‘ENDLESS BASEBALL GAME’
By SCOTT QUEEN HAD A VALLEY CONNECTION
Labor Day Weekend is a time for relaxing with family and having a little barbecue. But that wasn’t the case for one Missouri Valley College alumnus. In fact, Jeffery Bartolotta ’78 might have had the most stressful weekend of his life during Labor Day Weekend 2023– getting into the Guinness Book of Records for what is now called The Endless Game, a continuous baseball game in Kansas City that lasted over 100 hours. For Bartolotta, it was a Labor Day of love. Not only did he participate in the game as a catcher, he spent hours and hours earlier as one of its many organizers. “It took two years to put together,” he said. “Someone saw that the record for the longest baseball game was held by a group in Canada. They decided to bring it home to Kansas City.
“There were quite a bit of rules and regs to make sure we qualified to get into the book,” Bartolotta said. “All the way down to continuous cameras on the official game clock, to umpire volunteers, timers, backup power systems, and volunteers and restaurants to bring in food.” Players were not allowed to leave the immediate field area for the entire weekend, so uniforms were washed and dried on site. There was even a backup power system for the lights, and witness signatures every two innings on the official scorebook. Bartolotta said Team Courage and Team Strength had 30 players each, who rotated in and out of the game every four hours. “It was just as much a mental drain as it was physical,” he said. “Of course, you had to hit, run, catch, and throw. But you weren’t really playing to win, you were playing to finish.”
20 Viking Views | 2023
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