I’ve never been a big baseball fan. Even so, I do like to attend the occasional game, so in the 26 years that I lived in Manhattan and then in St. Louis, it would be a rare year that I didn’t end up in a stadium at least a couple of times a year.  Regardless, in the 7+ years that I’ve been living Philadelphia, I’d yet to catch a single Phillies game.  Call it a slump, but that slump most definitely ended last night.

By an especially strange confluence of events (that I’ll omit, here, for brevity!), I won a silent auction for a pair of tickets to last night’s game.  The seats were absolutely perfect, on the 1st-Base side, but right on the 3rd-Base to Home Plate line, in Row 25 of Section 119, as shown above.

To cut to the chase, The 7+ hour 18-inning record-breaking marathon was nothing short of amazing, even if the Diamondbacks did end up winning 12-to-7 in the end!

I lost count of how many times each side had the bases loaded only to fail to bring a runner home.  Nail-biting stuff, but quite a thrill nonetheless, especially as the stadium thinned out after midnight.  It felt like being a rare witness to a titanic struggle and after the 12 inning or so I got the distinct feeling that the game could go on for ever.  As it was, it was the longest game in Diamondback history.  For the Phillies, it was their longest since 1918.  As I said: titanic!  Beyond the above I won’t go into the details, since ESPN has an excellent recap.

Suffice it to say that this one game certainly made up and more for my my recent hiatus…