I love baseball and was looking forward to this book. I remember this game happening and figured this would be a fun read. Instead, there were so many words...if wrote my review like this book, it would be 37 pages. Enough said.

A beautiful, transcendent book. It almost invites you into the meditative state of that longest-ever game, drifting easily between innings and biographies, histories and statistics. It's the kind of book that makes you fall in love with baseball all over again, or perhaps even for the first time.

If you're a baseball fan, you understand how the pace, the flow, the movement of a game works. There's so much to a game, the little things, the details not only of the current game but of the impact they'll have on other games. I like reading books about baseball, but this is probably the first baseball book that has gotten the real feel of the game for me.

In 1981, the Pawtucket Red Sox and Rochester Red Wings played a baseball game that ended up going 33 innings. Cal Ripken Jr played in the game, as did Wade Boggs, Bruce Hurst, and a number of other marginally famous to instantly forgotten players. This book excels in that it takes a significant amount of time with each player involved, both then and, if possible, today. It's perfect how the book handles the entire thing, the absurdity of the game and of a professional baseball player's life itself.

The book has a very literary, poetic tone that sometimes drags the narrative down. With that said, I won this off of a Goodreads contest and I'm glad I got to read it, because it was, like that game, something special.

A jammed pack book of not only great sports fun facts but an incredibly interesting tale of McCoy Stadium. The story was absolutely amazing and not being a sports person I was enthralled with the in depth story telling of the players, the management and the town. Whether or not you are a baseball lover or not it is a heartfilled/heartbreaking story of America's pastime.

I felt cold reading this book. Cold, lonely, and tired. Dan Barry does an excellent job of evoking the feeling of professional baseball's longest game, on a Easter eve in 1981. He places the reader there at McCoy stadium, watching a game unfold and then go on forever, one scoreless inning after another, briefly explaining how such a thing could happen.

Like it must have been for the fans who stayed in the stands, Barry wanders, and takes the reader with him. The 33-inning game brings up thoughts of ballparks, batboys, managers, and mostly ballplayers - players who desperately hope to make the major leagues. Some will, some won't, and two who played this game will eventually make the Hall of Fame. As Barry tells the story of the longest games, he flits away for the player's stories, for the beginnings and the endings of the stories that have a middle in Pawtucket. I appreciated this artistically, but it made the book hard to follow, and the information hard to digest. Someone with a stronger baseball background coming in would probably be able to enjoy it more.

Timing is everything, right? The book's release coincides with the 30th anniversary of the longest game ever. Such a long game happened in part because of weird coincidences of timing. Players' careers, we learn, are made or ended in part by accidents of timing, of what sort of talent is needed when. The randomness makes it hard to call this a pleasant story. But it's not exactly a sad one, either. It's cold. Cold and late and with a sense of being much longer than it really is, and once it's over you feel like you've gone from looking at a game through a kid's eyes to growing up and seeing what it takes from people, and that, ultimately, maybe you're OK knowing that.

I received my copy of Bottom of the 33rd from the Goodreads First Reads program.

"Why did you keep playing? Why did you stay?" "Because we are bound by duty. Because we aspire to greater things. Because we are loyal. Because in our own secular way, we are celebrating communion, and resurrection, and possibility."

An extraordinary event- a baseball game with 33 innings lasting into the wee hours of the morning, but dissected down into minutiae made for dull reading. DNF

The purest book of baseball.

Who knew that a story about the Red Sox would be this interesting. To be 100% forthcoming, the story is about the Pawtucket Red Sox and not that team from Boston.

This story is about a minor league (Triple A) baseball game played in April 1981 between the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings that turned out to be the longest game ever played in professional baseball, stretching to 33 innings played over two days when the game was halted after the end of the 32nd inning on the original date played.

Dan Barry has done a fantastic job in researching the details, the people and the back story of this historic baseball game. I can recommend this to anyone who loves the game of baseball...

It's not always easy to explain to non-baseball fans the allure of the sport. Like no other it has quirks, stats, idiosyncrasies, and memorable characters. This book hooked me from page 1. Ostensibly it's the story of the longest game in organized baseball history - 33 innings. It started on Holy Saturday, continued into the wee hours of Easter Sunday until it was mercifully suspended until mid June (the story of the suspension is fascinating in and of itself). But just like Moby Dick really isn't about a whale, this really isn't about baseball. It's about every day struggles, near misses, humor, passion, in short, life.