Longest MLB Game Ever: The Complete Record Book

Baseball is the only major sport played without a clock. No buzzer, no horn, no timer ticking down — just outs, and when both teams run out of ways to get them, extra innings. Then more extra innings. Then, sometimes, a few more after that.

Most extra-inning games resolve themselves in the 10th or 11th. A handful push into the teens. And then there’s a small, absurd category of games that went so far past the finish line that players ran out of baseballs, fans fell asleep in the stands, managers got ejected in the small hours of the morning, and in at least one case, a league president was called at home at 4 a.m. to figure out what to do.

There’s a game on this list that two pitchers started — and both of them finished, 26 innings later. There’s one that lasted nearly a full workday and had to be completed on a different date entirely. There’s a playoff game so long it ended past midnight with a walk-off home run that’s since become one of the most iconic moments in World Series history. And there’s the minor league game that makes everything else look short — a 33-inning, three-day ordeal that ended with only 19 fans still in the building.

How long can a baseball game actually go? The answer is below.

Why these games happened

The games at the top of the innings list are old for a reason. Before bullpens existed in their modern form, starters simply stayed in until the game ended — which meant two men could carry a scoreless marathon into the 20s without anyone considering pulling them. Leon Cadore and Joe Oeschger, the two starters in the 1920 record game, both went all 26 innings. By today’s standards, that is functionally unimaginable.

The longest games by time, on the other hand, skew modern — a product of expanded bullpens, replay reviews, pitching changes, and, before the pitch clock arrived in 2023, no real mechanism to hurry things along. The 2022 Dodgers-Padres game lasted 7 hours and 20 minutes over 18 innings. The pitch clock, which dropped the average game from over three hours to around two and a half, has made games like that significantly less likely going forward. The days of a 6-hour regular-season grind may be behind us.

The bottom line

The 26-inning record set in 1920 has stood for over a century, and given how baseball is played today — with pitch clocks, automatic runner-on-second extra innings, and deep bullpens designed to prevent any single pitcher from lasting too long — it is almost certainly safe forever. The era that produced it is gone. Nobody is throwing 26 innings again.

But baseball still plays without a clock, and that guarantee — that a game cannot end until the last out is recorded — means the list above will keep growing. It just won’t be adding anything to the top.

— Legion Report