BOSTON -- Barring an extra-inning marathon or weather delay, the Red Sox should play their 100th inning of the season sometime around 2:15 on Sunday against the Devil Rays at Fenway Park.

Probably before that game even ends, a couple of hundred players 25 miles south of Boston -- at Campanelli Stadium in Brockton -- will also play their 100th inning.

The difference will be they will have started just 30 hours earlier, while it will have taken the Red Sox two weeks.

That's because, beginning on Saturday morning, the Boston Men's Baseball League (BMBL) -- New England's largest amateur baseball league -- is teaming up with Curt Schilling and the Massachusetts chapter of The ALS Association to hold a 100-inning game to benefit Curt's Pitch for ALS, which allows people to donate money to The ALS Association for each strikeout or win that Schilling puts in the books. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), more commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease, is a progressive, fatal neuromuscular disease that causes the deterioration of motor neurons and leads to loss of strength and muscle control before eventually resulting in total paralysis, including the inability to swallow and breathe.

The event began last year when Brett Rudy raised the idea of a 100-inning game in an e-mail to Mike Lembo, his teammate with the Boston White Sox of the BMBL.

"It really just kind of snowballed. We planned the whole thing in about six weeks," said the 21-year-old Lembo, who is now the special events coordinator for The ALS Massachusetts Chapter.

And how did Schilling get involved?

"It just so happened that that was when Curt kind of was the fresh face in Boston," Lembo recalled. "We wanted to do something for Curt's charity as sort of a way to welcome him to Boston."

Of course, it didn't strike everyone as the most sane idea.

"We were dubbed as idiots before the Red Sox make it a cool thing to be called that," Lembo said with just a hint of pride in his voice.

They persisted and pulled it off, though, allowing Lembo, playing for Team Schilling, to become just one of a handful of "iron men" to play the entire marathon game on marathon weekend. That gave him the opportunity to record 20 plate appearances -- "every one worse than the one before it," he says.

Of course, fatigue may have contributed to some of that.

"I was batting at 10 a.m. on Sunday after I had been up for 24 hours and we had fresh pitchers coming in that had gotten a full night's sleep," recalled the former Norwood High School second baseman. "I saw three baseballs coming at me."

Nonetheless, the dedicated players actually played an extra inning, giving them 101 total.

"We just couldn't get enough, so we thought that if anyone was going to try to one-up us and get ahead of us, we'd give ourselves one more," Lembo joked.

Lembo even pitched an inning, giving up two hits, including one to none other than Schilling's wife Shonda, who, playing for Team Gehrig, laced a fastball up the middle to drive in a run, stole a base and came around to score following her only trip to the plate in the 93rd inning.

By then, the game was well in hand, as the Gehrig Stamina had taken advantage of a 14-run bottom of the 60th and a 10-run 89th to pull away from the Schilling Endurance en route to a 100-51 win, according to the game's seven-line "line" score.

The more important tally, though, was the $112,000 raised for the Massachusetts chapter of the ALS Association, a number Lembo hopes jumps to $150,000 this year. For more information, go to www.100innings.org.