The longest night

Jim Ingraham
JIngraham@News-Herald.com
So you say you want to be a baseball writer? Well, the baseball writers who were covering the Indians-Red Sox game Saturday night at Fenway Park were seriously questioning their choice of a profession at about 1 a.m.
See, there’s this thing in the newspaper business called a deadline. That’s the time by which you must get your story in so it can appear in all the papers.
Saturday night’s game was a baseball writer’s worst nightmare: an east coast game that went so long it ended on west coast time. Most of the reporters at the game missed at least some portion of their deadlines.
Let’s just say that when a game ends at 1:38 a.m. in the morning, the chance of you reading about it in your morning paper isn’t real good.
It reminded me of a game I covered in Oakland several years ago. There was a rain delay, and then the game went into extra innings. The game ended at something like 4 a.m. Cleveland time.
After the game, I sent my story to the paper, and called the office. The night watchman answered the phone and said there was nobody there. The papers had already been printed. Everyone had gone home.
To this day, I don’t think anyone east of the Mississippi knows what happened in that game.