A 33-hour baseball game raises money for prostate cancer

Tony Cabrera, a catcher, said he always wanted to pitch. So he walked up to his manager, Ray Lammie, in the seventh inning and said, "Hey, Ray, if you need somebody to kill some time pitching, I'll go in there."

Lammie put Cabrera on the mound the next inning. That was May 24.

Thirty-two hours later, Cabrera was on the mound and it was May 26, just after midnight. It was the 99th inning and, on and off, four innings here, five innings there, Cabrera had pitched 14 hours in a game that lasted 33 hours, 15 minutes, 29 seconds.

The New York Giants were leading the Brooklyn Dodgers, 155-136, when Cabrera threw the last pitch at Burns Park in Massapequa, Long Island, N.Y., to wrap up his 40-inning stint and the win. "I figured after all those years of throwing down to second as a catcher," Cabrera said, "I could throw a few in to the plate from the mound."

A few? Cabrera threw hundreds of pitches in what could be the longest baseball game ever played. It wasn't played by high school or college kids with fresh muscles trying to get their names in the Guinness Book of World Records; it was played by Men's Senior Baseball League players like Cabrera, who is 67.

As remarkable as the average age of the 40 players (over 50), or the length of the game, was their service to a cause. The game, which is in the process of being verified by Guinness, raised more than $40,000 for the Prostate Cancer Foundation. "You get one chance at life, you go for it," said Jerry Maier, 55, an environmental project manager from Suffolk County, N.Y., who figures he pitched 40 innings for the Dodgers. "I stayed awake for the whole thing."

Maier came up with the idea for the Guinness Game in January, but before he could get too far into the project, he had a stroke. He turned the project over to Lammie, a friend and a business consultant, as well as a four-time cancer survivor, and the plans for the Guinness Game raced forward. "After Jerry had his stroke he thought maybe we should wait a year," Lammie, 64, said. "I told him, 'I might not have a year'. We're doing this."

Lammie pushed business associates and corporations for donations of money, services, and products. Jerseys were donated, families cooked food, and the town donated the electricity for the lights. Cabrera showed up at the park the day of the game, Lammie said, clutching 35 checks in his hand that he had collected from his neighborhood.

Each team had two groups, A and B, and they rotated on the field. Players grabbed catnaps over the two days and rallied each other. Lammie managed the Giants, but he also kept things stirred up at the park by using the microphone to ask fans to contribute money to the cause.

Lammie said there were 60 or 70 unearned runs in the game, but the play never deteriorated into downright sloppy. Most of the players were veterans of the Men's Senior Baseball League, whose headquarters are on Long Island. "The key was not to stay on the field playing defense longer than the other team," Cabrera said.

The game started at 3 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon and, as it stretched through Sunday, the curious and envious stopped by Burns Park. Children were allowed to throw pitches between innings of the historical game, but only if they had $1 to put into the hat for the cancer fund.