Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 8, 1994 TAG: 9405080130
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ray Cox
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The bloom of youth has not yet faded from the no-doubt-he's-a-baseball-guy visage of Dave Huppert.
The eyes still are clear as a Caribbean lagoon as the manager of the Carolina League's Prince William Cannons gazes over his guys while they stretch and throw. The early spring tan from hours of workouts on the sun-drenched lawns of Sarasota, Fla., and points north is accented by the vigorous crimson of his cheeks.
The limbs remain muscular; the belly still more or less flat.
This healthful physical package is set off by a head of hair that is on its way from salt-and-pepper to pure salt beneath his black Cannons cap.
You ponder the dispassionate injustice of nature that would adorn a man who just turned 37 with gray hair.
What did this friendly fellow do to deserve this?
History offers a clue.
Perhaps if Huppert had devoted his professional life to the practice of law, or the construction of houses, or the preparation of tax returns, the gray would have been kept at bay. But no, he cast his lot in baseball. The niche he assumed therein may have contributed to his current state.
Not in a spirit of frivolity is the armor worn by a catcher called "the tools of ignorance." A catcher, in the eloquent words of Thomas Boswell, is half guru, half beast of burden.
The burden Huppert bore through nine bush-league campaigns and a quarter of a cup of coffee with the Baltimore Orioles and Milwaukee Brewers was more than most mortals could bear.
But who really knows? No mortal ever was asked to do what Huppert did.
It was he who, in the name of duty, squatted, received and returned pitch after pitch on baseball's longest day. Through twilight and into frigid dawn, Huppert was behind the plate as the Rochester Red Wings, his employers, battled the Pawtucket Red Sox in the most lengthy professional game ever.
Huppert stayed on the job for 31 of 33 innings on the cold Rhode Island night of April 18 and the early morning of April 19, 1981. In the 32nd inning, with the score 2-2, he was pinch-hit for after going 1-for-11 with a sacrifice and an RBI double that had put the drooping Wings up 2-1 in the top of the 21st.
The sagging Sox tied the score in the bottom of the inning - the same one in which Pawtucket lost its manager, Joe Morgan, for intemperate remarks to an umpire - and there matters stood until somebody phoned Harold M. Cooper, the czar of the Class AAA International League, for guidance at something like 4 a.m.
Go home and live to play again another day, Cooper said in a voice thickened by arrested slumber.
On June 23, the conflict was rejoined and settled an inning later, when Pawtucket scored the winning run with none out, making a winner of one Bobby Ojeda, who had hurled a solitary inning. The Red Sox went back to celebrate in their McCoy Stadium dressing quarters, where a pipe had burst and was flooding the floor.
The Red Wings went off to mourn as Peggy Lee sang over the public-address system, "Is That All There Is?"
Many years have passed, but not even the utter exhaustion of those historic hours - 8 hours and 25 minutes, to be exact - have caused most of Huppert's memories to fade. One comes first.
"It was so cold," he said. "By midnight, I'd say it was in the low 20s or high teens. The wind was coming in. A lot of fly balls that looked like they had a chance [to be home runs] just died."
Huppert, a Southern Californian by birth, did not question the cruelty of the New England spring:
"April in Pawtucket? What the heck?"
Strategies for dealing with these miseries were limited, he said.
"You try not to think about it. You go out there inning after inning after inning and try to stay loose and warm," he said. "Other than that, there's not a whole lot you can do."
As the hours crept by, the more difficult the Pawtucket pitching was to hit.
"Bruce Hurst came out there and you just knew you weren't going to be scoring any runs," Huppert said. "He had that forkball back then, and he threw a lot harder than he does now. Or at least it looked hard to me at that hour of the morning."
In time, desperate measures begged to be utilized.
"You wanted to bribe the umpires," Huppert said. "Anything to get us out of there."
Instead, a lot of guys were swinging too hard, trying to end it with one terrible, swift and final blow.
"That'll happen," he said. "Guys get away from the game plan. They forget that what you need is a couple of base hits and a bunt to get that winning run across."
Forgive them, because they knew not what they did.
"Guys were leaving the game, going back to the clubhouse to sleep, waking up later and coming out and wondering what the heck was going on," Huppert said.
Huppert did not snooze, nor did he complain about playing for the first time after hyperextending a knee on Opening Day.
"Doc Edwards [the Rochester manager] kept asking me if I was all right and I said I'd go," Huppert said. "At Triple-A, you only have 22, 23 guys. We'd pinch hit some guys and there was only one catcher left."
Some time after 4 a.m., after 13 dozen baseballs had been used, everybody trudged from the darkening field, the few remaining spectators (all of whom would be awarded season tickets for their stoicism) and the Red Sox home to their beds; the Red Wings to their motel.
It was said Luis Aponte, one of the Red Sox's pitchers, returned to his apartment to find his wife, Ximora, in an agitated state. She demanded to know where he had been.
"At the ballpark," the pitcher said.
"Don't lie to me," she said.
Sleep would not come soon for the Wings, either.
"We were starved," Huppert said. "Nobody had been in anything like that before, so we wanted to talk about it."
Most of them caved in by 6 a.m.
It was Easter Sunday. Another game was scheduled for 1 p.m.
"We had to be back at the park at 11," Huppert said.
Huppert was back behind the plate that afternoon.
He caught eight more innings.
The score was knotted at 3 in the bottom of the ninth before Sam Bowen hit a home run and Pawtucket won 6-3.
by CNB