If you're walking in your front door at 3 o'clock on a Sunday morning and
you have not called your wife to tell her where you have been, you're taking
your marriage into your own hands. But Luis Aponte figured that on this night,
of all nights, it would be all right.

Aponte, a right-handed reliever for Pawtucket, threw four dazzling,
scoreless innings of relief that night -- the seventh through 10th innings --
and some time after 2 a.m., with no end in sight, Pawtucket Manager Joe Morgan
allowed him to go home.

What happened next is part of the lore surrounding that night, the story
told and retold in various versions. As the story goes, Aponte was confronted at
his front door by his wife, Xiomara, who wanted no part of his explanation that
he had been at the ballpark all night.

"Yeah, it's true," Aponte said recently in a telephone interview from
Venezuela, where he is a scout for the Cleveland Indians. "She didn't believe
me. Whenever we had a game, I was usually home by 11:30."

Aponte finally convinced his wife to let him in, promising that the morning
newspaper, with its account of the extra-long game, would prove his story
correct. Of course, the game went too late to make the paper, so there was no
such proof, and Aponte was forced a second time to plead with his wife to
believe him.

It took another entire news cycle -- until the Monday newspaper hit the
doorstep -- for Aponte to convince his wife, once and for all, that he had been
telling the truth.

"She finally believed me," he said. "But it wasn't easy."