Twenty-One Innings and Nobody Wins
Until Grieve Says So

County Stadium has hosted plenty of long afternoons since 1956. Friday's game between You Got Got and the NjBombers lasted long enough to qualify as two of them. Twenty-one innings. Five hundred and ninety-two pitches. Seventeen pitchers. And when it was over, Tom Grieve had hit a home run to left field in the bottom of the twenty-first and the NjBombers had walked off with a 5–4 victory that needed seven hours of baseball to settle.

The game had everything except brevity. It had a two-run deficit erased. It had a two-run lead surrendered. It had a reliever nobody had heard of throwing five and two-thirds scoreless innings in extra frames. And it had fifteen consecutive innings — from the seventh through the twentieth — in which neither team scored a single run, despite combining for 29 baserunners across the two lineups.

Fifteen scoreless innings. 592 combined pitches. Jose Lopez went to the plate nine times without once reaching base. And it ended the way they all end — one swing.

The NjBombers drew first blood. Gavvy Cravath doubled in the opening frame to score Lou Gehrig, and Farmer Weaver singled home Cravath to make it 2–0 before You Got Got had touched a bat. Tom Bradley, the NjBombers' starter, settled in from there, and for three innings it looked like a quiet loss.

It was not a quiet loss. Dave Nicholson changed the tone in the fourth with a two-run homer that scored Curtis Granderson and knotted the game at two. In the sixth, John Olerud launched a solo shot to give You Got Got their first lead, and Granderson followed with another homer to push it to 4–2. Bradley was chased after five innings, having allowed three long balls. You Got Got had seized control.

Control is a temporary condition. Randy Flores entered in the ninth to protect the two-run lead. He retired nobody of consequence. Gehrig reached. Cravath crushed a two-run homer. The game was tied at four, and You Got Got's ninth-inning bullpen had failed in the most emphatic way possible.

What followed was a war of attrition that ground both rosters into dust. Jae Weong Seo entered for You Got Got in the tenth inning and became the unlikely hero of a game his team would lose. He threw five and two-thirds innings of scoreless relief, scattering two hits and a walk while striking out two. For a pitcher whose job was to eat innings after the bullpen collapsed, Seo was magnificent — a long reliever doing long-reliever things at precisely the moment they were needed most.

The NjBombers cycled through arms of their own. Steve Karsay gave way to Mark Littell, who gave way to Bill Caudill, who gave way to Rick Honeycutt, who gave way to Joe Genewich, who gave way to Sergio Valdez. Each threw scoreless ball. Valdez was the best of them — four innings, two hits, four strikeouts, and not a single run. The parade of zeroes on the scoreboard stretched past the point of drama and into the territory of endurance.

The position players suffered more visibly. Jose Lopez, the You Got Got third baseman, went 0-for-9 — nine trips to the plate without a hit, a walk, or a sacrifice. He saw more at-bats in one game than most players see in three, and had nothing to show for any of them. Roberto Alomar managed one hit in eight at-bats. Robin Yount went 1-for-8. Even the productive hitters — Olerud's two hits, Granderson's two hits — were diluted by the sheer volume of plate appearances that produced nothing.

By the twentieth inning, You Got Got had run through eight pitchers. Pat Underwood and Tom Browning had both thrown scoreless relief after Seo's departure, keeping the game level through frames that had long since lost their original shape. The bullpen was stripped bare. Mark Lemongello was the last arm available.

Lemongello recorded one out. He needed to record three. Grieve, who had entered the game back in the second inning as a substitute for Weaver and gone 1-for-6 since, connected on a pitch and sent it over the left-field wall. Walk-off. Game over. Twenty-one innings of deadlock broken by a man who had been in the lineup for nineteen of them and done almost nothing until the one moment it mattered.

Roy Oswalt, who threw just one inning of scoreless relief, collected the win. Lemongello, whose entire outing lasted a third of an inning, took the loss. Such is the arithmetic of extra-inning baseball: the result is binary, and the box score remembers the last pitcher standing, not the ones who kept the game alive for five hours before him.

Bartolo Colon deserves a paragraph of his own. He started the game, threw seven innings, allowed six hits, walked three, and gave up zero earned runs. The two runs he was charged with came on Mike Cameron's error. In any other game, Colon's line would be the headline. In a twenty-one-inning loss, it is a footnote buried under twelve innings of relief pitching and a final score that nobody saw coming in the fourth, the ninth, or the fifteenth.

The NjBombers left sixteen men on base. You Got Got left thirteen. That is twenty-nine runners who reached and did not score, scattered across forty-two half-innings of baseball like evidence at a crime scene nobody can solve. Both teams had the chances. Neither team could finish until Grieve decided to.

Some games you lose in the first inning. Some you lose in the ninth. This one took twenty-one innings to lose, and that is worse, because for fifteen of them it felt like it might never end at all.