Yup.  22 innings…and just three runs.  

When I was a kid, I used to get sad when it was the eighth inning and the realization started to set in that soon, it would be time to leave the ball park.  So I’d hope for extra innings.  

“Careful for what you wish for,” comes to mind when looking at the Rockies and Padres marathon affair on Thursday.

I went to a fourteen or fifteen inning Red Sox - Yankees game once and thought it was the coolest thing ever.  But they scored runs.

You had to sit through 21 innings to see the game’s third run on Thursday at Petco Park and the Rockies and Padres struggled to score inning after inning after inning after inning….

How do you sit through that?  The first 22 inning affair in the National League since 1989 featured good pitching, but no offense.  I guess if you made it all the way to the 13th inning when it was still scoreless, you were pretty much committed and all in at that point.

At the plate, the teams combined to hit 25-147 for a paltry .170 combined average.  The ninth longest game might have been the most boring.  And most parks stop selling beer after the seventh inning.  So fans sat through 15 innings without the option of a hot dog and a beer.  Brutal.

Gotta feel for the catchers as well as the fans.  While 15 pitchers were used, Yorvit Torrealba and Josh Bard went the entire distance behind the dish.  Two catchers, over 650 pitches…how you’re knees doing?

I love baseball is for the countless opportunities for the game’s final play.  There is generally only one last second shot in basketball, but each pitch in the ninth inning has the emotional excitement of a last shot.  So Thursday’s game, with it’s hundreds of last shots, has got me wondering.  Was this the best worst game or worst best game of recent memory?  

MLB Longest Games

Innings How many occurances

    26 Once

Brooklyn/Boston — May 20, 1920

    25 2 times

    24 3 times

    23 2 times

    22 9 times

- Jesse Jones