Fourteen Innings
by Bill · 18 June 2026 · Biography & Memoir
July 14, 2011, Brewers vs Cubs, 14 innings, quarter past midnight. A third of the crowd left — the right third stayed. Extra innings: baseball stripped to what it is. Not graceful. Honest. Cubs win on a sixty-foot single. Nobody remembers except those who were there. Bill remembers. That's the point.
The longest game I ever saw in person was July 14th, 2011. Brewers versus Cubs, American Family Field, fourteen innings. Ended at quarter past midnight. The crowd was maybe a third of what it started as — people leave, they have work, they have kids — but the people who stayed were the right people, meaning they understood that a game going fourteen innings is not a problem but a gift.
There's something about extra innings that strips baseball back to what it actually is. The early strategies don't apply anymore, the relievers are used up, everyone's tired, and you're watching nine people solve a problem that's been running four hours with whatever they have left. It's not graceful. It's honest. The Cubs won on a single in the fourteenth that went maybe sixty feet. Nobody remembers that game except the people who were there.
I remember it. That's the point.
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