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This Day In Sports…April 22, 2018:
San Francisco’s Brandon Belt, the second batter of the game, produces a 21-pitch at-bat, the longest in recorded big league history, against the L.A. Angels’ Jaime Barria. The marathon plate appearance lasted 13 minutes and included 16 fouls, 15 of them with two strikes. It ended anticlimactically when Belt finally lined out to rightfield. But he’d come back later in the game to hit a home run for the fourth consecutive game, helping the Giants to a 4-2 victory.
It got to the point that Giants starting pitcher Johnny Cueto trekked down the tunnel to the team’s indoor batting cage and threw a ball against the netting to stay warm. Belt came up again in the third inning, and that at-bat lasted eight pitches. But Belt’s favorite takeaway from the game was not the history (the record has been tracked since 1988), but his homer in the fifth, the eventual game-winner.
According to MLB.com, Belt ended up apologizing after the clock-chewing session against Barria. Belt had spent his career standing at first base and watching opponents foul off a basket’s worth of pitches. “When I’m in the field I hate it when a batter keeps fouling pitches off,” Belt said after the game. “I’m like ‘Dude, just put it in play. It’s not that hard. Let’s go.’ So I basically had to apologize to everybody after that.”
Belt broke a 20-year-old record held by Houston’s Ricky Gutierrez, whose at-bat against portly legend Bartolo Colon of Cleveland lasted 20 pitches. Colon finally got Gutierrez to strike out swinging—then retired the next two Astros to finish the eighth inning. The Cardinals’ Max Wieters extended a 2020 plate appearance against Minnesota’s Caleb Thielbar to 19 pitches. The Twins were in an “enough is enough” frame of mind, as Wieters was the last of eight straight batters to step in the box with the bases loaded. He mercifully flew out to end the inning.
(Tom Scott hosts the Scott Slant segment during the football season on KTVB’s Sunday Sports Extra. He also anchors four sports segments each weekday on 95.3 FM KTIK and one on News/Talk KBOI. His Scott Slant column runs every Wednesday.)
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