The 22-inning baseball game that gave one Pirate 11 at-bats on August 22

On August 22, 1917, the Brooklyn Robins beat the Pittsburgh Pirates 6–5 at Ebbets Field after 22 innings and 4 hours, 15 minutes. Pittsburgh left fielder Carson Bigbee came to the plate 11 times, setting a major-league record at the time. The game also broke the National League's previous long-game mark. 12

Brooklyn looked ready to end the afternoon early. The Robins led 5–1 after three innings, but Pittsburgh scored four runs across the sixth and seventh to tie the game. The score stayed 5–5 through the next 13 innings. 12

The pitching workload became its own oddity. Pittsburgh's Elmer Jacobs threw 16⅔ innings in relief after Wilbur Cooper left in the sixth. Brooklyn's Larry Cheney followed starter Leon Cadore and threw 13 scoreless innings before tiring in the 20th. Rube Marquard finished the game for Brooklyn. 12

The standings added a little more strangeness. The 1916 National League champion Robins were 53–58 and already 18 games behind the first-place New York Giants. The last-place Pirates were 36–76, 35½ games back, and had gone through three managers that season. The standings made the marathon a contest between two struggling teams on a Tuesday afternoon. 1

Bigbee's number came from the extra innings. The box score gives the left fielder 11 at-bats, six hits, and two runs batted in. Pittsburgh's lineup accumulated 82 at-bats in the game; Brooklyn's lineup accumulated 78. 2

Eleven at-bats sounds like a typo until the game lasts more than twice its scheduled length. Bigbee's 11 trips were a by-product of repeated turns through the batting order, and the box score preserved the result as a record of its own. A later Society for American Baseball Research biography says the mark has been matched 13 times and never bettered. 3

Bigbee also supplied one of Pittsburgh's most important hits. In the sixth inning, his slow grounder took a bad hop over Brooklyn second baseman Jimmy Johnston, scoring Jake Pitler and Bill Wagner and cutting the deficit to 5–3. Pittsburgh tied the game in the seventh. 1

The 22 innings broke the National League's previous long-game mark: a 21-inning Pirates–New York Giants game on July 17, 1914. Contemporary coverage treated the Brooklyn–Pittsburgh game as the longest in the league's 41-year history. 1

Baseball records often come with a time stamp. Brooklyn's 22-inning mark later gave way to a 26-inning Brooklyn–Boston game that ended in a tie in 1920. Bigbee's batting mark had a different afterlife: later players reached 11, and the highest total remained 11. 13

The game also formed the third straight extra-inning meeting between the clubs. The Pirates and Robins had already played a 10-inning game and a 13-inning tie, so the three-game run reached 45 innings before the 22-inning marathon ended. 1

The final run arrived through movement rather than a clean extra-base hit. In the bottom of the 22nd, Brooklyn's Jim Hickman walked and moved to second on Frank O'Rourke's single. Otto Miller then hit a grounder that forced O'Rourke at second. Hickman sprinted to third while the force play unfolded, rounded the bag, and kept going for home. 1

Jake Pitler hesitated between throwing to first and throwing home. Pitler's wild throw arrived too late, and Hickman slid across with the winning run. A contemporary account preserved by SABR said the win came down to "five seconds of hesitancy" by Pitler. 1

The clubs were scheduled to play a second game that afternoon. Umpire Bill Klem started it at 5:56 p.m., then called it after two scoreless innings as twilight closed in. The 22-inning game had already supplied a record, an 11-at-bat line, and enough baseball for one date on the calendar. 1