The Long Ball

It's a pretty rare occurrence when a baseball player can hit home runs on back to back days. It's even more rare when that player can hit a home run on back to back days during the same game. That's what Brandon Moss did on Monday night for the Oakland A's. In a game that lasted for six and a half hours, for nineteen innings, from Monday Night into Tuesday Morning, the Athletics held on to win, thanks for that pre-dawn tater Mister Moss sent out into the mostly empty stands. For those who stuck around, it must have been more than cathartic. It must have been historic.
Perhaps that is why I feel just a little more sheepish about how I dealt with the situation. I tuned in to watch the game after catching a score that told me Oakland was behind four to one. By the time I got the television all warmed up, they had fallen behind six to one. I told my wife that we could probably go to sleep, since it looked like the local team had run out of steam.
"Don't count them out," my wife reminded me, "These are the A's."
So we watched for a little while longer. Sure enough, in the bottom of the eighth inning, it was a one-run affair, with the A's still coming up in the bottom of the ninth. We had seen this before. Last year we were treated to fifteen of those walk-off wins, complete with the whipped cream pies and buckets of Gatorade. But it was getting late. It was a school night. We decided to put it in the hands of the baseball gods and get some shuteye.
Little did we know that the game would go on for another three and a half hours. Playing more than the equivalent of two full games, the Los Angeles Anaheim Former Disney Angels battled toe to toe with the scruffy boys from Oakland. The two teams traded runs in the fifteenth inning, and so the game continued. They played until it became the longest game in Oakland's baseball history. Shortly after one thirty in the morning, they were finished. It was epic.
I slept through it. And I earned my wife's mild scolding: "I told you so." I should have listened.