best seats
in the house. Row A.
Seats 1-4. If
you were given the choice of any seats in
the stadium, these would have been the obvious choice.
They were perfect.
The stadium, too, was nicer than I’d imagined, as I
didn’t expect much of a baseball stadium in Gary,
Indiana whose home team was the
“Southshore RailCats.” But it was a big, beautiful field with
outfield walls at major league distances (320’ down the lines,
400’ in straightaway
center). The only odd thing about the
park was the lack of bleacher seats in left-field; a result of the
elevated
freeway which rose up just beyond the homerun wall, creating the
illusion that
if a car were to careen off the road, it might skip past the warning
track and
crush the left-fielder.
We
took our
VIP seats and caught the last of Kentucky
taking their infield reps before both teams retreated to their dugouts
for the
national anthem and the player introductions.
I leaned back into my seat and stretched my legs onto the top of
the
dugout, damn near dangling them over the edge to where the players
could see. This was the closest I’d
ever sat to
pseudo-professional baseball; I was going to enjoy it.
The only thing I regretted was that they didn’t
serve beer at the Steel Yard, but I had a mega-pack of sunflower seeds,
the
weather was mild, and there was an entire day of baseball to take in. I was ready.
Then
the game
began. The trouble started when the game
wouldn’t end.
1st
Inning
The game started
innocently
enough. Kent
State went in order in the
first
and though Kentucky
managed two
base-runners, they too failed to score.
It seemed apparent to us that Kentucky
was the better team, but that was mostly conjecture, as none of us knew
much about
either team. But still, we considered Kentucky
the favorite as they came from a far superior conference, and that
meant better
recruiting and better competition during the regular season. On the other hand, everything about Kent
State made them seem like the underdog, from the old-timer uniforms
they wore
(complete with short pants and stirrups), to their off-kilter mascot
(the
Golden Flashes), to the shortness of their lineup (George Roberts,
their
cleanup hitter, appeared to be no taller than 5’8”).
2nd
Inning
There were little
things to
remind me that this was no professional ballpark. For
example, though there was an immense
scoreboard in left field with a jumbo digital screen, the park
operators had
nothing to broadcast except grainy, pixilated images of the players as
they
came to the plate. There were no season
statistics shown, and for subsequent at-bats, no game stats either. Later in the game, Scott and I would regret
not having bought the one-dollar scorecards they were selling near the
entrance
to the park. George Roberts led off for Kent
State by singling up the
middle. Several batters later, Roberts
scored the game’s first run and the Flashes had the bases loaded
with nobody
out. But after two quick strikeouts by the
eight and nine hitters and a line-out by the leadoff man, who was now
hitless
in two at-bats, the score stuck at 1-0. In
the bottom half, Kentucky
got a
single out of Zac Zellers,
prompting Matt V to question whether we knew anyone with the initials
Z.Z. We thought of Zinedine
Zidane, but that was it.
Regardless, Zellers
was quickly picked off of first base and caught in a run down to end
the
inning.
3rd
Inning
As we cycled through
the
lineups for the second time, we got to know the names a bit better. We started to make nicknames for them. There was a Tony Cousino
on Kentucky who we
dubbed “Kirk
Cousins.” When Jimmy Rider came to
the
plate to lead off the third inning for Kent
State, Matt V asked,
“You think his
middle name is Easy?” I said it
might be
“Knight.” “Easy
Rider” sounded a little
better, so we went with that. Either
way, Easy Rider struck out swinging for the second time, George Roberts
collected his second hit (another single), and Kent
State failed to score. Kentucky,
however, used a few hits and some aggressive base-running to get two
across. The score, after three, was Kentucky
2, Kent State 1.
4th
Inning
The weather
fluctuated
depending on the sun and the clouds.
When the sun was out, you could feel it pressing down upon you. But when the clouds shielded you, a cold
breeze wisped through the seats. There
were a lot of long at-bats and pitcher/catcher meetings; the game
already
seemed to be taking a long time. Kent
State only exacerbated this feeling by stringing together its best
inning yet,
scoring three runs, capped off by an RBI double by George Roberts (who
we were
now calling “Georgey Boy”). He was 3-3.
Kentucky pulled
their
starting pitcher and finally got out of the jam. After
they failed to score in the bottom half
of the inning, the score stood at 4-2 in favor of the Flashes.
5th
Inning
Our favorite nickname
was
“Toad,” which we applied to Kent
State’s
nine-hole hitter (who also happened to be the only black player on
either
team): Derek Toadvine.
Toad was a typical college second baseman; he
couldn’t hit, but had a good glove and blazed around the
base-paths. Toad had bunted his way on
base and scored
one of the runs in the fourth inning, but with his other two at-bats,
in the
second and in the fifth, he looked miserable, striking out both times. Kent
State went scoreless in the
fifth,
but Kentucky got a run
across on
a wild pitch. After five, Kent
State led 4-3.
6th
Inning
Scott was starting to
get
extremely agitated that he hadn’t gotten a foul ball. Sitting directly behind the dugout, with fans
spread thin throughout the stadium, it appeared likely that we would
have a
chance at a few. But, strangely, it
seemed that every foul ball popped in our direction would sail up over
the roof
and towards the parking lot. Scott went
on several “smoke breaks” in search of the runaway balls,
with no luck. He returned to his seat each
time further
agitated. George Roberts doubled again,
but no one could get him home. Kentucky
couldn’t score either and the score remained the same.
7th
Inning
I finally left my
seat to get
something to eat, as the sunflower seeds weren’t really filling
me up. I ended up getting a Polish, though
I was
disappointed to find out later that they sold Brats on the other side
of the
stadium, shaking my belief that we had been given the right seats after
all. But a positive was that the
toppings were do-it-yourself, which I always love, not only for
avoiding
unwanted toppings, but for gorging on the toppings I love.
I returned to my seat with a Polish piled
high with white onions and jalapenos. Kent
State finally pulled their
starting
pitcher, after 108 pitches, but not before Kentucky
scored a run to tie the game at 4. I
devoured the Polish and my medium Coke in under
thirty
seconds.
8th
Inning
Easy Rider singled
with one out
in the eighth and advanced to second after a walk by the three-hole. Georgey Boy came
through again, singling to right, scoring Easy Rider and breaking the
tie. Georgey
Boy was now
5-5 on the day with two doubles and two RBI.
I guess height isn’t necessary to be a great clean-up
hitter; Georgey Boy was putting on a
clinic. Kentucky
threatened in the bottom half but came up empty. Heading
into the ninth, Kent State,
the underdogs, led 5-4.
9th
Inning
Kentucky
put in their ace for the ninth inning to stop Kent
State from adding any
insurance
runs. Whispers in the crowd confirmed
that the new pitcher, Trevor Golt, was an
All-American closer. He looked like it
too. He fanned all three hitters Kent
State sent to the dish in
the ninth. Kent
State, on the other hand,
stuck
with their reliever when Kentucky
came to hit and it cost them: Kirk Cousins scored on an RBI single by
Luke
“You’ve Got” Maile and
the game was sent into extras,
knotted up at five runs a piece.
10th
Inning
Golt
sent down Kent State’s
batters in short order once again, striking out Toad along the way. Kentucky
used some none-too-bright base-running to squander their chance and the
score
remained tied.
11th
Inning
The scoreboard at The
US Steel
Yard was like other scoreboards, in that there was only room for ten
innings. By the eleventh, the scoreboard
reset, erasing all of the innings that had been played, leaving only
the Runs,
Hits, and Errors. Looking up at that
blank scoreboard, it felt like an entirely new game had started. When Georgey Boy
got out for the first time all day and neither team scored yet again,
that
feeling amplified. A new game had
started.
12th
Inning
The medium Coke was
coming back
to haunt me and I really had to pee. But
it was extra innings; the winning run could come at any time. I resolved to wait until the game was over,
which I didn’t think would take long, and then find a bathroom
before the Purdue
game started. Toad got his second hit of
the day (on another bunt), but Kent
State
couldn’t get him across. Kentucky
started the bottom half promisingly, with their catcher knocking a
drive to the
wall. Unfortunately, he forgot to touch
first base and Kent State
won the appeal; the umpire emphatically called him out.
No runs were scored.
13th
Inning
It was already close
to seven o’clock at
night, which was when the
Purdue/Valparaiso game was supposed to begin.
The fans and players who had arrived for that game stood on the
tarmac
area behind the seats, begging for the Kentucky/Kent State game to end. I didn’t blame them; most of us just
wanted
the game to get over with too. Kentucky
brought in their fifth pitcher: big AJ “Fulton”
Reed, the first basemen. Both teams
managed a single base-runner in the 13th, but neither advanced past
first. Going into the fourteenth, Scott
assured me
he had a feeling that it would be the deciding inning.
14th
Inning
Kent
State got a runner over to
third
with two outs, but Toad struck out for the fourth time, stranding him
ninety
feet from home. For the second or third
time, with Kentucky
hitting, a
bench coach from Kent State
emerged from the dugout to call out a shift for his outfielders. For the second or third time, the Kentucky
hitter smacked a ball to exactly where the bench coach told the
fielders to
go. It was amazing. At
this point, both teams had made so many
substitutions, both in the field and in their lineups, that we now knew
the
names of every bench player as well.
Unfortunately, none of the new subs made any difference and the
inning
went scoreless.
15th
Inning
Scott continued to
moan about
not having caught a foul ball, watching them continue to sail over the
roof and
into the parking lot. Every time I
laughed at his despair over this he said he hoped they all hit my car. Kent
State grounded into a double
play
to end their half of the inning. Kentucky,
however, got a double with one man out from double-Z (Zac
Zellers). A
strikeout and two walks followed, leaving the bases loaded. The winning run seemed so close. The Kentucky
hitter dug into the batter’s box. After
several tense pitches, the count was full.
The Kent State
pitcher wound and hurled. The runners
ran with the pitch. The batter swung. Scott moaned again as another foul ball went
sailing over the back roof and out of reach.
The very next pitch, the batter popped out to third to end the
inning.
16th
Inning
My huge bag of
sunflower seeds was
empty. The discarded shells were strewn
all over the top of the dugout. It was
after eight P.M. Night had fallen almost completely. Both teams went in order.
Scott assured me, for the fourth inning in a
row, that the next inning would be the last.
17th
Inning
Apparently the
stadium had run
out of songs to play in between innings, because they started to repeat
ones we
had already heard. Matt V asked if we
had somehow been transplanted into the movie Groundhog Day. Toad got out again and Kentucky
squandered another chance to score by playing small-ball, and I turned
to Matt
V and shrugged my shoulders, not really sure that we hadn’t.
18th
Inning
Kent
State’s leadoff hitter
started the
inning with a single (his first and only hit of the game).
After a sacrifice bunt by Easy Rider and a
sacrifice fly by Georgey Boy, a pinch-hit
by “Billy”
Koch brought in the go-ahead run for the Flashes. After
a quick fly-out, Kentucky
got things going as well, with a base-on-balls and a single that
advanced the
runner to third. With runners at first
and third with only one out, Kentucky
seemed on the verge, especially with their best hitter (who was also
their
catcher) coming to the plate. Scott was
optimistic, “If they blow it, the game is over.
If they score two, the game is over.
Either way, we’re good.” Sure
enough, the brawny back-stop nailed a drive out to the gap in right
center. The first runner scored easily,
but the runner from first tweaked something in his leg while rounding
third. The relay came in on time and he
was tagged out many steps away from scoring the winning run. The next batter grounded out on the first
pitch. Both teams had scored a run for
the first time in nine extra innings, yet, the game would go on, tied
6-6. Scott collapsed onto the top of the
dugout
with his eyes closed, exasperated. When
he finally stood back up minutes later, he had a mess of sunflower
shells stuck
to his back.
19th
Inning
We could see the
headlights of cars
streaming past on the freeway. It was nine P.M.
Lauren seemed on the edge of mutiny.
When she agreed to come to the ballpark with her boyfriend, she
surely
hadn’t agreed to this. I
wouldn’t
have blamed her if he had dumped Matt V on the spot.
Neither team scored. We looked to
the twentieth. Scott had finally stopped
making his
predictions that the next inning would be the last, content to spend
his time
picking the sunflower shells off his shirt.
20th
Inning
Kent
State went down quickly,
with Georgey Boy striking out to retire
the side. Georgey
Boy had
pulled an impossible one-hundred and eighty degree turnaround: he
started the
game with five hits in a row, only to follow that up with five outs in
a
row. We were all sure this was some type
of unbreakable, impossible record for a single game.
Kentucky
then looked to end the game once and for all in the bottom half. After a HBP, they loaded the bases with only
one man out. All it would take is a
simple fly ball to score the winning run.
Instead, the hitter grounded back to the pitcher, who hurled it
home to
the catcher for the force out, who then sent it over to first to
complete the
inning-ending double play. Scott
collapsed back onto the dugout.
21st
Inning
The scoreboard
“reset” trick
must only work once, because the operators were baffled at what to do
in the 21st
inning. The bulbs blinked all sorts of
strange numbers before finally settling on six runs a piece in the
first
inning-slot on the board, which must have been the only way to make the
total
score read correctly. It was after 9:30 when Alex Miklos
(“The Greek”) tripled to dead center and brought in another
go-ahead run for Kent State. Though they only scored one, to take the lead
7-6, the scoreboard read that Kent
State
had scored seven runs in the inning.
With how foggy my brain felt with numbers, they very well might
have
scored seven runs and I hadn’t noticed.
I realized that I still needed to pee very badly.
I wondered if the game would ever end. Kentucky,
of course, threatened right away, getting runners at second and third
with two
outs. I turned to Scott, who seemed
terrified to say anything. At that
moment, the Purdue and Valparaiso
fans were indistinguishable from the Kent
State fans, joined in their
hope
for the game to end. Three strikes
later, it did.
-------------------------------------------------------------
There were plenty of crazy statistics that resulted from
this 21-inning marathon. Ten pitchers
were used, most for long stretches (eight
of them
threw 50 pitches or more). AJ Reed, who
spent the first twelve innings playing first base, came in to pitch a
complete
game, or nine full innings, and threw 108 pitches.
There were 678 pitches thrown in all, with 15
walks and 47 strikeouts. The teams
combined for 38 hits in 154 at-bats, but not a single homerun. More shocking than anything, perhaps, was
that there were only two errors made; one by each team.
But the real takeaway was that the game took six hours
and thirty-seven minutes to complete. It
was the second longest game in College World Series history.
Even scarier for us, we still had tickets for the second
game. We had seen our share of baseball,
no doubt, but we didn’t really want to let the tickets go to
waste. It was a tough decision. As it turns out, NCAA rules state that a game
cannot start any later than 11:00 P.M. It was only 9:40,
so this was not a problem. Then came the announcement that the Purdue/Valparaiso
game would
begin an hour later, at 10:40
(almost four full hours after it was supposed to begin).
The prospect of waiting an entire hour for
the game even to begin was too much to deal with. Matt
V reasoned that we had paid for two
games and, if counting by innings, we had actually seen more than two
full
games anyway. In my tired mind, this
made sense. We headed back to the car
(which was free of any foul-ball dents) and drove towards Chicago
and home. I considered the ordeal over
with. But, like I said at the outset,
June 1st was only the beginning of the story.
The next day, Kent State
beat Purdue easily (who was a
#1 seed and hosting the Gary Regional), by a score of 7-3.
On Sunday, Kent State
played Kentucky
again. After seven innings, the score
was 0-0. I wasn’t there, but
I’m sure
most of the fans hunkered down, expecting another drawn-out battle. Then, in the top of the eighth, Kent
State’s leadoff man
launched a
three-run homer over the right-field wall.
Kentucky would
tack on two
runs in the bottom half of the inning to keep things close, but would
go
scoreless in the ninth and fall yet again to Kent
State by a single run.
Improbably,
Kent State
had won the Regional and was
advancing to the Super-Regional, which is played best two-out-of-three. Their opponent was to be Oregon
(ranked sixth in the country, as opposed to Kent
State, ranked 74th
in
the country). If the Flashes weren’t
huge underdogs in Gary,
they surely
would be against the Ducks. Worse yet,
the CWS affords home-field advantage to the higher-seeded teams, which
is a
caveat of college baseball that no other sport shares.
Can you imagine March Madness being played
with home-court advantage? It would be
an almost insurmountable disadvantage to the lower seeds.
But, though Kent State
had gone undefeated in the
Regional, they had to travel all the way across the country to Eugene,
Oregon to play one of the best teams
in the
country on their own twenty-million dollar home-field, with the winner
earning
a spot in Omaha and the
Elite
Eight.
None
of the
games would be easy, with each decided by exactly one run.
Kent State
took the first game 7-6. Oregon
took the second game 3-2. The third and
deciding game was yet another thriller, threatening for more extra
innings. Kent
State was batting last, as
the home
team, in the bottom of the ninth with the score knotted at two a piece. Toad drew a walk to start the inning and
advanced to second on a sacrifice bunt.
Easy Rider stepped to the plate and lifted a harmless-looking
fly ball
down the left-field line. The Oregon
outfielder lost it in the sun and it dropped fair by a few inches. Toad scored easily. Oregon’s
season was over. Kent
State was headed to Omaha.
June
1st
was just the beginning. The
end…well,
just like in that 21-inning game, seems like it might never come.