Column: You've got my attention

By John Hunt

Published April 23, 2010

Last Saturday, the St. Louis Cardinals played the New York Mets in an afternoon baseball game at Busch Stadium. The Mets won 2-1 to even up the series at a game apiece heading into Sunday's finale. (The Cardinals won that one 5-3.)

It wasn't the first Saturday afternoon ballgame for the Cardinals or the Mets, and it definitely isn't the last on their schedules. In fact, after Sunday, it isn't the last time the Cardinals will play the Mets this season. By most regards, it seemed like a pretty ordinary day at the ballpark after the standard nine innings.

After the opening day excitement clears, baseball hunkers down into the long grind of the season, rolling inevitably toward the playoffs. The MLB is plenty captivating; it just seems like once or twice per season something is needed to snap us out of the malaise that is the regular season and get us excited to see men run around a diamond again.

Saturday's game did just that, but it took a little longer than the normal allotment of innings to do the trick.

What made Saturday night so special is it took 20 innings for the Mets to finally outlast the Cardinals, taking a total time of 6 hours and 53 minutes from start to finish, according to ESPN.

Now, if I actually had attended the entire game, I don't know if I would have been as pleased. Heck, even if I had played in that game, my perception still might be a little different. Seven hours is a long day at the office for anybody on a Saturday, but as a fan watching the game on TV, from the outside looking in, this night was pretty special. I wouldn't be surprised if I never saw another game reach 20 innings, in person or on TV.

Most MLB games take around two hours and 45 minutes. Saturday night's Cardinals-Mets match-up more than doubled that figure. Within the game's duration, I could have driven from Columbia to Kansas City and back — and then to St. Louis. That in and of itself sounds exhausting and I would just be sitting in my car in that instance, as opposed to actually physically exhorting myself for the innings equivalent of more than two games on the baseball field.

Even during a normal double-header, the teams are competing for two W's and the athletes get a little bit of a break between back-to-back games. Not only did the Cardinals and the Mets not have those fortunes Saturday night, they had to go to sleep knowing they would have to wake up and play an equally as important game the next day. And the next day. And the next day. Thus is the 162-game behemoth that is the MLB regular season.

It is their job, yes, and they're getting paid to endure nine-plus innings of baseball, but I have a hard time believing they would fight that hard for that long of an ordeal if the players were just in it for the money.

The game ultimately paralleled the invaluable lesson of persistence in sports. It speaks highly of the Mets that they seemed to refuse to lose, regardless of how long it took and it will be interesting to see how St. Louis rebounds after such a heartbreaker.

Games like those define seasons. This game, coupled with the Colorado Rockies' Ubaldo Jimenez no-hit performance on the same night, was enough to get me paying attention to the regular season again, no matter how many innings it takes.