26 September 2023
This is Baltimore, Queen City of the Patapsco Drainage Basin. It doesn’t take much to keep us happy around here.
We want good neighbors and friendly dogs. We want to see tall ships in the Inner Harbor once in a while. Give us an excellent crab cake now and then, a cold beer, a juicy corned beef-on-rye, decent pizza, clean tap water and a snowball in July. We want strong schools and safe streets. We want an adequate supply of toilet paper for when it snows. We want that certain spontaneous wackiness that almost always happens when you open yourself to Baltimore and start conversations with amiable, quirky strangers.
Some of these things we already have. Some are aspirational. Some are — stand by for a new word — exasperational. But you get what I mean. It doesn’t take much.
We want the comfort of community that comes from going to places like Lexington Market or Fells Point or to events that bring us together — city and county parades, farmer’s markets and ethnic celebrations, Artscape, the Maryland State Fair, the Baltimore Running Festival — or from the success of the Ravens and Orioles.
The latter have a special hold on us. There’s no getting around it. Our professional sports teams provide big doses of civic pride, and they heighten community spirit.
The Ravens are almost always contenders, and they have given us two Super Bowl championships within the last 22 years.
The Orioles, on the other hand, last won the World Series in 1983, and we suffered through 26 losing seasons in the 40 since then. That’s roughly two generations of Birdlanders who have not seen their team celebrate a world championship.
Baseball expert Paul Francis “Sully” Sullivan believes most kids latch onto Major League Baseball at age 7. It’s Sully’s Seven-Year Rule: Kids first take a favorite team and favorite player around second- or third-grade.
I believe he’s correct about that, which is why I found it depressing to watch many of the kids around here become Yankee and Red Sox fans while the Orioles notched 14 consecutive losing seasons (1998-2011).
So, while it doesn’t take much to keep us happy, we are long past being tolerant of a floundering Orioles organization.
I sense we have reached a point where more is expected. Winning the way the Orioles have this season will do that.
A World Series parade on Pratt Street every few years — maybe even two or three in a row — I mean, why not? All due respect to the teams of the Buck Showalter years, a run of success like that is way overdue.
If it should happen with the present team — these exciting, talented and appealing young Orioles on the cusp of nailing the club’s first 100-win season since 1980 — it would prove, after all, that in Baltimore we can have nice things.
And it would be splendid if that rubbed off on all of us, in all facets of life in and around Baltimore: Don’t lower expectations, raise them.
Some experts argue, convincingly, that big taxpayer investments in stadiums for professional sports teams have little payoff for cities in terms of economic growth. Many agree. Many resent all the public money that goes into sports, and in Maryland the Ravens and Orioles will be getting even more soon.
In return, the Ravens made a commitment by signing a long-term lease with the state.
But the Orioles are still only committed verbally, even as the team reaches the American League playoffs and the fan base goes wild.
So there’s a toying with our civic emotions that underlies all the excitement we feel for the rebuilt, robust Orioles of 2023. It’s so foolish and unnecessary, and I don’t care how complex the lease negotiations are, most of us don’t accept that two-bit reality. We just want to have fun without the drawn-out and dreary sideshow, without hearing how we’re a small market and nothing gold can stay.
Next year will mark 70 since the St. Louis Browns became the Baltimore Orioles. The club had some big success during that time, including the Robinson-and-Robinson run of the 1960s and early 1970s. Nobody asked me, but I think this 2023 team has an opportunity to match that kind of success. That’s what’s exciting about the organization Mike Elias and his staff hath wrought here — it has the potential to contend for years.
Orioles fans, young and old, deserve that. We deserve nice things.
Personal note: On Sunday, Sept. 17, the day the Orioles played the Rays and clinched a spot in the American League playoffs, I was 3,500 miles from Baltimore, in a foreign land where no one we know pays MASN $12.35 a month to watch baseball on television.
The local barroom had its flat screen permanently tuned to the Rugby World Cup, and I wasn’t about to ask the bartender if he could switch to the Orioles-Rays game.
Fortunately, however, a young man savvy to cyber subversion worked a miracle and managed to get the telecast from Camden Yards on his smartphone. (I didn’t ask how, I just thanked the guy.) And, as a result, six sojourning Baltimoreans got to see Adam Frazier tie the game and Cedric Mullins win it with a walk-off sacrifice fly in the 11th inning. If you heard a faint, distant roar over all the noise in Baltimore that day, that was us.
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