The longest pro baseball game lasted over 8 hours
Most baseball games take a few hours, but one historic match was so long it had to be finished over two different days!
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Last updated: February 3, 2026 at 08:19 PMMost baseball games take a few hours, but one historic match was so long it had to be finished over two different days!
A normal baseball game usually has 9 innings and lasts about 3 hours. But in 1981, two Minor League teams - the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings - played a game that just wouldn't end!
The game started on a cold Saturday night in April. Both teams were so good at defending that neither could get more points than the other. They kept playing inning after inning. By 4:00 AM on Sunday morning, they had played 32 innings, and the score was still tied! The president of the league finally called the stadium and told them to stop so everyone could go home and sleep.
The game didn't finish until two months later when the Rochester team came back to town. Everyone was excited to see how it would end. To everyone's surprise, the "extra" part of the game was very short. In the 33rd inning, Pawtucket scored a point and won the game in just 18 minutes.
What's even cooler is that two of the players in this crazy long game went on to become huge legends in Major League Baseball: Cal Ripken Jr. and Wade Boggs. They were just young players back then, probably wondering if they would ever get to leave the field!
The longest professional baseball game took 33 innings and 8 hours and 25 minutes of playing time. It was so long that it had to be paused for months before a winner was finally found. It remains a legendary record that will likely never be broken.