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Clemson Baseball

My unforgettable evening spent watching the longest baseball game in Clemson history

April 18, 2019
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ATHENS, Ga. -- If there is one thing you should know about this writer, one of my biggest pet peeves is missing the beginning of sporting events.

Even as a kid, before it became my actual job to be early and cover these contests, I always made it a priority to be in my seat to catch every bit of the pregame festivities and watch kickoff, tipoff, or that very first pitch.

On Tuesday, for the first time in a long time, I went to a baseball game just for the fun of it. To make matters even more fun, I decided to invite a girl to tag along. She is a huge Clemson fan, and it was our first date.

My mind was at ease as we showed up to Athens on a beautiful, sun-splashed afternoon at 3 p.m., four hours before game time between the Tigers and the sixth-ranked Bulldogs.

There was no work to be done. No nerves. No stress.

After we explored the gorgeous University of Georgia campus and had dinner, which included me inhaling The Fat Elvis - an 8 oz. burger topped with American cheese, bacon, and barbecue sauce from the famous Blind Pig Tavern - it was time to make our way over to Foley Field.

I wasn’t too anxious at 6:33 p.m. as I parked my beat-up white RAV4 two blocks away from the stadium on the corner of Morton Avenue and Pinecrest Drive. After all, we were right on time for what was a big game for Clemson.

The Tigers were coming off being swept by the Florida State Seminoles and had lost four of their last five games. A bounce-back win against a highly-rated rival would most likely put them back on track.

The Tigers were coming off being swept by the Florida State Seminoles and had lost four of their last five games. A bounce-back win against a highly-rated rival would most likely put them back on track.

The girl who braved the trip with me also shared my longing for seeing the first pitch. There was excitement as we finally entered the Foley Field gates and caught a glimpse of the fresh-cut green grass for the first time.

We were nestled into seats 11 and 12 of row A in section 109, right above the Clemson dugout, by 6:42 p.m. A security guard approached us and asked if we were Georgia students because students were not allowed to sit that close to the opposing team’s dugout. We were not wearing red and black, but the guard thought we were in disguise and would heckle Monte Lee’s ballclub. This wasn’t his first rodeo.

I stood up and showed the guard our tickets. He gave us a grin and told us to enjoy the game.

Little did we know how long we were about to sit there.

The game started strong and was moving fast. Starting pitchers Jacob Hennessy and Tim Elliott were dealing. The two went back and forth, mowing batters down left and right. From the second through the fifth inning, Hennessy retired nine straight batters and Elliott retired nine of ten batters.

Neither team would let the other muster enough momentum for a big inning.

Right across from our seats behind right field was a house full of college-aged boys and their friends watching the game from the comfort of their own backyard. They were throwing the frisbee, drinking, grilling out, and stood in front of a giant sign attached to the house that read Dawgs to Omaha 2019.

By the end of the fifth inning, Foley Field was packed to the brim - a solid 3,419 strong of both Georgia fans and a well-traveled Clemson contingent. The atmosphere was electric as the sun began to set and the spring air began to cool off.

Because the game was so neck-and-neck, people sitting around us began to talk. A college-aged girl, a row behind us, sitting next to her friends, was worried how long the game would go.

“I have a 16-page paper that is due tomorrow that I haven’t even started yet,” she said with a nervous laugh.

Meanwhile, two dudes, also college-aged sitting directly behind us, were enjoying the game and noticed the tied 0-0 score.

“Does college baseball go into extra innings?” One of them asked. “I’m pretty sure,” his friend answered. “Just like the pros.”

To keep from giggling out loud or rolling my eyes, I said something to my date that should never be uttered out loud at a baseball game: “This game is moving along pretty quickly.”

To keep from giggling out loud or rolling my eyes, I said something to my date that should never be uttered out loud at a baseball game: “This game is moving along pretty quickly.”

The ultimate kiss of death.

The fireworks finally began in the sixth inning when Kyle Wilkie hit a two-out single to score Sam Hall from second base. Bryar Hawkins ended the inning with a bang, hitting a two-out triple off the wall in center field to score Wilkie and give Clemson a 2-0 lead. Tension built inside the stadium as Georgia had to come from behind in front of its home crowd.

There was nothing comfortable about this two-run lead, especially with how solid of a team Georgia is. Clemson had done a steady job defensively from keeping the Bulldogs off the scoreboard until the bottom of the seventh inning came around.

Sam Weatherly was in to pitch for the Tigers and was moving along with relative ease until a walk with one out gave the Bulldogs a runner on first base. Then came one of the most bizarre plays I had ever seen in person at a baseball game.

On the seventh pitch of the next at-bat, Georgia’s Cam Sheppard sent a shot down the left field line that should have just been a routine double, maybe scoring one run. Instead, an errant throw from Elijah Henderson that slipped out of his hands allowed Sheppard to come all the way around the bases and tie the game up after a close play at the plate.

Bryce Teodosio kneeled in center field in awe of what just happened, just like the rest of the Clemson faithful who had just felt the massive kick to the gut.

It was a whole new ballgame. A game that had only just begun.

On the game went into the ninth inning. With one out, Jordan Greene came up to bat as a pinch-hitter to give the Tigers some life. Greene sent the seventh pitch of his at-bat to the left field wall. As the ball drifted in the night sky, everyone wearing orange thought it was going to be a home run, that Clemson was going to take the lead and wrap this game up.

Clemson Sports Talk

The ball eventually bounced off the top of the wall and back into play, only managing to get Greene to second. There was still a chance to score him, but man, it was so close to being a 3-2 advantage. Even with the momentum, Clemson was unable to take the lead and squandered that opportunity.

Georgia had its chances, too. LJ Talley hit a ball to the warning track at the deepest part of the field in the bottom of the ninth that would have ended the game if it were hit anywhere else. Instead, reliever Carson Spiers got out of the inning, and off we went to extras.

Now, I could go into great detail about what happened between the chalked lines during the innings that ensued, but that would become a novel.

Clemson had so many chances to take the lead. Georgia had even more chances to end the game. But the steady pitching, and frankly poor hitting turned a rollercoaster of a game into a full-on marathon.

There were 556 total pitches thrown. Clemson’s pitching staff threw 259 of them, while Georgia’s threw 297. Each team threw seven pitchers during the heated midweek battle. Both teams combined to throw 50 strikeouts, which was the second most in NCAA history for a single game.

Hits came few and far between. Both teams combined to hit 19-for-132, a whopping .143 average, left 31 runners on base, and hit 3-for-28 with runners in scoring position. The Tigers were a staggering 1-for-17 in that category.

The real battle was going on outside of those lines. Fans began to file out of Foley Field as the game continued onward with no end in sight.

The girl who had to write that 16-page paper? Gone, and probably for good reason. And I guess the two guys sitting behind us figured out eventually that yes, indeed, college baseball did go to extra innings.

The girl who had to write that 16-page paper? Gone, and probably for good reason. And I guess the two guys sitting behind us figured out eventually that yes, indeed, college baseball did go to extra innings.

A crowd of 3,000-plus quickly dwindled down to a group of around 300, all becoming more drunk from delusion with each inning that passed by.

Baseball is a superstitious sport, which is one of the best aspects of it. We spectated as players and fans tried different tactics to give their respective team the advantage. Some Clemson fans kept moving seats between innings in hopes that it would help their team’s bats heat up. One fan started wearing his sunglasses upside down.

In the top of the 14th inning, the Clemson players turned their hats backward to try and spark a rally. Right across from them, Georgia players were doing the same, except with batting helmets.

One Clemson player started balancing a cup on his head inside the dugout. A Georgia player countered by putting on a shark hat while wearing his sunglasses and using gloves as fins. Whatever works, I guess.

Sir Foster, the Georgia organist, had been taking song requests on Twitter that people wanted to hear between innings. By the middle of the 14th inning, the stadium was silent at times. I thought Foster had clocked out, but every now and then he’d chime back in and show us he was working overtime. He never played the Aretha Franklin we requested, though.

A woman sitting a few rows behind us was one of the committed few left in our section. She seemed to know all of the players. This particular woman had the thickest southern Georgia accent I think I have ever heard.

When Georgia pinch-hitter CJ Smith came up to bat in the bottom of the 15th inning and had two strikes against him, she yelled, “go CJ” but it sounded like she said “Juicy J.”

Smith struck out swinging on the next pitch. The woman could only blame herself.

“I messed up his mojo,” she said with that southern drawl. We could not keep ourselves from laughing as delusion started settling in for us as well.

In the 16th inning, the clock struck midnight, and it was suddenly Wednesday morning. Before Clemson began to bat, something started to smell like it was burning. Of course, it was only the Clemson baseball team plugging up a toaster oven so that they could heat up some bagels.

They, unfortunately, didn’t want to share.

Little moments like these showed us the beauty of what college baseball is. What started off as an intense game between two rival programs turned into a battle of wills. Which team was going to outlast the other? It almost didn’t seem to matter. People just wanted the madness to end.

I counted five different occasions where either Clemson or Georgia got the leadoff man on base, and I said, “this is it. This is the inning. This is where it stops.”

The irony of what this story became was that we wanted to be there for the first pitch, but we often began to wonder if the last pitch would ever come.

Finally, we made an executive, mutual decision. After the Tigers secured another leadoff man on base in the top of the 16th inning, we decided that if a winner were not determined in this inning, we’d head to the car and begin the trek back to Clemson while listening to the game on the radio.

Right on cue, Logan Davidson lined a ball right into a double play, which ended the threat. During the 16th-inning stretch, we tipped our caps to the few remaining fans still in attendance, and they wished us safe travels back to the upstate.

We left Foley Field and there was not a soul manning the gates. We passed by the house that had previously been full of college kids and was now empty. They were out for the night in The Classic City, which you could never pass up.

We got to the car quickly and turned on WCCP 105.5 The Roar to finish what we started. We hung on by a thread to every pitch, every passing inning, until we reached exit 19B for Clemson at 1:33 a.m. It was the bottom of the 20th inning and Georgia had the bases loaded with one out.

We could hear a crowd that was much quieter when we left had suddenly come to life. Clemson’s play-by-play announcer Don Munson described a group of rowdy college students, all of whom had come in and sat right behind home plate.

We could hear a crowd that was much quieter when we left had suddenly come to life. Clemson’s play-by-play announcer Don Munson described a group of rowdy college students, all of whom had come in and sat right behind home plate. I knew it had to be those guys from the house behind right field coming back from their party to see history unfold. It’s fitting that they got to see how it would finally end. 

Georgia’s Connor Tate poked a single to left field to score the game’s winning run. The marathon of a game had finally concluded, putting Clemson fans in attendance out of their misery but most Bulldogs into ecstasy. The game lasted a total of six hours and 33 minutes.

Do you know what you can do in six hours and 33 minutes?

- Make the drive from Clemson to Athens five times.

- Watch Titanic twice.

- Watch Clemson football’s 2019 national championship win over Alabama once, then the second half one more time for good measure.

- Or listen to one of Dabo Swinney’s filibustered speeches from after a Wednesday football practice.

After I dropped my date off and thanked her for being a part of such a wild day, I drove back to my home in Seneca at 2:00 a.m. With a McDonald’s McFlurry in hand, I began to reflect on what exactly I just experienced.

People will do some crazy things when it comes to watching their favorite college teams. On Tuesday night, I experienced it first hand as one fan base tried to outlast and out-will the other.

By the end of the night, I had witnessed rivals who began the night barking at each other become friends. They knew that they were about to be a part of, that they’d be able to tell their friends and families, “I was there for the longest baseball game in school history.”

It’s a damn shame that one of those fan bases had to go home on that early Wednesday morning with the sour taste of defeat in their mouths. I didn’t. Because both sides got their money’s worth.

After all, it was two full games (and then some) for the price of one. It was history.

It was an evening I won’t forget.

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My unforgettable evening spent watching the longest baseball game in Clemson history

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