As
I mentioned in my last blog, I’ve been preoccupied with the Baltimore Orioles baseball season. They made it into the one game Wild Card
Playoff, and Tuesday night in a heartbreaker of of a cliffhanger of a game,
they lost in the bottom of the eleventh inning when the Blue Jays got a
walk-off three run homer. It was a particularly hard way to lose.
If
this were a blog devoted to baseball, I could give you my opinion of what went
right and what went wrong with the Orioles’ season. After all they were in first place for have
the year until their offense seemed to have taken a vacation, and instead of
winning the division they had to settle for a wild card spot. But I'll spare everyone.
To my surprise, I came across George Weigel’s recent column where he talks
about his memories of the 1966 Baltimore Orioles. If you’ve never heard of George Weigel, he’s
a well known Catholic writer, social critic, and columnist. I did not know he was a Baltimore Orioles fan,
let alone a baseball fan. Well his bio
entry does say he was born in Baltimore.
!966
was the year the orioles won their first World Series, and Weigel delves on
memories of that experience. From his
article, titled, “Golden memories of a golden anniversary”:
There were no
air-conditioned skyboxes in those days; there weren’t even seats, but rather
wooden benches. So fans (who were not yet a “fan base”) bought a newspaper on
the way in as anti-splinter protection, the working class folks sitting on a
News-Post and the white collar types on an Evening Sun. Concessions were
primitive in the extreme: rubbery Esskay hotdogs; salty, stale popcorn; Nation
Boh for those who had achieved their majority and watery Cokes for us small
fry. Then as now, Baltimore felt like Calcutta-on-the-Patapsco for months on
end. So on hot, humid summer evenings you didn’t come to Memorial Stadium to be
seen, or to close a deal, or to consult your broker or your therapist on a cell
phone: you came for baseball, period.
Baseball
works so well with nostalgia. It was
fifty years ago to the day. The 1966
World Series win, by an underdog group of Orioles, who were not much older than
kids, over the intimidating and domineering Los Angeles Dodgers was a
stunner.
In the winter of 1965-66,
the final piece of the championship puzzle fell into place when the O’s
acquired Frank Robinson (discarded by the Cincinnati Reds’ general manager as
an “old thirty”) in exchange for Miltiades Pappastediodis, whom you will likely
remember as “Milt Pappas.” Robinson proceeded to win the Triple Crown in 1966,
and to this day I have never seen a ballplayer who could bend a game to his
will like Frank Robby. He, Brooks Robby, and the rest of the O’s waltzed
through the American League, then flew to Los Angeles as underdogs to the
mighty Dodgers in the World Series. But they beat Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax
out on the left coast (with, perhaps, some assistance from the saliva of Mr.
Moe Drabowsky in Game One). And on return to Baltimore, the Birds won Game
Three of the Series with Dada and my brother John in attendance.
I’ve
been a long time Orioles fan, but I have to admit I was not old enough in
1966. I became an Orioles fan at the
ripe old age of eight, but that was in 1970, their second World Series
win. The kids of ’66 grew to be the great
Orioles of the late sixties and early seventies. If only I could attend an Orioles victory
like that. Weigel concludes:
I was there with Dada for
the fourth game, on October 9, 1966, sitting twenty rows or so behind first
base. As Paul Blair caught Lou Johnson’s fly ball to complete Dave McNally’s
1-0 shutout and the Orioles’ four-game sweep, Memorial Stadium erupted, hoary
south-of-the-Mason-Dixon-Line racial codes were abandoned as blacks and whites
hugged and hollered, and I experienced a moment of unalloyed joy – a prolepsis
of the Kingdom, if I may say.
Fifty years later, the
glow remains.
The
glow of loving your baseball team, win or lose, never fades. Despite the Orioles loss the other day, I
love them to death.
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