An Opening Day game between two teams who haven’t seen the playoffs in recent history doesn’t often make the record book. However, April 5th, 2012, was different for the Toronto Blue Jays and Cleveland.
With blustery winds off Lake Erie freezing Cleveland’s home fans, this game went on for 16 innings. That’s over 5 hours of baseball. That’s the longest opening day in baseball history.
Now, it might seem like a very long baseball game would be dull, especially after I tell you that it was tied for 7 innings, but this game wasn’t devoid of excitement.
Cleveland came close to ending this thing several times. Lotta potential heroes in this game, from Casey Kotchman, who only spent a portion of the previous year in the bigs, to All Star Asdrubal Cabrera. But those are not the names of tonight’s hero. To find out that name, you gotta watch the video. Or, I suppose you could technically just google it– okay fine I’ll tell you, it was JP Arencibia. But! To understand how much weight was on his shoulders– I’m talking about the expectations of two teams hoping to finally break through, the ups and downs of this game itself, the diehard fans who still remain in the stadium and are hungry and tired and cold– to understand all that, you have to rewind.
