First of all, no. No, games do not usually last that long. In fact, they never last that long. An 18-inning game is in fact two games. This is unprecedented — a word sadly overused in our beleaguered times — but it is. I am sure you didn’t stay up to watch. At 11:24 my time, you texted to me: “These innings take forever. I am not even watching, but it is hard to go to sleep when it is tied.” I was already asleep, and the ding on my phone woke me up. It is impossible to watch the game in the U.S. without a subscription to Fox Sports, and I do not have one, for various reasons.

Later in the night, I woke up. Not at three — “In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald — so say it was two o’clock in the morning, when I checked my phone (sleep experts say you should not do this, but perhaps this is why I am so very very tired) and the game was still tied.

“Nobody on, nobody out,” I mumbled to nobody. I rolled over and went back to sleep. Perhaps the empty room appreciated the literary reference to my long-unpublished novel, Nobody On, Nobody Out, my second novel, and the first novel for which I had a literary agent.

So my second novel was what should have been my first novel, an autobiographical coming-of-age. (Instead, my first novel, Cooder Cutlas, was a rock and roll on the Jersey Shore story, which I believe if I’m not mistaken is a story quite in vogue this week?). So, Nobody On, Nobody Out follows a weekend in the life of a teenaged girl in a motherless, baseball-obsessed family. Our heroine, Alison, an aspiring sportswriter, is playing Helena in her school’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream while also following the progress of her team, the St. Louis Browns, in the American League Championship Series playoffs. (The St. Louis Browns were a real team who moved to Baltimore in 1953 and became the Baltimore Orioles. Similarly, the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958. You do not need to know this, except that it is something that can be known.)

At the time, the American League had a rule that a game must end at midnight. Because of that, and various rain delays, the game in the novel lasts an entire weekend. I wrote this novel on a typewriter in my sister’s spare bedroom in Philadelphia and when it was finished I mailed the paper manuscript to an agent at the William Morris Agency who had expressed interest in my writing career. He did this by placing his hand on the manuscript for Cooder Cutlas and intoning, like a bailiff in a courtroom, “I think this is a good book.” (Dramatic pause.) “I don’t think this is the best book you will ever write.”

He said the same thing about Nobody On, Nobody Out, eerily predicting the long and thankless road my writing career would take. I did get an another agent for that novel, however, and over the course of a year gathered a soft, leafy pile of rejection letters, full of praise but ultimately rejecting the work as “too YA.” (This was well before YA became a desirable thing — it was still something of a publishing ghetto at the time.)

Nobody On, Nobody Out, anyway, Netta, was inspired by a 1974 game between the New York Mets and my beloved St. Louis Cardinals which lasted 25 innings and lasted seven hours and four minutes (don’t be impressed — I had to google this.) It set records in various ways. I did not stay up to listen to it; it was a school night. But my father did. Of course my father did. We were awakened from time to time by the sound of his hand slamming against the counter when a play did not go as he wished. This was the soundtrack to my childhood.

So no, Netta, games do not always go on that long. But yes, they are always that slow. When I say “slow,” I mean leisurely. This is why baseball is the preferred sport of poets. Baseball allows you time to think. Not the kick-kick-run-run of soccer (or “football”) or the war-game-meets-planning-committee bluster of American football. It is a strategic. It is a duel. It is bucolic, going back to agrarian roots.

“It is summer,” wrote William Carlos Williams. “It is the solstice/the crowd is/cheering, the crowd is laughing/in detail/permanently, seriously/without thought.”

Another poet, Robert Frost, wrote “Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.”

The intervals are the tough things, don’t you think? We are in a tough interval as a national here down south, and I think those of us who are not enamored by the frenzy of other sports find solace in the leisurely pace. It reminds me of Jordan Baker’s line in The Great Gatsby: “I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.” Similarly, baseball is intimate, and the busy sports don’t afford you any privacy, any time at all to spend with your thoughts.

And there is nothing more beautiful in the sporting world than Dodger Stadium as the sun goes down.