Long, long night in Normal

The Corn Crib during last night's record rain delay.

The final days of a baseball season, when mixed with rain, often leads to some long days and nights at the ballpark.

That was the case last night in Normal, Ill., where the CornBelters and Lake Erie Crushers played the final game of their three-game series at The Corn Crib. Both teams are chasing a playoff berth. The Crushers currently hold the final wild-card spot while Normal went into the night trailing the Crushers by four games with seven to play.

On Fan Appreciation Night, which included a prize of a trip to Cancun, heavy rain rolled into the area after the second inning and the game was delayed. Once a game starts, it is the umpires' decision if play will be resumed or the game will be cancelled. In this case, with the game having playoff implications for both teams and several others around the league, umpires T.J. Cunningham and David Fields decided to wait out the storm.

It was a long one.

The delay lasted 4 hours and 39 minutes.

The game resumed, in the top of the third inning, at 12:39 a.m. local time. That's 1:39 a.m. Eastern. According to one person's tweet from the game, "Lake Erie players, manager doing some world class whining."

Who could blame them?

A quick Google check this morning turned up a listing of longest rain delays in baseball history. According to SABR (the Society for American Baseball Research), last night's game had the 7th-longest rain delay in history, the 4th-longest in professional baseball and the 2nd-longest in independent leagues. The only rain delay in an indy game that was longer than the one in Normal was at Yogi Berra Stadium in Little Falls, N.J., on Aug. 14, 2000, when a Northeast League game between the New Jersey Jackals and Catskill Cougars was delayed at the start for 7 hours and 6 minutes. That game was scheduled to start in the afternoon and ended at 11:06 p.m.

Thus, according to SABR, the rain delay in Normal was the longest in-game delay in independent baseball history.

If you're wondering, the longest rain delay ever recorded was 8 hours and 12 minutes in an NCAA game between Harvard and Delaware in 1978.

The longest rain delay in an MLB game was 7 hours and 23 minutes in a 1990 at Comiskey Park in Chicago. That game between the White Sox and Rangers was never started, then rescheduled for five days later in Texas and was delayed in the bottom of the 5th inning because of a brawl.

When the game finally ended last night in Normal, it was 2:19 a.m., more than seven hours after it started. The seventh-inning stretch was at 1:45 a.m. Normal won the game, 6-3.