“For the most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. My immediate purpose is to place before the world…a series of mere household events…the events have terrified—have tortured—have destroyed me…to me, they have presented little but horror.”
– The Black Cat, Edgar Allan Poe

It was a hot and sultry night in June, the summer solstice, and I got a late start on taking a photo of Camden Yards for a local website called, “The Daily Camden.”

I was in the process, that month,  of relocating to my hometown of Baltimore after thirty 30 years — everything seemed both familiar and strange. I parked on Conway Street around 10 pm and walked briskly across Howard Street into the stadium. It was an off day, during an Oriole season in which a cessation of activities on the diamond brought a strange kind of relief.

Drawn to a sign that read “Baltimore Oriole Offices,” I heard the raspy voice — in my mind? — of singer Tom Waits asking, “What’s he building in there?”

At this point the Orioles had won seventeen 17 games against more than forty 40 losses. Thirteen years ago, they had posted a 43-17 record at this juncture in the season. Waits croaked again: “What the hell is he building in there?”

A thirteen-year fall

What, indeed. It appeared that Andy MacPhail’s master plan for being competitive in 2011 had crumbled. He’d fired manager Dave Trembley and after thirteen years, losing had become a way of life—our destiny. The team’s long-time mantra, “The Oriole Way,” had been reduced to marketing prattle. The franchise could barely scrape together one win a week. One local radio station previewed the game with, “Last night they gave it their best, but it wasn’t enough. They’re back out there again hoping to have better luck tonight. ” It sounded like a bit from The Simpsons, Kent Brockman  promo-ing the oh-so-lame Springfield Isotopes.

I thought of children entering adolescence who’d never witnessed a winning season. Living with my father during the relocation, I remembered how generations of Baltimoreans depended so much on the outcome of the Orioles game each night. Now I realized there were children entering adolescence who’d never witnessed a winning season. I thought of my son Quinn moving to Charm City with his Red Sox jersey, and how I was going to arrange for it to be lost in the move and replace it with an Orioles cartoon bird shirt—the last emblem of on the field excellence—as soon as I could.

So what went wrong?

Over the past thirteen years, any semblance of leadership had all but vanished. I had a bad feeling when the Rochester AAA minor league affiliate changed teams and we relocated to Ottawa and then Norfolk and “uncooked” players, like Daniel Cabrera, started appearing at the Yards from Bowie and Frederick. We rushed young talent and grew impatient. We lacked teachers like Cal Ripken, Sr. We wrecked young arms.

There were injuries, growing pains, and the loss of George Sherrill, Aubrey Huff, and Melvin Mora—seasoned veterans who added ballast in the clubhouse. Former Oriole great Paul Blair gave me an earful about today’s players and their lack of attention to fundamentals.

“They don’t give a [damn] about defense,” he told me last fall, at the Brooks Robinson tribute at the Meyerhoff. “You don’t go into defensive slumps. It’s the one part of the game you can control through hard work and they don’t care.”

Every ball in the air or on the ground had become an adventure. They played defense like hockey goalies. There were whole decades strung together when the double play was automatic in Baltimore and the number of times the Orioles turned them directly related to their postseason success. Double plays, one-run victories, three-run homers, and the dense humidity of Baltimore summers kept the ball in the park on 33rd street and helped put three World Series trophies in the case.

All-stars like Nick Markakis and Brian Roberts have toiled for seasons with nothing to show for it. It got to the point where no one wanted to play for the Orioles anymore and New York, Boston, and Tampa Bay had become superpowers.

I began to believe that there had to be nine random baseball players currently living in Baltimore who could play better than this team. Local boys like Gavin Floyd and Mark Texeira had flourished. Pitcher Dave Johnson was driving a truck before he was discovered. Would an Orioles version of American Idol energize the fan base?

Humid and steamy, the first night of summer covered the Yards like a heating pad. The 2010 season was already over—done, finished, wait until next year–or better yet 2015. Incredibly, we were playing out the string with 100 games left.

Purging the past

I continued my descent into Orioles purgatory and soon discovered there were plenty of evil spirits to reckon with. The phantoms of blown saves and squandered opportunities flashed across the warehouse windows. I replayed the ghastly scenes of Armando Benitez, Jorge Julio, Mike DeJean, and Danys Baez serving up game winning home runs like plates of Boog’s barbecue.

I saw Melvin Mora and Jack Cust falling down as if tripped up by the ghosts of Yankee fans before reaching home plate, trying to belly-flop their way forward. One particular window struck me as being in eternal agony. “The Horror. The Horror.” (Another raspy- voiced character. Brando in Apocalypse Now.) The panes had transformed into teeth.

I took a picture of the moaning window and walked to the southernmost end of the warehouse, which had always reminded me of the front of a locomotive. Tonight, it looked ablaze in a monstrous display of shadows and light. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end, thinking of Babe Ruth and Edgar Allan Poe playing stickball in the flickering shadows. A bat flew by.

Chased by ghouls, I tried to escape around the corner and encountered a man sleeping on a bench. I watched him splayed there, across the bench as though it were a bed—an Oriole fan perhaps, or a homeless man–the specter of a downtrodden franchise and a city in search of an identity beyond drugs, murders, and decay. I took the picture with the man on the bench against the backdrop of the Bromo Seltzer Tower. I clutched the Eutaw Street gates. For a split second, I wanted out of this forty-year obsession with the Orioles. Losing made me numb. For the first time ever this year, I had turned down tickets to watch them.

I scoured the depths of my Orioles soul.

When I first arrived in Baltimore, the prospects for moving my family here seemed tenuous—the real estate market was inflated and neighborhoods had been destroyed by crime. Our friends thought we were crazy. Within a few weeks of a taking a job at Johns Hopkins University, a security guard was murdered near my office for thirteen dollars. Thirty years ago, we had Mayor Schaefer and a baseball team that personified the city’s integrity and grit. We had a swagger and were proud of our heritage. There was something called Baltimore pride.

Recently I walked across 33rd street and stood where Memorial Stadium used to be. As a boy, I’d stop on the sidewalk on the way to a game and pause at my first glimpse of a light stanchion or a section of façade through the trees. I had dreamed on many nights, during my thirty-year exile from the city, of playing baseball in Memorial Stadium for the Baltimore Orioles. Champions had roamed over the grounds. Time, it had seemed, had usurped the glory of their deeds.

I shook the Eutaw Street gates and railed at the baseball gods. We were cursed, possessed, eternally damned to losing seasons.

The Bromo-Seltzer Tower fizzed spectacularly in the distance. The monstrous beauty of Camden Yards suddenly presented itself and something clicked into place. I was an Orioles fan since my first game as a three-year-old at the 1966 World Series. And a fan I would always be.

Looking forward

I went to Camden Yards the very next night to watch my first game of the season. It was Ty Wigginton t-shirt night and it was hard not to pull for “Wiggie.” Of any player on the team, Ty was a Baltimore Oriole worthy of playing for Earl Weaver. He looks like an Oriole—as well as a little like ““Spanky”” from the Little Rascals. As the Marlins mercilessly pounded the Birds, the ghosts of old Memorial Stadium materialized past appeared behind me and started heckling in a nasal Baltimore-ese at the Marlin players.

“They’re padding their average,” the woman yelled. “Come on, Andy.” Balls rocketed in all directions off Marlin bats.

“Padding their average,” she repeated.” Earl Weaver wouldn’t put up with this bullcrap.”

Indeed, Earl had been a genius, a brilliant tactician. To end the curse we needed a Weaver-like presence, a dirt kicker, a scrapper, a challenger of umpires, and somebody not afraid to get in the face of today’s coddled ballplayers.

The Second Coming

Later that week, I was driving down Harford Road half-listening to the Marlins play the Orioles in the series finale. The smell of Old Bay wafting across the road from a pot full of steamed crabs in a restaurant somewhere seized my nostrils. Shortstop Cesar Izturis squared to bunt, and the ball sailed eerily over the pitcher’s mound just as I passed my grandfather’s house on Oak Forest Drive. I spent many hours, for about a decade of my life, sitting in his cool basement listening to every pitch on a Zenith transistor radio. The announcers had never seen a bunt sail over the pitcher’s head for a hit and neither had I. More singles followed and the Orioles took the lead and won the game.

Was it a sign, a foreshadowing? I was looking for anything. One day in early July, my wife texted me: “A Baltimore Oriole flew across the windshield of the car—unmistakable orange and black. In fifteen years of birding, I’ve never seen one.”

Under new manager Juan Samuel, they won a few more games including a stunning sweep of the Texas Rangers just before the all-star break. Buck Showalter’s name began to be mentioned in the press as a candidate for the manager position.

I lived in New York when Buck managed the Yankees and have always thought that he was one of those managers who could win games with their presence, like Joe Torre or Tony LaRussa. He was prepared and detail-driven, right down to the way the players laced their shoes. I remembered the words of Cal Ripken during one of his Hall of Fame speeches, “I played for the State of Maryland and the City of Baltimore.” Showalter would bring a level of professional responsibility that had been lacking. He had taught the Yankees to win and he would do the same thing here. Like Max Von Sydow in the William Friedkin classic, he arrived to exorcise the demons of thirteen losing years.

“Are you kidding me, it’s all about winning. Every day is an opportunity. That’s why you wake up in the morning,” Showalter said, during a recent press conference.

Last Thursday night, the Orioles played the Angels. When I arrived, the air was heavy and humid
as it had been on so many nights at 33rd street and I sensed a renewed energy in the park—a buzz. I couldn’t wait to see the new manager in uniform. In the second game of the Showalter era, the Orioles jumped all over Ervin Santana and put up nine runs.

They did something I haven’t seen an Oriole team do with such precision in thirteen years. With two runners on and nobody out, they bunted the runners to second and third. Ty Wigginton drilled a single, plating them both. Standing there at the edge of the dugout, leaning on the railing, Showalter looked like someone I had seen before in a similar stance: Earl Weaver.

The Birds won, like they did thirty years ago.