Imagine sitting down at a baseball stadium on a Saturday night in May. You’ve got your hot dog, your scorecard, and you're ready for maybe three hours of action. Then, the sun goes down. Then the moon goes down. Then the sun comes up again. By the time you leave, you’ve basically aged a weekend. That is the reality of the longest game in MLB history, a marathon that pushed the limits of human endurance, sanity, and the rulebook itself.
It happened in 1984. The Chicago White Sox and the Milwaukee Brewers decided to play a game of baseball that lasted 25 innings. Technically, the 33-inning minor league game between the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings in 1981 holds the all-time professional record, but for the big leagues, the South Side of Chicago is where the madness peaked.
Eight hours and six minutes. Think about that. You could fly from New York to London and still have time to clear customs while these guys were still trading zeroes on the scoreboard.
What Really Happened During the Longest Game in MLB History
On May 8, 1984, Comiskey Park became a time capsule. It started out as a fairly standard Tuesday night game. But baseball has a funny way of refusing to end when the pitching is just slightly better than the hitting for a very long time.
By the 17th inning, the score was knotted at 3-3. The American League had a rule back then—no new inning could start after 12:59 a.m. So, at nearly one in the morning, the umpires called it a night. But they didn't call it a tie. They suspended the game. Everyone went home, slept for a few hours, and came back the next day to finish the "night" game before the regularly scheduled Wednesday game.
It took another eight innings the following day to find a winner.
Harold Baines eventually ended the misery with a walk-off home run in the bottom of the 25th. The White Sox won 7-6. Tom Seaver, a Hall of Fame pitcher who had actually pitched the day before, ended up getting the win in relief. It was a bizarre, grueling statistical anomaly that remains etched in the record books because, quite frankly, modern baseball is designed to prevent this exact thing from ever happening again.
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The Rules That Killed the Marathon
If you're a purist, you probably hate the "Manfred Runner." Since 2020, MLB has placed a runner on second base to start every extra inning. This was a direct strike against the longest game in MLB history ever being repeated.
The logic is simple: owners want to protect pitchers’ arms, and networks want to keep their schedules. Before this rule, a 20-inning game would absolutely gut a team’s bullpen for a week. Managers would have to put position players on the mound just to throw "loopy" strikes so the game could end. It was chaotic. It was often ugly. But it was also legendary.
Nowadays, games rarely go past the 12th or 13th inning. The statistics show that the runner on second scores a massive percentage of the time, ending games quickly. While this is efficient, it robs us of the weirdness that occurred back in 1984. During that 25-inning stretch, the Brewers and White Sox combined for 43 hits. They used dozens of players. It was a war of attrition that modern sports science simply wouldn't allow.
Why 25 Innings Is the "Real" Record
You’ll sometimes hear people argue about the May 1, 1920, game between the Brooklyn Robins (now the Dodgers) and the Boston Braves. That game went 26 innings.
So why isn't it the record?
Because it ended in a 1-1 tie. Back then, they didn't have stadium lights. The sun went down, the umpires looked at each other, and they just ended the game. In the official MLB record books, the 1984 White Sox-Brewers game is the longest "decided" game by time and tied for the most innings where a winner was actually declared.
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There’s also the 1906 game between the Athletics and the Red Sox (24 innings) and a 1945 game between the Dodgers and Braves (24 innings). But the 1984 tilt stands alone because it was completed under modern professional standards, even if it took two days to do it.
The Physical Toll of Eight Hours of Baseball
We don't talk enough about the catchers. Carlton Fisk caught all 25 innings of that 1984 marathon.
Imagine squatting and standing up hundreds of times over the course of eight hours. Your knees would feel like they were filled with broken glass. Fisk was 36 years old at the time—an age where most catchers are thinking about retirement or at least a permanent DH role. Instead, he stayed behind the plate for the equivalent of nearly three full games back-to-back.
The psychological fatigue is just as heavy.
In the 20th inning of a tie game, every pitch feels like the end of the world. But as the game pushes into the 23rd or 24th, a strange sort of "baseball delirium" sets in. Players in the dugout start wearing rally caps in weird ways. Fans who stayed in the stands start bonding with strangers because they've shared a traumatic chronological event together.
By the time Baines hit that home run off Chuck Porter, it wasn't just a victory celebration. It was a release.
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Could It Happen Today?
Honestly? No.
Between the ghost runner on second base and the way pitching rotations are managed today, the longest game in MLB history is a safe record. Managers today pull pitchers the second their "velocity dips" or they "see the lineup for a third time." In 1984, you stayed out there until your arm fell off or the game ended.
Even if a game went 20 innings today, the pitch clock—introduced in 2023—would keep the time elapsed much shorter. The 1984 game took 8 hours and 6 minutes of actual play time. With the pitch clock, a 25-inning game would likely be finished in under six hours. Still a long time, but not the "all-nighter" vibe of the 80s.
Surprising Stats from the 25-Inning Night
- Tom Seaver's Win: He won the game on the second day after pitching in relief, then went out and won the regularly scheduled game the next day too. Two wins in about 24 hours.
- The Hit Count: 43 hits combined. Usually, in a 25-inning game, you'd expect more, but both teams were swinging at anything just to get it over with.
- The Attendance: Comiskey Park had about 14,000 people at the start. By the time it ended the next afternoon, the crowd was a mix of die-hards and people who had just arrived for the second game.
The Actionable Takeaway for Baseball Fans
If you want to experience the "vibe" of the longest game without actually spending eight hours in a stadium, you have to look at the minor leagues. The Pawtucket 33-inning game is the gold standard of endurance. It featured two future Hall of Famers—Wade Boggs and Cal Ripken Jr.
If you're a fan of the history, here is how you should approach the "long game" legacy:
- Check the Box Scores: Look up the May 8-9, 1984, box score. Look at the substitutions. It's a masterclass in how a manager (Tony La Russa for the Sox) handles a crisis.
- Appreciate the Pitch Clock: Next time you’re at a game that goes 10 innings and finishes in 2 hours and 45 minutes, remember the people who were stuck in Comiskey Park until the sun came up.
- Watch "The 33rd Inning": There are several documentaries and books specifically about the Pawtucket game which provide the best "human" perspective on what it feels like when a game of catch becomes a marathon.
The longest game in MLB history isn't just a stat. It's a reminder that baseball, unlike almost every other major sport, has no clock. Or at least, it didn't. It was a game that could, theoretically, go on forever. And for one weekend in 1984, it almost did.
To understand the grit of that era, you have to look past the home runs and look at the guys like Baines and Fisk who just refused to go home. That game was the ultimate test of who wanted to be there more. It’s a piece of sports history that remains untouched, protected by new rules and a faster pace of play, standing as a monument to the days when the only thing that could stop a baseball game was the 1:00 a.m. curfew or a Hall of Famer's swing.
To truly dig into the stats, you can visit the official MLB Baseball Hall of Fame archives which detail the play-by-play of the 25th inning. It remains the longest game by time in the history of the American or National League.