I’m not a baseball fan (at all), but my wife is quite fond of the Royals. Since we got our Apple TV up and running (after cutting the proverbial cord), and she signed up for MLB.tv, baseball has been a prominent feature of our home.

Since I am exceedingly good at finding ways to entertain myself while others are watching sports, I often spend the time researching baseball trivia based on random, oft-idiotic questions that occur to me. Most of what I have learned isn’t all that surprising (e.g. no Major League team has ever had an undefeated season, probably because it’s improbable to the point of impossibility to win 162 games in a row.)

During a Royals game the other night that ran into multiple extra innings, I began to wonder how long a baseball game could go before someone in a position of authority decided to put off further play until another time. I based this query partly on the HBO special “7 Days in Hell,” about a fictional 7-day tennis match that involved nightly breaks for sleep. How long would a baseball game have to go on before everyone goes home? To the interwebz!!!

I couldn’t find any Major League game that went on so long that someone decided to call it a night. Suspensions of games have occurred because of rain, lack of light, and other factors, but not, as far as I could tell, an ongoing tie. The longest game in Major League history, at least according to the website Infoplease, took place on May 8, 1984. The Chicago White Sox defeated the Milwaukee Brewers 7-6 after 25 innings. The game lasted 8 hours and 6 minutes. With 13 total runs, that’s 1⅝ runs per hour, or approximately one run every 37 minutes. Soccer is often lower-scoring than that, but at least something is always happening on the field.

Sorry—if you like baseball, more power to you. I just don’t think I’ll ever get it at this point in my life.

Anyway, to answer the question of whether they’d ever call it a night and continue a baseball game later, we must turn to the minor leagues. This comes from the same Infoplease page:

The longest professional baseball game in history began on April 18, 1981 and featured two Triple A minor-league teams — the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings. At 4:07 a.m. on April 19, with the score tied 2-2, the game was suspended after 32 innings. The game was resumed on June 23, 1981, and ended when Dave Koza’s bases-loaded single in the bottom of the 33rd inning scored Marty Barrett, giving Pawtucket a 3-2 win over Rochester. The continuation took only 18 minutes to complete. Bob Ojeda pitched one inning to earn the win. Future ML stars Wade Boggs and Cal Ripken, Jr. went a combined 6-for-25 in the game. TOTAL: 33 innings, 8 hours 25 minutes.

4:07 a.m. Let’s assume the game started at 7 p.m., for no particular reason—that’s a 9-hour game, not much longer than the MLB game. Well, and an 18-minute coda more than two months later. You have to admire that sort of dedication to an entire sport’s refusal to allow any ties. (Take that, soccer!)

I wonder if people in attendance on April 18-19 got automatic admission to the continuation. Not enough to try to find an answer, though. It’s just something to ponder.