Dodgers pulled an all-nighter
A baseball marathon can bring out the wiseguy in a sportswriter, and such was the case with the 22-inning Rockies-Padres game and Denver Post reporter Troy Renck.
Renck's lead on Thursday night's (and Friday morning's) Rockies victory: "SAN DIEGO -- This wasn't a game. It was a relationship."
The game that ended at 1:21 in the morning in San Diego reminded me of a Dodgers-Cardinals game I covered in 1987 that went until 3:01 a.m. in St. Louis.
That one wasn't a relationship, only a 10-inning affair, but it ran late because it was the second game of a rain-delayed doubleheader.
The second game didn't get under way until 11:14 p.m., and there was no choice but to play because it was the Dodgers' last scheduled trip to Busch Stadium that season.
The Dodgers beat writers' newspaper deadlines had long since passed before the sleepy drama ended with Jack Clark (of course) knocking in Tom Lawless from second base with a single past reliever Ken Howell to give the Cardinals a 5-4 victory.
It wasn't like today, when the writers in San Diego had on-line stories to crank out in the middle of the night.
In 1987, we went downstairs to the clubhouses mainly to laugh at the players, but also to gather notes on the weirdness of the event.
- The Dodgers were about to get a doubleheader split and end things at a shank-of-the-evening 2:33 a.m., but in the ninth inning reliever Matt Young gave up a Terry Pendleton single and a Steve Lake home run to force extras.
Up to a quarter of the original crowd of 39,000-plus fans were still around to demand a Lake curtain call.
"They always told me I was a 3 o'clock hitter," Lake joked afterward, meaning a good batting practice hitter, "but I didn't know they meant 3 in the morning."
- L.A. channel 11 wound up showing the Dodgers for 7 1/2 hours.
Which was, I wrote, "about an hour more than Lt. Col. Oliver North dominated five networks earlier Tuesday."
It was that long ago.
- Vin Scully said it was the latest he'd been on the air in what was then a 38-year career as the Dodgers' play-by-play man.
Worse, Scully had to get up early the next morning for a previously arranged conference-call interview with sports-TV writers.
"I was having trouble putting words together. I must have sounded like a real dummy," Scully said, if you can imagine.
- Imagine the joy of Dodgers coach Manny Mota, who was called upon to be the guest on the post-game show.
"It was a long night," Mota said.
- The Dodgers had another rain-makeup doubleheader to play the next day.
At the end of it, they'd suffered parts of four losses to the Cardinals in a span of 24 hours.
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Kevin Modesti watches sports from a new angle since his promotion from sports columnist to sports editor for the Los Angeles Newspaper Group. In his new blog, Modesti not only comments on the big sports stories of the moment-- he talks about what makes them big. Think of it as a conversation with readers about how these stories should be covered.
Or the night in the Astrodome that the Dodgers and Astros went 18 innings and Ross Porter did the telecast by himself. I remember watching most of that game to see if he could last. He did and it changed my impression of Ross.
That was a great lead. Then again, seems like he had quite a while to think of it...
I listened last season to Charley Steiner as he called one inning of a Dodger game in August, and it seemed like the inning took 45 minutes for the Dodgers to bat. Then I looked at my watch and realized it just seemed like 45 minutes and the Dodgers went 1-2-3. Oh well ...