Yes, the Oriole Bird has a mom, and just in time for Mother’s Day, she’s getting a glow up.

If you’re at Camden Yards for Sunday’s game, you’ll see it, thanks to a Maryland Institute College of Art student’s vision. Think Black-Eyed Susans, Laura Ashley aesthetics, and maybe your mom’s spring or summer style from decades ago.

The Oriole Bird first broke into the world from a seven-foot Styrofoam egg on the Memorial Stadium field before the O’s home opener in April 1979. We’ll save the complete family history for another day, but for at least the last several years, the Orioles have featured Mother Bird alongside her Mascot Hall-of-Famer child on Mother’s Day at Oriole Park.

Until now, momma bird has worn—to put it nicely—a nearly comical, mismatched outfit (floral print dress, striped purse, checkered headscarf) assembled from a thrift store. The new ‘fit looks much more curated. Paying homage to her style, it’s still dated and still has flowers, but now purposefully so.

It was designed by MICA sophomore Angel Forsyth as part of a class project and collaboration with the Orioles. The team picked Forsyth’s concept from a group of submissions organized by MICA’s Hope Simpara, who teaches garment design and production. Students compiled mood boards, drew conceptual sketches, and produced a finalized rendering.

“The goal was to give her a put-together look,” Forsyth says of Mother Bird.

Before getting the assignment, Forsyth didn’t know there was such a character. (To be fair, neither did we.) A general fine arts major pursuing an illustration minor, Forsyth says the class is their first foray into fashion design.

Forsyth brainstormed and landed on a style that mothers of sports fans in their twenties today would have seen worn by their mothers in the 1970s or ‘80s.

“Then I started thinking about styles from that time, inspired by the original dress, like Laura Ashley-style florals with poofy sleeves and sailor collars,” Forsyth says.

Simpara also mentioned to the class that the Black-Eyed Susan was the state flower of Maryland, which unlocked a core memory for Forsyth. They remember being 4 or 5 years old and walking a path bordered by wildflowers near the family’s apartment outside of Syracuse, N.Y., where Forsyth and their dad, Jeff, would bring back a fistful of the blooms for Forsyth’s mom, Kelly. Today, Forsyth and their mom even have matching tattoos that include Black-Eyed Susans.

“It just feels like a very Mother’s Day-type symbol,” Forsyth says.

From their research and mood board—which included vintage Orioles logos and merch, those Laura Ashley dresses, and the mascot itself—the concept was hatched. (Much like the “birth” of the Oriole Bird decades ago, in a costume worn by another college student, then-Morgan State senior Gregory Tull).

Forsyth added a flower-adorned Preakness-style hat, too. “I love things that are a little bit outdated, especially for a project like this,” Forsyth says. “It made sense to have something chic, but outdated. It was meant to be like fashion from a different time.”

Forsyth and Simpara took measurements of Mother Bird last week on MICA’s Baltimore campus, and dress construction came together this week as Forsyth wrapped up other finals and was part of an art showing.

On Sunday, Forsyth—who eventually wants to be an art teacher, if not write graphic novels—will be at Camden Yards with their mom. While they played softball for years and—being from New York—attended a few Yankees games as a kid, it will be their first Orioles game ever.

“I like watching baseball, but I’m also kind of just there to hang out and buy a snowcone and periodically ask who’s winning,” Forsyth says.

Not a bad way to do it. Except this time, Forsyth and others will also get to see their work on full display. Black-Eyed Susans, on a bird, on Mother’s Day. Does it get any better?

Here stands John Flannery, “the father of American Lacrosse.” Hanging on a wall of the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame and Museum in Sparks, a circa 1879 portrait shows the 26-year-old Canadian, posing outdoors in a crew-neck shirt and dark shorts, stick over his shoulder, his confident expression suggesting he’s ready for a game—and the Gilded Age.

A few feet away, though, visitors learn that lacrosse’s origin story dates back even further. About a dozen wooden sticks of various shapes and sizes highlight the sport’s Native American heritage and different forms of the game played as early as the 11th century.

“Canada was the first place that the white man started playing it—they saw the natives playing,” says Joe Finn, pictured above, the Hall of Fame’s longtime archivist, gesturing amid exhibits that span the centuries.

Given its present-day ubiquity in Baltimore, it’s no surprise that lacrosse’s National Hall of Fame is here, and has been since 1957. As lacrosse season hits full stride this spring, the museum will celebrate its 10th anniversary at the Baltimore County headquarters of USA Lacrosse. But the city and region’s importance to the sport was hardly preordained.

In 1636, French missionaries first recorded the Huron tribe of modern-day Ontario playing a ritual game. They called it “La Crosse,” the webbed sticks being reminiscent of a bishop’s crozier. Two centuries later, a Montreal dentist published the sport’s first rule book and, with that, the aforementioned Flannery eventually brought the fast-paced game—12 against 12; most goals wins—with him to the United States.

Organized lacrosse spread from there, including to the Old Line State. In 1878, members of the Baltimore Athletic Club traveled to an athletic competition in Rhode Island. There, C.J. Iglehart came up short in the one-mile run, but his crew caught New Yorkers and Bostonians competing for a national lacrosse title.

“They liked what they saw,” Finn says, “so they brought rules and equipment home.”

“THE SPORT’S HISTORY RUNS DEEP IN BALTIMORE.”

A few months later, Baltimore’s first recorded lacrosse game took place in West Baltimore. As The Baltimore Sun reported, 24 men played “the Canadian Indian game of lacrosse, which has been gradually growing in favor in this vicinity, and is decidedly an improvement on baseball.” Spectators paid 25 cents. The game lasted 90 minutes. The winners received silver scarf pins shaped like lacrosse sticks—the first awards for the sport in Baltimore, but hardly the last.

Since then, lacrosse has woven its way into the fabric of life here. Johns Hopkins University fielded a team by 1883, more clubs emerged, and today, nets dot school and neighborhood yards.

In 2016, USA Lacrosse opened a new headquarters in Sparks and built a beautifully designed home for the Hall of Fame, replacing cramped quarters near Hopkins. Inside, there are also tributes to women’s lacrosse, which was popularized in the U.S. by a Bryn Mawr School coach in 1926, and Morgan State University’s pioneering Ten Bears team, the first from a historically Black college. Additionally, there are displays devoted to international competition (lax returns to the Olympics in 2028). Admission is free.

On one wall, wooden squares with the names and faces of more than 450 Hall of Famers form a mosaic. There’s Jim Brown (yes, the football legend), dozens of Baltimore natives, and a record 72 inductees affiliated with Hopkins, as well as 34 from rival University of Maryland, speaking to the region’s dominance of the sport.

Finn, who joined the Hall of Fame as a volunteer in 1998, knows about every player and artifact.

“A lot of people are surprised by the James Naismith connection,” he says, referring to the Basketball Hall of Fame namesake, who invented that sport to stay in shape for . . . lacrosse.

The sport’s history runs deep, and it lives in Baltimore.

A sellout crowd. Sunny, 75-degree weather. Orange everywhere. The Oriole Bird bouncing around the seats.

Orioles season is so back, and courtesy of $135 million in public funds from the state, Oriole Park at Camden Yards has gotten some serious upgrades since the end of last season. Fans will notice the new amenities—look no further than the state-of-the-art scoreboard (more on that later)—but rest assured, the ballpark hasn’t lost its charm and character.

Of course, the roster got a refresh, too, with additions like veteran slugging first baseman Pete Alonso, who joins an O’s homegrown core intent on returning to the playoffs under first-year manager Craig Albernaz. 

On Thursday, with Orioles starting pitcher Trevor Rogers allowing only three hits over seven innings and new closer Ryan Helsey getting his first save, all the O’s needed from their offense to win was an RBI sacrifice fly from Colton Cowser and an RBI single from Blaze Alexander. 

After taking in the season opener from the field—as well as from the stands, Splash Zone, and the newly relocated Jim Henneman Press Box—we compiled five of our favorite new things at Camden Yards.

New Faces (and Walk-Up Songs) 
Upon signing a five-year, $155 million contract with the Orioles this winter—just the type of move fans have been longing for under Baltimore native David Rubenstein’s ownership—Alonso spent several weeks searching for a new walk-up song that would play before his at-bats at Camden Yards. 

In front of 42,134 fans on Thursday afternoon, we found out what he landed on—and it’s perfect.

Alonso walked to home plate to the crescendo of “Birds” by Baltimore’s own Grammy-award winning hardcore punk band, Turnstile. “It is perfect,” Alonso told us in the clubhouse after the game. 

Here’s how it came together: Alonso knows Turnstile guitarist Pat McCrory through mutual friends, and they met in December in Baltimore when Alonso visited town to take his physical and complete the O’s free-agent signing of him. An easygoing conversation in February, recorded by the O’s, hatched the idea to use “Birds.” 

“Turnstile is sick. They’re a great band,” Alonso said. “I know they’re a Baltimore band. Them winning a Grammy is big-time. I’m happy to represent.” 

The standing ovation that fans gave him before his first at-bat, as “Birds” played, was a “dream come true,” he said. “It’s such a blessing and I’m happy we got the win for them today. He added, “It felt like a movie today. There’s a lot of excitement with this group of guys and this team. You could really feel that from the fans. It was electric today.”

The good vibes didn’t quite carry into the batter’s box, though. At least not yet. 

Alonso struck out in his first two career Orioles plate appearances against Minnesota Twins starter Joe Ryan (and later flew out to the warning track in the eighth inning). But, hey, it’s early. The 31-year-old, who left the New York Mets, has a strong track record that suggests the hits will ramp up soon enough. 

The Scoreboard
Undeniably, the most noticeable difference at Camden Yards this season is the giant videoboard in center field. It’s two-and-a-half times larger than the previous scoreboard, which was the smallest in pro baseball. And it was dated. Even the eagle-ist of eyes could have trouble seeing the correct score in years past, especially during the day. But no problem anymore. 

Built by Daktronics, the board is now the 12th-largest in MLB, allowing fans at the park to easily view everything those at home might see on television, including the new ball-and-strikes challenge system. Plus it’s easier to see in-person exclusives, like a reimagined crab shuffle. (In related news, ICYMI, relish took the first live hot-dog race win of the year.) 

“The goal here wasn’t to go crazy or try to have the biggest in the country,” Orioles president of business operations Catie Griggs said of the scoreboard. “That’s not what Camden Yards is. We feel this is right sized for our ballpark.”  

Which still means big. For scale, it’s the equivalent size of 800 55-inch TVs. 

The Other Side of the Scoreboard
A giant image of a uniformed Gunnar Henderson at bat, part of a new multi-year sponsorship deal between the Orioles and Under Armour, now greets fans coming in off Gate H on Eutaw Street, with the tagline, “This is our yard.”  

Henderson saw it for the first time on Tuesday. “Pretty cool,” he said when we asked him about the signage, thanking both the Orioles and Under Armour. But is he comfortable with his sizeable stature—both real and symbolic—over the team (and fans) out in centerfield?

“Yeah,” he said, as if there was no question. “It’s really special.”

Now, for the next thing. A long-term contract between Henderson and the O’s…

A Lot of New TVs, and a Brand-New Sound System
No more squinting at the screens on the concourse for a peek of the action while you’re grabbing a dog or refilling your beer. There are now 600 modern TVs around the ballpark, programmable with on-demand video and other information (like what items are sold-out at concessions).  

And you can hear everything now, too. The stadium’s long-beleaguered sound system has finally been fully revamped with 900 new speakers. The radio broadcast piped in through the system—for example, on Thursday, the play-by-play voice of Brett Hollander—provides a great atmosphere while out of your seat. 

Something for Everyone, from Premium Club Access to Budget-Friendly Bites
Visuals and audio aside, many of the stadium upgrades appeal to higher-income clientele, most notably, the Truist Club. Replacing the old press box behind home plate, the ballpark’s first-ever premium club seats around 350 in an upscale restaurant-style setting. The price tag is around $15,000 for 40 games, according to O’s officials, which works out to around $375 per ticket. 

“We do want this to be a ballpark for everyone, we recognize there are people for whom this is the experience they wanted, and we weren’t able to offer it,” said Griggs, noting that Camden Yards was one of two MLB stadiums without a premium club previously. 

The club/suites level also got a refresh, most significantly with a pair of large bars overlooking the field at the end of the first and third baselines.

Throughout the stadium, new food items on deck include crab smash tacos; Yakamein (stir-fried udon noodles with grilled shrimp, onions, and hot dog slices in a soy sauce gravy); and a Japanese cheesesteak from Washington, D.C.-based chef Katsuya Fukushima, featuring a sweet soy broth and fresh toasted roll. (Highly recommend.) 

Thankfully, last season’s fan-favorite value menu is back, as well. Simple food and drink items (like the humble hot dog, peanuts, refillable soda cup, and 12-ounce domestic beer) are available for under $5. And many eats from local restaurants have returned for another year, as well, like Ekiben, Attman’s Deli, Stuggy’s, and, of course, Boog’s BBQ. 

A New Favorite Pre-Game Personality
We must mention one more favorite of the day—109-year-old Baltimorean Arthur Green, who tossed a ceremonial first pitch to a raucous ovation. Yes, 109. I chatted with him briefly before the game. He laughed with affirmation when I said he’s seen a lot of what’s happened in Baltimore.  

Green, a World War II and Korean War veteran, then ditched his walker to stroll onto the grass and effort a pitch toward Henderson at home plate. He was then greeted with more ovation by fans as he took his seat down the left field line. 

Yes, people, Birdland bliss is back at a refreshed Camden Yards. 

“The crowd was awesome,” Albernaz said after his first win as O’s manager, which really culminated afterward when players put him in a clubhouse cart and showered him with beer and soap. “The whole place was electric today. There was no down in the game. The whole day was awesome.” 

At 1:34 a.m., the phone rang, and Jim Harkness reached toward its glow in the dark. One of his employees at the Maryland Transportation Authority (MDTA) broke the news. Five minutes earlier, a ship had collided with the Francis Scott Key Bridge. Details were scant until more calls came in quick succession and the full picture began to emerge.

“I started getting my stuff together,” says Harkness, “and headed into work.”

As chief engineer for MDTA, which operates the state’s eight toll roads, Harkness’ office was, and still is, at the agency’s Sollers Point site in Dundalk, just north of the iconic steel truss structure. He drove the 47-year-old bridge twice daily on his commute from Carroll County, enjoying the sunrise over the water or views of downtown Baltimore at dusk.

In the early morning of March 26, 2024, all that changed. The Key Bridge collapsed in seconds. Six maintenance workers filling potholes on the deck vanished into the Patapsco River, their bodies all eventually found in submerged vehicles. Two other men escaped with their lives. Mangled steel and part of a crumbled span fell across the bow of the Dali, when the roughly 110,000-ton vessel crashed into one of the bridge’s inadequate piers.

After the initial reports, Harkness became one of the first of some 35,000 daily Key Bridge commuters, truckers, and travelers to adjust their lives without the major connector to southeast Baltimore. This time, he took Interstate 95 and the Fort McHenry Tunnel. On the way, he got a situation report from MDTA staff and made calls, orchestrating part of the early state response to a shock that millions would soon wake to, all before reaching his office and seeing the destruction for himself.

With first responders already searching for workers in the water, Harkness’ immediate thought was to assign inspectors to assess the safety of the still-standing sections, then find a contractor to help clear debris and reopen the blocked Port of Baltimore—ASAP. But as those triage tasks were being addressed, he also began thinking about what came next: “figuring out a path forward for a replacement,” he says.

In the gray daylight, just after 10 a.m., Harkness was among the officials standing behind Gov. Wes Moore as he offered details about the collapse in the first of many media briefings. It was then that talk of a rebuild was first mentioned.

“Can you look to the future at all at this point?” one reporter asked.

“This is going to be a long-term build,” said Moore.

Knowing the bridge—along Interstate 695, over a federal navigable channel—would be part of a national emergency-relief effort, and that President Joe Biden was promising full reconstruction funding, Harkness gathered colleagues that same day to discuss working on a plan with the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA).

“Let’s figure out the necessary steps to kick off a project of huge scale,” he told them.

The idea of a rebuild began almost immediately.

Thirteen days later, state officials had to submit a cost estimate for federal disaster aid. They forecast an up-to-$1.9-billion rebuild, to be completed by 2028, comparable to other 21st-century American bridge constructions.

Even then, though, the projections were characterized as aggressive. “Thirteen days in, you have to make some assumptions,” Harkness says now.

And there was a lot they didn’t know.

“We’re building something that is a gateway to Baltimore. We’ve got to do it right.”

Almost two years later, this past December, Harkness stands on the third floor of a modest business-park office building near the BWI Airport, wearing a white button-down shirt and dark tie. The site has become a second office; he and a handful of MDTA staff share the workspace with FHWA reps, consultants, and a dozen-plus employees from the rebuild’s contractor, Kiewit. Together, they’re advancing on a “progressive design-build,” where design and construction run concurrently to speed up the process and avoid surprises.

Harkness, 48, is a Pennsylvania native, Penn State grad, and father of two boys who’s worked as a civil engineer in Baltimore for nearly three decades. After almost 10 years as a traffic consultant, and three with Baltimore’s Department of Transportation, he joined the MDTA in 2014, helping on projects like the I-95 express toll lanes and Nice-Middleton Bridge. Since 2021, as the authority’s chief engineer, he’s led numerous design and project management efforts, but nothing like this one.

“The past 18 months have certainly been different than other points in my career,” he says. The rebuild’s “expedited nature” fills 90 percent of his work calendar, even though the MDTA currently has about 100 other projects in its pipeline (including the even larger Bay Bridge replacement). And with more attention, there is more scrutiny.

In November, the MDTA amended its earlier forecast, projecting a late 2030 opening for the new Key Bridge, eliciting swift social-media criticism—“we will have moved out of Maryland before that bridge is finished!”—and a higher cost, up to $5.2 billion, surprising even industry experts. The agency cited several factors, but the bottom line is this: “Once we gathered all the data, our assumptions needed to be adjusted, and they adjusted up,” says Harkness.

He’s careful with his words, which is unsurprising for someone who considers risk for a living. Maryland Port Administration director Jonathan Daniels calls him “calm and rock steady,” which is a useful temperament for being thrust into Baltimore’s most consequential infrastructure project in decades.

While the state owns and operates the Key Bridge, the MDTA engineering and construction divisions lack the capacity to work on a project this large and time-sensitive alone. Kiewit, one of North America’s largest contractors, has extensive experience in Maryland and brings not only expertise and resources also as many as 200 designers to this high-stakes public-private partnership. They’re also currently working with Amtrak on the Frederick Douglass Tunnel in West Baltimore.

In August 2024, they were chosen by the state for a $73-million Phase 1 contract for the rebuild and began demo-ing the old bridge for the new one. The firm also has exclusive negotiating rights for Phase 2 construction, which could start in June.

Most weeks, Harkness sits with MDTA project-development head Brian Wolfe, his deputy Jason Stolicny, and 30-some Kiewit staffers for task-force meetings on structural updates and finer details. Daily, firm supervisors meet to plan the next day’s work. “There’s a lot of collaboration—it’s necessary to keep the ball moving,” says Harkness.

One of those advisors is Bob Palermo, a veteran geotechnical expert. At the office, he hands Harkness three Coke can-sized jars filled with Patapsco soil samples. To design anything, they needed to understand the build site. A large cross-section map of the riverbed under the new bridge’s roughly two-mile path (about 250 feet southeast of the circa-1977 original) reveals the challenge: Beneath the water is up to 100 feet of mucky deposits, a coarse sandy layer, then harder ancient clay. That’s where hundreds of steel foundation piles—including 45 eight-foot-diameter ones for the two main support pylons, aka towers—could be set, presumably.

Testing had to confirm assumptions. In the fall, crews on barges used air compressors, a 145-ton hammer, and one of the East Coast’s largest cranes to drive six 200-foot-long, 340,000-pound piles into the riverbed. They set a metal load atop the frame then applied pressure. Palermo measured. The piles resisted 11 million pounds, or 11,000 kips, even better than anticipated.

“The last job I worked on was the Tappan Zee Bridge [over New York’s Hudson River], and we went to 7,600 kips,” he says. “So, this is bigger.”

“Bigger” was the largest unknown after the collapse. The original Key Bridge’s 1,209-foot span between its largest piers covered an 800-foot channel with 185 feet of vertical clearance, safe enough for 20th-century commercial vessels. (In 1980, a freighter one-tenth of the Dali’s weight hit and only lightly damaged a pier.)

But cargo and cruise ships today are larger and heavier, and safety standards for new bridges are beefier, too. The Coast Guard is requiring the new bridge have a 230-foot clearance over the channel. And in a move to minimize collision risk and meet American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) standards, the new cable-stayed main span needs to be wider, at 1,665 feet, the longest in the U.S.

“Once you get all that information, you find out you couldn’t construct your assumed approach,” says Harkness.

The larger blueprint means more material, cost, and time to build. It also requires a taller pair of primary pylons and additional tension cables for support. At 600 feet, the towers will be taller than any building in the Baltimore skyline, constructed in 31 “lifts”—20-foot-high concrete chunks—each taking three to four weeks to cure into shape. Without delay, building those alone will take over two years.

“No matter how good we are, nine women will never make a baby in a month,” says Wayne Thomas, a Kiewit senior vice president overseeing the firm’s rebuild operations. Thomas spent most of his 30-plus-year career in Baltimore before moving to Philadelphia; his adult children are Laurel and Katyn (as in Catonsville).

The most dramatic details the rebuilders didn’t know, though, had to do with pier protection. It was always taken into account, Harkness says; nobody wants another collapse. But with larger bridge dimensions, AASHTO guidelines, and the Patapsco’s natural characteristics, they now estimate spending over $1 billion to protect them.

Originally, simpler stone berms were considered to keep runaway ships at bay, but the makeup of the riverbed didn’t make that feasible. Instead, 276 concrete-filled steel piles will be driven in around the bridge’s six largest piers, including 78 to support football-field-sized fenders around the main pylons’ 20-foot-thick concrete foundations. Imagine two fortress-like islands.

“It’s what this bridge needs,” says Harkness. “We’re not adding anything unnecessary.”

Even so, the bigger budget and slower timeline has raised plenty of questions from stakeholders. “As leaders, we have an obligation to give the public a detailed breakdown of what’s driving the changes,” says Congressman Johnny Olszewski, who lives in eastern Baltimore County. Like all the other former daily Key Bridge drivers, he’s added time—sometimes more than 90 minutes—to his commute to Washington, D.C.

Harkness wants the rebuild finished as quickly as the rest of us … But “we’re not compromising on safety,” he told the MDTA’s board in November.

Harkness sits in traffic like everyone else when heading to the MDTA headquarters. He wants the rebuild finished as quickly as possible, just like the rest of us. He points out that the project reached “70-percent design,” an industry milestone for most major specifications and cost estimates, in 14 months versus seven years, the average for comparable projects. But “we’re not compromising on safety,” he told the MDTA’s board in November.

Meanwhile, certain aspects of the rebuild are beyond his control, and could hinder progress.

While Maryland is suing the Dali’s owner for the collapse’s responsibility and cost of a new bridge, any payout won’t come for years (and will be reimbursed to the federal government). And while full federal funding was codified by Congress in 2024, it hinges on annual appropriations, meaning potential delays. In the meantime, working capital is necessary, like to buy the giant steel piles made in Texas and Louisiana.

Contingencies are in place, but aren’t free. The MDTA plans to sell a $600-million bond in early 2026 to help with financing. The unspoken effect? Maryland taxpayers will absorb costs and likely higher tolls.

The better news: There’s widespread agreement that a new bridge is vital to Baltimore, and beyond. Apart from squeezing traffic into the Fort McHenry (I-95) and Harbor (I-895) tunnels, as well as secondary roads, the collapse has sent trucks carrying hazardous materials not permitted in the tunnels around the north and western Beltway, adding to congestion and travel times.

And while steel and car factories aren’t major southeast Baltimore employers like when the original Key Bridge was built in the 1970s, Amazon’s distribution centers and other warehouses and industries are an economic driver, while the Port of Baltimore handled more than $60 billion in cargo coming in from under the bridge in 2024. Roughly $22 billion in freight crossed over it the year prior.

Harkness understands the project’s scope—and meaning. “From some of our first meetings, you could feel it in the room,” he says. “The responsibility to deliver for the residents of Maryland, and the region, is never taken lightly.”

Later, during a public livestream, the engineer sits in front of roughly 500 viewers, introduces himself, and begins. “I’m proud to be presenting tonight,” he says before sharing an image of the new bridge design and highlighting its features: the cables, main span, shaped pylons, and pier protection, illuminated against a pink morning sky.

It’s a vision he wakes up to now. A new Key Bridge, years away, built to withstand what the last one no longer could. Bigger, stronger, still symbolic.

“We’re building something that is a gateway to Baltimore,” Harkness says. “We’ve got to do it right.”

Jesse Minter’s new office at the Ravens’ headquarters in Owings Mills is just down the hall from the old one he occupied not that long ago.

From 2017 to 2020, Minter was a defensive assistant coach under John Harbaugh, sharing a cramped room with three colleagues as they broke down film, prepared for practices, and handled the unglamorous task of evaluating late-round draft prospects.

“He started at the bottom,” Ravens general manager Eric DeCosta said Thursday, “and now he’s here.” (Drake approves this message.)

Now, Minter is the Ravens’ new head coach, with a much bigger office down the hall and the responsibility and spotlight that comes with it.

On Wednesday night, as the team welcomed him back to Baltimore, Minter tossed passes to two of his three children as they dove on the couch in his new space, pretending to catch touchdowns. On Thursday, in a crowded auditorium at the Castle, the Ravens formally introduced the 42-year-old as only the fourth head coach in the franchise’s 30-year history, and its first new hire in the position since Harbaugh arrived 18 years ago.

“I’m truly honored and humbled to be here as the head football coach of the Baltimore Ravens,” Minter said to begin. He added later, “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

It is a homecoming of sorts for Minter, a Midwest native who spent the past two seasons as the Los Angeles Chargers’ defensive coordinator. The hire is also steeped in continuity. Minter is deeply connected to the Ravens’ existing identity, and, interestingly, to the Harbaugh coaching tree.

For the past four years, Minter worked under John Harbaugh’s older brother, Jim, with the Chargers and at the University of Michigan, where Minter was defensive coordinator for the Wolverines’ 2023 national championship team. His father, Rick Minter, a longtime college coach, once hired a young John Harbaugh as an assistant at the University of Cincinnati in the 1990s.

Apples, meet ground, near tree.

“When this job opened, this became the one for me,” Minter said. “Knowing the tradition, knowing the spine of the organization, what it’s built on, there was no better place.”

The Ravens’ organizational structure will remain familiar, as well. Minter will report directly to owner Steve Bisciotti, the same setup that has existed under DeCosta, former general manager Ozzie Newsome, Harbaugh, and previous head coaches Brian Billick and Ted Marchibroda.

“We won two Super Bowls that way,” DeCosta said Thursday, as Bisciotti, Newsome, and former team president Dick Cass watched from the front row. “We’ve won a lot of games that way, and we believe in that system—working together, fighting together, and figuring things out together.”

In many ways, nothing about Minter’s introduction suggested a dramatic shift in how the Ravens operate or what they value. He referenced the team’s longtime mantra, “Play Like a Raven,” as a reflection of the identity he wants to maintain: “Physical, tough, relentless, and together.”

Depending on your view, that message may land differently. If you put more weight in the franchise’s Super Bowl victories at the end of the 2000 and 2012 seasons, continuity is reassuring. But if you lament the more recent history—and Lamar Jackson’s 3-5 playoff record over eight seasons—perhaps you wonder what, exactly, will be different now.

Minter’s 30-minute introductory press conference was heavy on the clichés and rehearsed answers, leaving no room for criticism or judgments. The real answers will come much later when the games begin again in the fall—and the Ravens play the Steelers.

Minter is regarded as an innovative defensive mind, willing to adjust schemes and deploy top players creatively, much like former Ravens defensive coordinator Mike Macdonald, now coaching the Seattle Seahawks in the Super Bowl next week.

What’s clear is Minter is undoubtedly his own person. He is a younger voice who will now set the daily tone for players and staff. His role on game day will look different, too. Unlike Harbaugh, who operated as a CEO-style head coach after arriving from the Philadelphia Eagles as a special teams coordinator, Minter will call plays on defense.

“That’s a strength of mine,” Minter said. “That’s one of the reasons I’m sitting here.”

He is regarded as an innovative defensive mind, willing to adjust schemes and deploy top players creatively, much like former Ravens defensive coordinator Mike Macdonald, now coaching the Seattle Seahawks in the Super Bowl next week. Macdonald left Baltimore to take that desirable new gig two years ago. Minter is of the same mold. As an assistant, he quickly became a head-coaching candidate, except he is returning to Baltimore.

“When this job opened, this became the one for me,” he said. “Knowing the tradition, knowing the spine of the organization, what it’s built on, there was no better place.”

Here are a few more takeaways from his introduction:

It’s about the “We”
After starting by thanking Ravens officials, current and former players, his former colleagues in Los Angeles, and his family, Minter outlined a serious, focused approach.

“We get to go to work,” he said. “The ‘we’ is important. It takes everybody to be successful.”

That mentality extends to the postseason, where the Ravens have struggled to meet expectations in recent years. “Our plan will be built on being at our best late in the season and into the playoffs,” Minter said. “We will be at our best when our best is needed.”

In the meantime, he promised players would “feel my competitiveness and mentality every day.”

He intends to get the most out of Lamar Jackson
Though Minter is a defensive coach, he understands that much of the Ravens’ success hinges on their quarterback. Jackson has won two MVP awards in 2019 and 2023 under different offensive coordinators, but injuries and difficult postseason exits have defined recent seasons.

Harbaugh’s departure has been linked to reported frustration from Jackson, a significant factor as the Ravens look to restructure the quarterback’s contract and create roster flexibility. Minter just signed a five-year deal and his hiring, with Jackson involved in the interview process, offers the potential for a restart for the now 29-year-old QB still seeking his first Super Bowl appearance.

“With Lamar, I just look forward to connecting with him,” Minter said, “helping him become the best version of himself, creating a team identity that allows him to thrive. He’s already proven to be the best player in the National Football League.”

He added that he wants to, “put a team around him that allows him to reach that ultimate goal of bringing a Super Bowl back to Baltimore.”

The offensive coordinator hire will be critical. “I’m looking for a connector and an innovator and a scheme-builder around the best player in the world,” Minter said in an interview on the Pat McAfee Show after his press conference.

He’s different than the last time he was here
In addition to the gray in his beard, Minter now has three kids, more responsibility, and more experience under his belt.

After graduating from Mount St. Joseph University in 2005, where he was a wide receiver for its Division III football team, Minter was turned down nearly 100 times while seeking an entry-level coaching job. His father, then Notre Dame’s defensive coordinator, eventually brought him on as an intern. From there, Minter worked his way through a graduate assistant role at Cincinnati and coordinator stops at Indiana State and Georgia State before joining the Ravens. He then went on to Vanderbilt for his first major coordinator job (“It was a shoot-your-shot moment for myself,” he said), followed by Michigan and the Chargers.

Along the way, he changed. “My confidence has grown,” Minter said. “Your own style begins to come out. But it’s really about trying to get better every day.”

The Chargers’ defense ranked first in points allowed per game in 2024, giving up only 17.7 on average, and was fifth best in total defense this season. The team held opponents to 20 points or less in 10 of Los Angeles’ final 11 games.

He saved those early job application rejection letters as a reminder of where he started, but he puts less stock in them now. “My mindset has shifted in the last five or six years from proving people wrong and more to proving people right,” he says, about the people who hired him.

When Minter said on stage Thursday that he’s prepared for this job, I sensed that he really is. He was most compelling when talking about his on-field vision for the team and appeared most excited when talking about players, like safety Kyle Hamilton, whom he said is a “positionless defensive player that I would classify as a weapon. As much as you can do to get a guy like Kyle near the point of attack, that is what you try to do as a designer and play-caller.”

DeCosta admitted when he thought of Minter as a potential head coaching candidate about a year ago, he had to adjust his perception.

“My experience with Jesse was primarily in the draft years ago, when he was [evaluating] all the bottom guys on the draft board in the secondary,” DeCosta said. “But watching [the Chargers] last year and that defense, I’m like, ‘This is a really good defense and Jesse’s doing a hell of a job.’”

Minter was among at least 20 candidates the Ravens interviewed, DeCosta said, and one of only a handful called back for in-person interviews. “While he was with me in my office, I started to imagine Jesse as our head coach and what that might look like,” DeCosta said. Even before formal interviews, former Ravens safeties Eric Weddle and Tony Jefferson, who played for Minter, shared their support for Minter with DeCosta.

Minter even had John Harbaugh’s endorsement. “I think they should hire you,” Minter says Harbaugh texted him as the interview process was unfolding over the past two weeks.

“I appreciated that,” Minter said. “[I want to] take the foundation in place and build on it, make it better, put my own spin on it. Not try to be John Harbaugh, not try to be Jim Harbaugh, just be myself, connect with everybody, and make it about all of us.”

A piece of the Key Bridge—a toaster-sized, 80-pound, steel chunk—sits on the showroom floor of Alan Tsao’s Baltimore Watch Company inside the Union Collective in Hampden.

But instead of looking like part of the silver-gray structure that iconically spanned the Patapsco River, this block of metal is deep black, like volcanic rock. “That’s because someone torch-cut it,” from one of the trusses pitched above the waterline after a cargo ship crashed into the bridge in the early morning of March 26, 2024, explains Tsao.

A friend happened to be on the salvage crew tasked with cutting apart those mangled pieces before demolition. With his supervisor’s approval, he handed Tsao 200 pounds of steel—raw material for an idea that dozens of clients had urged for months since its fall: “Make a Key Bridge watch.”

It’s not as peculiar a request as it might sound. For nearly a decade, Tsao’s Baltimore Watch Company has turned local icons—Natty Boh, Old Bay, the Orioles—into limited-edition luxury timepieces. But this project would demand something deeper: transforming tragedy and hardened bridge steel into a finely crafted tribute. But the 37-year-old Timonium native thought it was worth the effort.

Using that salvaged steel, a machinist in Harford County is now milling 500 solid dials. Down the hall in Tsao’s Union Collective workshop, rotors, hands, glass, straps, and cases will form the finished watches, to be sold for $1,500 each. But Tsao isn’t keeping the profits. After covering his costs, he plans to hand a $200,000 check directly to the families of the six workers who died in the Key Bridge collapse.

Baltimore, and ingenuity, runs in Tsao’s blood. Like his great-grandfather, a Chinese immigrant who in 1932 opened a Roland Park laundromat (that Tsao’s parents still run today), he built his business from scratch. But why the interest in expensive watches?

“It’s an obsession,” he says, which began when he marveled over the craftsmanship of his first Fossil watch at age 10. Eventually, his collection grew to include higher end Omegas and Breitlings. Then, after graduating from the University of Baltimore, Tsao worked at a property management firm, got married, and, after one too many watch purchases, his wife quipped: “Why not make your own?”

In 2017, Tsao launched his first design through Kickstarter and quickly learned the costs of overseas sourcing and manufacturing. Five years later, in 2022, he took the full-time leap after an angel investor commissioned 250 custom pieces following a chance meeting at a local watch show.

Smartwatches, inflation, and tariffs be damned, in the past three years, Tsao has found a niche: making classy, automatic timepieces that tell Baltimore stories. Each design is locally flavored. And the reception has reflected the city’s hometown pride, with sales hitting $1.5 million last year. But “this year,” says Tsao, “has been about building something special.”

In the fall, he acquired Hagerstown-based Maryland Watch Works, a business he’d previously contracted for the assembly of his watches. Their head maker, Eugene Stohlman, now works at Tsao’s 7,100-square-foot headquarters in the Union Collective, joined by another new colleague, Antonio Vespoint, formerly of Towson Watch Company, plus three technicians who handle everything from vintage fixes to high-end builds. Together, they’ve formed a veritable local brain trust, bolstered by Stohlman’s development of an entirely Maryland-built “movement,” aka the actual clockwork of a watch.

While luxury watches usually use imported parts, Tsao’s Key Bridge edition will be almost entirely Maryland-made. In September, Tsao showed off the latest prototype.

“With watches, we’re thinking on the micron level—we need everything perfect,” he says.

Etched into deep gray metal on the dial are the initials “FSK”—for Francis Scott Key—where a rendering of the bridge will appear on final versions.

It feels weighty, because it is. A piece of Baltimore’s past, forged to keep time with its future.

About 20 minutes before his introductory press conference as Orioles manager on Tuesday, Craig Albernaz crouched like the minor-league catcher he once was, facing north on Eutaw Street behind the Camden Yards scoreboard under construction.

His 2-year-old daughter, Gigi, wearing orange bows in her hair, walked as quick as she could toward him. Mom, Genevieve, trailed behind, dressed up too. Albernaz, in a fresh black suit, eventually hoisted his youngest of three children in the air, looking like he was simply celebrating life and a new beginning.

The 43-year-old is the 21st manager of the Orioles, arriving from the Cleveland Guardians organization, where he was bench coach for reigning A.L. Manager of the Year Stephen Vogt the past two seasons, both division-winning years.

“This is a dream come true for me,” Albernaz would say later.

Arriving in Baltimore with glowing references and experience as an assistant coach with three MLB organizations (Cleveland, the San Francisco Giants, and the Tampa Bay Rays), as well as a stint coaching in Australia, this is Albernaz’s first managerial role since 2017—when he led a Single-A team in the Rays’ minor league system.

He’s now tasked with guiding a big-league A.L. East team that had an injury-plagued, 87-loss 2025 campaign. It was a departure from the trajectory of a young, talented core that led the O’s to the playoffs in 2023 and 2024, though they exited both without a win.

On Tuesday, Albernaz sat on a stage set up in the Warehouse Bar and Restaurant between O’s owner David Rubenstein and president of baseball operations and general manager Mike Elias. He fielded questions from reporters for about 45 minutes.

With his daughter, two sons, and wife—as well as his former boss and close friend Vogt—in the front row, Albernaz acknowledged his emotions. “Alby,” as his close friends know him, cracked a few jokes too, some at his own expense, showing a glimpse of who he is and what Birdland can anticipate.

“I just can’t wait for the fans to come out to watch our boys compete because we’re going to play a very exciting brand of baseball,” Albernaz said. “It’s going to be a great bounce-back year for this group.”

Here are a few top takeaways from his Baltimore introduction:

Get used to the Bahston accent.
Albernaz left home in New England (Fall River, Mass.) at age 17 to play baseball at Eckerd College in Florida, but his thick native accent hasn’t left him. A few moments into his opening statement, we heard “paht,” meaning “part,” and “Gahdians,” referring to his former team. A few weeks ago, when news broke of the hire, some funny people on the Internet speculated Albernaz was a mole for the Red Sox. But nobody will question that, nor care what he sounds like, if the Orioles have a strong season.

Albernaz’s personality isn’t lacking.
While clearly trying to hit the right notes upon introduction, he also let his personality shine, mostly when making jokes (about his height, 5-foot-8) and working with Elias on their offseason wish list. “Whatever Mike wants to cook up. I trust Mike,” Albernaz said. “That’s not my job. That’s Mike’s job. He’s pretty good at it. Actually, really good at it.” He added: “Please, Mike,” which drew a laugh and grin from the typically guarded GM.

When asked how many current O’s players he’s spoken to, Albernaz recognized an opening and referred to the viral “6-7” social media trend, which his sons—8-year-old CJ and 6-year-old Norman, sporting orange-and-black Air Force 1 sneakers that matched their parents and sister—wanted him to mention. “I’ve probably reached out to 6, 7 of them to be honest with you,” Albernaz said.

This wasn’t quite Buck Showalter’s wistfulness and charm in the 2010s (the last time the team won a postseason game), but Albernaz will be entertaining in his own way. Take it from his friend, Vogt, the Guardians manager, who talked to Baltimore reporters after the press conference Tuesday. “He’s going to keep everyone relaxed,” Vogt said. “He’s going to have personality. You got to give it back to him.”

He could be the right guy at the right time.
For all the high expectations for this Orioles team—and talks of future multi-million-dollar contracts for Gunnar Henderson and Adley Rutschman, or Colton Cowser and Jordan Westburg—they’re still young and maturing. I mean, get to Camden Yards early enough, and you can see Henderson riding into the clubhouse parking lot on an electric scooter. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but an older player concerned about injury would at least drive.)

Last season, injuries mounted all over the roster and pressure built early, leading to then-manager Brandon Hyde’s firing. Elias wanted the team’s young core to get back on track while justifying the coaching change to interim manager Tony Mansolino. Albernaz will be another new voice at Camden (Yahds), but his hire isn’t a huge departure from Hyde’s pedigree. Both were hired as first-time, young-ish managers, who never played in the majors, but are receptive to analytics and were part of former Rays and Cubs manager Joe Maddon’s coaching tree. But Albernaz appears to be a more playful version of the gruffer Hyde.

“I’m going to keep it loose. It’s baseball,” he said. “We’re with each other 162 games in a season, and more than our families. Guys play at their best when they’re having fun and just playing the kids’ game.”

That may be just what this team of Lego-loving young stars needs for a “bounce back” year in 2026. Yet Albernaz said “tough conversations” are necessary for improvement as well. He quoted Maddon: “You tell the player the truth, he might be mad at you for a day. If you lie to them, you lost him forever.”

“It was clear that this was a really good fit all-around,” Elias said. “The places he’s worked, the philosophies that he’s developed, I think his personality and personal style will be a really good fit for what our group needs, but also in this town and in this market.”

He understands the business.
One of Albernaz’s comments suggests he grasps a point that’s more important to professional athletes and winning teams than many fans recognize: “All players want to make as much money as they can,” Albernaz said, “and they want coaches in their corner, and people in their corner, that can help them do that. It also helps the team they’re with win a lot of games.”

This isn’t something you often hear professional coaches say publicly, but it’s an absolutely true dynamic. Managing personalities and motivations are as important as filling out the lineup.

And speaking of business, Rubenstein offered his offseason outlook and roster changes, saying they have “no particular restraints” on payroll and want to add complementary players, while deferring to Elias on the details.

“We have an investor group that’s pretty deep-pocketed,” Rubenstein said. “We’re able to do what we need to do. Mike has a lot of authority to go out and find the best players that we can get…We don’t feel we need to break [payroll] records, but we want to get good players who want to be part of an organization that is very cohesive.”

He’s all about family.
Gigi, Albernaz’s daughter, ended up stealing the show at the press conference, at first making noise from the front row—as a 2-year-old does when tasked with sitting still for long.

Eventually, Rubenstein suggested she come up to Dad on stage, and the O’s owner handed her to Albernaz, leading to this cute and touching exchange:

Albernaz said you’ll see his family at games. Though they’ve lived many different places, his wife—a former Philadelphia Phillies ball girl—says she’s excited for her family to embrace a new accent: Bawlmer.

On Friday night, Baltimore basketball icon Carmelo Anthony stood tall, as he does, holding a microphone before hundreds gathered at the Enoch Pratt Central Library for the opening of House of Melo.

On view through December, the landmark exhibit celebrating Anthony’s life—which coincides with his 2025 induction into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame—has completely transformed the historic building’s first floor. A giant likeness of Anthony hangs from the library’s iconic main hall ceiling. Items telling his story dot the rooms around. He beamed seeing it all come together.

“This is special. I wanted to bring this here, and I’m very grateful,” Anthony said at the grand opening gala Friday. “After the year I’ve had, to be able to add taking over a library to my resume means a lot,” he continued, mentioning his Hall of Fame induction last month and developing business ventures following a 22-season and 10-time All-Star NBA career.

It is, indeed, a takeover. From the Cathedral Street entrance, now cased in red—the color of the rowhome on the 1100 block of Myrtle Avenue where Anthony lived from age 8 to his junior year of high school (at Towson Catholic)—to subtle yet powerful features like classic magazine covers; Anthony’s favorite music; milkcrate hoops; and NBA, Olympics, and Syracuse memorabilia that fit naturally amid the bookstacks, hallways, and rooms, it’s a fully immersive experience.

“It is a library. It ain’t like it’s a lounge, it ain’t like it’s a club,” Anthony said Friday night. “We still got to be respectful and responsible with what we’re doing and the messages that we’re putting out there.”

He formally opened the exhibit with a ribbon-cutting ceremony, attended by notables like Gov. Wes Moore and Mayor Brandon Scott, on Saturday morning. Baltimore writer D. Watkins, co-author of Anthony’s 2021 memoir, Where Tomorrows Aren’t Promised, and Khalilah Beavers, Anthony’s stylist and creative director of nearly 20 years, produced and designed the exhibit. Art from Baltimore’s Devin Allen is also featured throughout.

The idea, Anthony said, is to attract a new generation to the building, who might be inspired by a West Baltimore kid’s gritty coming-of-age story and accomplishments. The tagline is a spin on his memoir’s title: Where tomorrows are promised.

“We hope everyone will come from all over to view this,” Enoch Pratt Free Library CEO Chad Helton summed up.

To that end, here are a few highlights that you can’t miss when you visit. House of Melo is free and open to the public during regular Central Library hours: Monday-Thursday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., as well as Friday and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Home Court
When you enter the library’s main hall, you’ll see a basketball court outlined on the floor, featuring Anthony’s own words in the design. “For every soul still trapped in the places I broke free from,” is quoted at the midline. “Pressure? I’ve been under pressure since birth,” marks the free throw line in front of a giant hoop at one end. It’s Anthony’s favorite part of the exhibit.

Before you go too far, though, don’t miss the QR code near the front desk to hear opening narration from Anthony, then Watkins, as they guide you through the House of Melo. “You’re not walking into a museum,” Watkins explains near the beginning, “you’re stepping inside of Melo’s story, a Baltimore story.” Keep your headphones on.

Soundtrack of Life
Where you would otherwise find typical audio and visual materials behind the computers, take in a bright display of 41 albums that feature Anthony’s favorite songs. It’s a soundtrack to his life. Rick Ross, Notorious B.I.G., Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar, Jay-Z, and Drake are heavily featured. “Hip-hop raised me, but I pulled from R&B, reggae, even my mom’s cleaning-day records,” the exhibit label reads. Scan a QR code for access to custom playlists, one with explicit lyrics and the other clean.

Cover Stories
We’re partial to magazines around here, so, naturally, this is our favorite part. The “periodicals” section of the Central Library has been turned into a vestibule lined with giant archived covers that featured Anthony, including three Sports Illustrated and seven SLAM issues. “Each of these covers is proof the grind was working,” Anthony’s commentary reads. “They weren’t just my milestones—they represented my family, my city, my story coming to life.”

The Draft Suit
There’s a lot of Anthony memorabilia to peruse, but one item stands out: his 2003 NBA Draft suit fitted on a mannequin. It’s a story itself. The suit was notoriously ill-fitting on draft night—a product of early-2000s baggy era fashion—and it didn’t particularly age well, either. One of the most talented draft classes ever—including LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh—became mocked in NBA circles for their fashion choices. All these years later, the baggy pants of Anthony’s 5XL suit are still…big.

The Back Rooms
Tucked near the encyclopedias—and beyond a bank of “Stay Me7o” memorabilia highlighting Anthony’s Olympic accomplishments, his Top 10 all-time NBA scorer feat, and business interests—are two standalone classrooms that have been transformed. One is a “locker room” that marks each stage of Anthony’s basketball career, and the other a “boardroom” with references to Anthony’s past and present off-court ventures.

One very cool display on the boardroom wall shows early Nike sketches for one of Anthony’s custom Jordan brand basketball sneakers. “We’re curious about what you’d like to see done in Liquid Chrome?” a note on one sketch reads. Another annotation from 2012: “We will design an artful way to tell your 10 years of life with the Jordan Brand.”

By that point, Anthony had been working with Nike for nearly a decade, having signed with Michael Jordan’s brand in the summer of 2003 before the NBA draft. Anthony became the brand’s first signature athlete with his name on a shoe, accomplishing what nearly every basketball-playing teenager in America sought: to pick up the NBA superstardom mantle from Jordan.

That path was forged in Baltimore, from the summer of 1992 when he arrived from Brooklyn through the frequent weekends now when Anthony says he visits the place he calls home.

What better place to document that full-circle journey than the city’s anchor library?

Last fall, Army veteran Aaron Baca and a group of coaches with the Timonium-based Catch A Lift Fund nonprofit decided to make their annual retreat a visit to Arlington National Cemetery.

There, they visited the gravesite of Christopher J. Coffland, a Gilman alum killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan in 2009 at 44, and the man who inspired their organization. They spoke about Coffland’s big personality and free spirit, the military service he signed up for at a later age than most, his athletic career (captain of the Washington & Lee football and lacrosse teams, a pro football stint in Finland, then coaching in Australia and Germany), and his legacy.

“We reflected,” says Baca, Catch A Lift’s head coach. Then they signed a football as a team and placed it at Coffland’s white marble headstone.

Catch A Lift was founded in 2010 by Coffland’s grieving older sister, Lynn, and niece, Jess.

“I’m going to catch a lift,” Chris Coffland would famously say to his friends and family when he went to work out. Chris was dedicated to his physical fitness, knowing it led to strong mental health, wherever he was.

“He worked out because he believed it changed your life,” says Lynn, pictured above. And for the past 15 years, Catch A Lift has provided more than 15,000 combat-injured, post-9/11 veterans a chance to do just that.

Each year, more than a dozen coaches—all veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan deployments—lead eight-week virtual trainings with personalized fitness, wellness, and nutrition programming for hundreds of vets throughout the country. The participants can then have access to free at-home workout equipment or a one-year gym membership, as long as they log at least 180 minutes of movement weekly.

Some have lost limbs and are now competitive adaptive athletes, like double-amputee U.S. Army veteran Jason Smith, who won six gold medals at the 2025 Warrior Games in Colorado. Many have PTSD, anxiety, or depression, and others, like Baca, have shrapnel in their body from a long-ago mortar attack.

They face “holistic” needs, Lynn says, often unmet by the Department of Veterans Affairs, another reason for the organization’s creation. “We want them to be in charge of their health for the long term,” she says, adding that the average participant loses 25 to 100 pounds their first year, dropping two to 35 medications daily.

Catch A Lift operates through donations and corporate sponsorships. It employs six full-time and 18 part-time staff and hosts five fundraisers nationwide each year. This year’s local event was on October 5 at Onelife Fitness in Hunt Valley, where veterans led a family-friendly, boot-camp-style workout.

A good sweat for a life-changing cause, just as Chris Coffland believed possible.

Scottie Scheffler knew what to do when the ball was in the rough. With a swipe of a club, the dimpled sphere plopped onto the 17th green and kept rolling downhill toward the hole cut just a few feet from the water.

As the ball made its final revolution and dropped in, the crowd at Caves Valley Golf Club went into a frenzy. They saw exactly what they wanted—an unforgettable memory in Baltimore, delivered by the world’s best men’s golfer in a clutch moment.

Scheffler made an 82-foot chip-in for birdie on the tough par-three, giving him a two-shot lead with one hole to go over Scotland’s Robert MacIntyre in the BMW Championship at the hilly, hot Caves Valley club in Owings Mills.

“It was a chip we practiced,” Scheffler said. “I knew how fast it was, and basically it was just trying to get it on the green. It was kind of a bowl pin back there to where everything funnels towards it. It came out how we wanted, then it started breaking and it started looking better and better. It was definitely nice to see that one go in.”

Afterward, as MacIntyre prepared to attempt a chip in from the rough to keep pace, chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” broke out among the dedicated golf fans, alluding to the upcoming Ryder Cup where Scheffler and the U.S. will play against Team Europe, of which MacIntyre is a part.

MacIntyre didn’t convert, and Scheffler parred the long par-4 18th to close a round of 67. He finished the tournament at 15-under to take the title while looking like the closest thing golf has seen to Tiger Woods.

With the victory, the 18th of his career, the 29-year-old Scheffler became the first player since Woods to win at least five times on the PGA Tour in consecutive years.

MacIntyre started the day with a four-shot edge, but by the end of the fifth hole—with three bogeys—he lost it. Meanwhile, Scheffler was steadier and took the lead with a birdie on the par-three 7th. Things seemed inevitable from there.

“Bob gave me a couple gifts early in the round,” Scheffler said. “I went from being four back to we were standing on the third tee, and I’m only one back, and all of a sudden, it’s game on now. No more cushy lead. It’s time to go get it.”

He did, though it wasn’t easy on what he said was a firm course, especially on the greens late in the day. “There gets to be a few spike marks, and they got really fast out there,” Scheffler said. “There’s a lot of slope. They were pretty challenging.”

After three-putting the 14th hole, Scheffler’s lead, which had grown, fell back to one. Then, his tee shot landed in a bunker right off the fairway. MacIntyre hit his second shot to about seven feet, then Scheffler bettered him with an 8-iron that rolled closer to the hole.

That set the stage for more drama and the second largest comeback win of Scheffler’s career.

Then came a trophy presentation, celebration with his family, many photos (with Gov. Wes Moore, BMW representatives, Caves Valley chairman Steve Fader, and perhaps the most photographed baby of all time, Scheffler’s son, Bennett), and a press conference as a thunderstorm arrived.

Despite everything, the tall Texan looked composed, apart from the perspiration on his Nike clothes.

He came, saw, and conquered.

In the first two rounds, Scheffler and another golf superstar, Rory McIlroy, played together with crowds five and six rows deep. It resembled the BMW Championship at Caves Valley four years ago, when a larger, rowdier crowd followed Bryson DeChambeau and Patrick Cantlay as they battled for the title, ultimately decided in a six-hole playoff won by Cantlay.

After walking tens of thousands of steps up and down the Caves Valley hills in uncomfortable heat on Saturday, Scheffler was asked to assess his third round of 67. “I was definitely quite warm,” he deadpanned, much like the several one-liners he delivered in a cameo in the recently debuted Adam Sandler movie Happy Gilmore 2.

A day later on Sunday, after sweating for four-plus hours all over again, Scheffler authored a win for Baltimore to enjoy.

A Meaningful Hole-in-One for Akshay Bhatia

Until Scheffler’s chip-in, the tournament’s highlight was Akshay Bhatia’s hole-in-one at the 17th hole on Saturday afternoon.

(I was next to the 8th green, watching Cantlay and Shane Lowry play. When I heard echoes from down a hill and through the trees, I knew something impressive had happened elsewhere.)

You will notice that Bhatia’s caddie, John Limanti, looked more excited than Bhatia. He pointed to the BMW iX M70 electric car parked to the left of the tee box.

If a player made an ace on the 17th hole during the tournament, they would win that car.

Limanti was really excited, as a replay from the NBC broadcast showed, because he thought he might be getting it as a gift from his boss, Bhatia. Meanwhile, Bhatia was processing what had just happened.

“My caddie is pointing at the car, and I don’t even know what to do,” Bhatia said. “I couldn’t feel my body. Even going to 18 tee was pretty nuts, how much adrenaline I had.”

About 30 minutes later, after a four-under round and feeling back in his body, he explained: “It was a perfect 5-iron.” The skinny, glasses-wearing left-hander hit a draw into a left-to-right wind across the downhill par-three with water right, a bunker left (that Scheffler hit into on Sunday), and temporary grandstands back and left of the green.

“That’s a hole where you’re trying to hit it from the front of the green to back of the green,” Bhatia said. “I told myself, ‘Just don’t be afraid to hit it. Execute it.’ Because it’s easy to bail out there. And when that golf ball goes in, it was the craziest thing in the world.”

It was the sixth hole-in-one in the 23-year-old Northern California native’s life, but his first on the PGA Tour. He also needed a good result to advance in the Top 30 of the FedEx Cup playoffs to qualify for next week’s Tour Championship at East Lake in Atlanta. Making up two shots on one hole helped, and when it was all over Sunday night, Bhatia was in the tour’s final event.

He said it’s hard to beat his first hole-in-one, when he was 11 with a 7-wood at Pinehurst No. 2 in North Carolina. But he acknowledged Saturday’s ace was his most “meaningful” in a competitive sense. For his family, too. His sister could use the car.

“I was going to give it to my caddie, obviously, but my older sister has two kids. One of her kids is disabled, and their car is not in great working form. I figured they need it a lot more than I do,” he said. “Even though I don’t get to see them much, they were excited and I’m very excited. It makes me feel good about that decision.”

The hole-in-one has also already benefited the Evans Scholars caddie program, which receives all BMW Championship proceeds and has sent more than 4,000 caddies to college. A full, four-year scholarship worth $125,000 will be awarded to an Evans Scholar in Bhatia’s name early next year.

It is uncertain who will receive the scholarship, but someone will be pleased. Bhatia will too. “It warms my heart that a golf shot I hit can help a kid get a full scholarship,” he said.

Maryland’s Denny McCarthy Feels the Hometown Love, But Comes Up Short

As he walked from the fan-lined 11th green on Saturday afternoon, carrying an even par score, someone yelled at Denny McCarthy from the top of the stands: “Maryland’s finest. Finish strong.” Another screamed: “Hey Denny, Wahoowa,” referencing his alma mater, the University of Virginia. On the trail to the 12th tee, a woman goaded McCarthy into slapping her hand, and she was thrilled with the acknowledgment.

The 32-year-old McCarthy—Maryland’s own from Takoma Park in Montgomery County—had home region support, which he appreciated, but it wasn’t enough to power him to the top of the leaderboard.

McCarthy finished 3-over par and tied for 28th. “It’s always fun to play in front of a home crowd,” he said Sunday after his final round. “It wasn’t the result I was looking for this week.”

McCarthy grinded through the first two-and-a-half rounds before unraveling on the back nine of Saturday’s third round. He double bogeyed the 15th and tripled the 16th by taking four shots to land his ball safely on the elevated green. “I shot myself in the foot,” he said.

On the 16th, with his second shot on the par-five in the rough short left of the green, his first three attempts failed to hold the putting surface. The first rolled back toward him into the fairway, and the second and third landed, then tumbled back toward his feet. He finally chipped one past the hole and putted in for an 8.

On Saturday night, he thought about it as he and his wife, Samantha, headed from their hotel, The Sagamore Pendry in Fells Point, for dinner across the street at Thames Street Oyster House.

By the time they finished the meal, McCarthy felt a little better about the earlier course events. “We had a bunch of good things, so that put me in a better mood,” he said.

But he wasn’t completely over making a “mess of 15 and 16” hours earlier.

He still wasn’t even after he chipped in from the fairway for eagle on the same 16th hole during a 2-under final round. “It was nice to just take one shot and put it in the hole from there,” he said. “It would have been useful yesterday.”

For the fourth straight year, McCarthy’s season will end with the BMW Championship. His performance wasn’t enough to place in the Top 30 in the FedEx Cup playoffs and make the Tour Championship.

“Kind of disappointing to end up in this kind of spot for the third or fourth year in a row,” McCarthy said, but he relished the chance to have some hometown support.

“It was a really good experience. Anytime you can play in front of a home crowd, it’s a lot of fun. It was really hot this week, and the support I had, the amount of people I had coming out and sticking it out with me in the heat, I don’t know if I would come out and walk four rounds in this heat and watch someone play golf, so the amount of people that came out to do that for me was really special.”

Three years ago, on a summer day, Kevin Flowers arrived at the Baltimore Country Club unsure of what to expect. Growing up in “West Baltimore, 21229,” he says, proudly, Flowers knew little about golf, or the job he agreed to try as a caddy—carrying golfers’ bags, spotting balls, and helping determine the best direction and speed of their putts on the private 36-hole course north of the city.

“I was nervous,” recalls Flowers, pictured above, “I was fidgety, making minor mistakes, but eventually adjusted.”

Members helped, he said, especially a mentor, John Leahy, who was a trustee at Loyola Blakefield, Flowers’ school, who told the then-freshman about the job, knowing full well where it could lead.

Flowers later called Leahy to inquire more. And he’s glad he did, as it opened up more doors than he could’ve imagined.

On a sunny weekend this April, Flowers visited College Park to get acquainted with another new place and meet his future classmates at the University of Maryland—all fellow caddies on full-ride scholarships, several from Baltimore. They had lunch together, played pool, and toured the campus.

They were all there thanks to the nationwide Evans Scholarship, awarded yearly to high-achieving caddies with good grades and character, as well as financial need, who’ve worked 100 rounds.

Caddying hours are long and physically demanding—carrying two 25-pound bags over miles of hills for four-plus hours—and the environment takes many out of their comfort zone. Some, like Flowers, had never previously picked up a golf club.

“It was hard, but I did it,” says Flowers, who managed to log those caddy hours despite a part-time job at a retirement home, a keen interest in taekwondo, and not having a driver’s license.

The Evans Scholars Foundation, founded in 1930 by Chick Evans, a former caddie and U.S. amateur player, has sent more than 12,000 kids to college at no cost, and 24 universities have affiliated “Evans Houses,” where recipients live.

Four years ago, the program expanded to Baltimore when the annual BMW Championship attracted more than 100,000 people over four days to Caves Valley Golf Club. All proceeds from the tournament—$5.6 million in 2021—help fund caddy scholarships. A premier PGA Tour event, the BMW returns to Owings Mills from August 12-17.

Varada Maulkhan of Catonsville graduated from UMD this spring—an inaugural member of the Evans class there. In April, she greeted the newest members, including Flowers, who plans to major in kinesiology.

“It’s a life-changing opportunity,” says Maulkhan, who wants to become a teacher. “I’ve met so many people over the years who…want to do something in life, but they just cannot financially do it.”

Flowers, raised primarily by his father, says he would’ve felt the financial burden without the opportunity he seized: “I’m forever grateful.”

Many people first saw Baltimore City Fire Department Chief James Wallace in the predawn of March 26, 2024, delivering the first information about the Key Bridge collapse.

“Everybody ready,” Wallace said to reporters at a staging area in the westbound lanes of Fort Armistead Road in Hawkins Point. Wearing a navy blue BCFD baseball hat, he then introduced himself and other officials, and began detailing what he knew.

Seven months into the job, Wallace—a 33-year fire department veteran—was facing a monumental situation. And though far from the first time, this was different.

As he spoke, divers were in the water searching for possible survivors, though they didn’t know how many. Sonar detected submerged vehicles. Other local and state resources were converging on the scene. Wallace appeared calm while addressing the media and clearly answering questions about what happened, though the situation’s unnerving scope was on the Bel Air native’s mind.

“The Key Bridge was difficult because it was the Key Bridge,” Wallace says nearly a year later, sitting at a conference table at the department’s executive headquarters downtown.

The truth is, Wallace’s job isn’t to fixate on the morning that the Key Bridge went down, though nobody around Baltimore will ever forget it. Emergencies happen all the time in different forms. His department gets some 500 calls per day, including EMS requests, with which he’s intimately familiar. He began his career as a paramedic, and that experience convinced him, upon his hire in 2023, to redesign the department’s response to such calls without exhausting its staff.

Mainly, though, Wallace assumed leadership of the department with a mandate to revamp both operations and culture after another tragedy.

On January 24, 2022, a fire collapsed a vacant rowhome at 205 South Stricker Street, killing three firefighters who were trapped inside—Lieutenant Paul Butrim and Acting Lieutenant Kelsey Sadler, each with at least 15 years of experience, as well as 30-year-old paramedic Kenneth Antonio Lacayo. It also left six-year veteran John McMaster critically injured.

It was the department’s most tragic incident since 1955. A lawsuit from McMaster and the families of the deceased, refiled in January against the mayor’s office and the city council, alleges negligence. It claims that the city was at fault for ceasing its identification of vacant buildings as Code X-Ray—or “unsafe” locations, marked with red-and-white placards warning firefighters not to enter—without firefighters’ knowledge.

A pilot program for Code X-Ray started in late 2010, but needed additional funding by spring 2011, and it’s unclear how long the initiative was active. At least 445 vacant rowhomes caught fire from 2017 to 2022, more than half in West and Southwest Baltimore. McMaster and the families of those killed at the Stricker Street fire, a few blocks west of the B&O Railroad Museum, say the firefighters didn’t know they were entering an empty, fragile building—let alone that a partial collapse at the same location had already injured firefighters—and thus they unnecessarily risked their lives.

In December 2022, previous BCFD chief Niles Ford resigned after the 314-page city report on the Sticker Street incident. On October 5, 2023, Wallace, acting director of the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management, was sworn in as chief.

Exactly two weeks later, a fire at a residence on Linden Street in northwest Baltimore killed two more firefighters—31-year-old Rodney W. Pitts III, who was in his third month on the job, and 26-year-old Dillon Rinaldo—as well as injured three others in what was later ruled an accidental blaze.

After that, Wallace says he began making immediate changes to evaluate new fire academy graduates and supervisors.

Still, the challenges and stresses of the job are ever-present despite the best intentions. In May, the department mourned two more on-duty deaths. Charles Mudra, a veteran emergency vehicle driver, died after suffering a medical issue during a skills assessment session at the Fire Academy on May 16. Lt. Mark Dranbauer was critically injured after suffering a medical emergency while approximately 30 to 40 feet up a ladder at a rowhome fire on West Saratoga Street on May 12. He passed away five days later. 

On the day we spoke with Wallace in March, a four-alarm fire broke out around 3:40 a.m. in the 2200 block of North Fulton Street in West Baltimore, and the fire spread to 15 other buildings in a wind-driven blaze. At least nine residents from four rowhomes were displaced. Other vacant structures, a corner store, and a church were impacted.

Once again, Wallace was on scene, delivering another sobering update to the media before sunrise.

“The challenge was that one of the exposures [a building adjacent to a source of fire] was what we know as a Code X building, so that’s a no-entry for us,” Wallace said as he briefed reporters amid flashing emergency-vehicle lights in darkness.

About 12 hours later, with a huge mug of coffee within his grasp, Wallace is still on the job, outlining steps he’s been implementing to create a better fire department.

During one question, he looks at his phone and pauses. “I’m listening, I’m just checking. That’s in South Baltimore, okay,” he says, taking a deep breath. “I know right away when there’s something.”

He’s talking about new fires in the city, and the department putting them out. But as Wallace explains, his job entails even more responsibility than that.

Where are you from originally and how did you start with the department?
I grew up in Harford County. I got hired as a paramedic in 1990 and did all my time downtown on Lombard and Eutaw Streets [at Steadman Station]. I love downtown—the challenges, the call volume. I’m still a paramedic to this day. But I decided to demote to firefighter, which changed the trajectory of my career, and I worked my way up. I would say to people, where else in a career can you see the fruits of your efforts more so than saving a life? I’ve been Hazmat coordinator for the city. I’ve been the chief of special operations, shift commander, emergency manager, and here I am.

You’re two-and-a-half years into the job. What have you focused on since becoming chief?
What I’ve tried to do here is make us a lot more innovative. We’re evolving as a department to be really data-driven. It shapes not only who we are, but the service that we provide. We look at call types, volume, day of the week, time of day, month of the year. We try to analyze how those factors contribute to how we perform.

As a department, we have always been very mission-driven. Good fire departments know how to fight fire, but I think better ones also know how to take care of their people…how they function and their cognitive ability in very stressful situations. A lot of the training that we do now focuses on the mind. Especially our decision-makers, because if they’re not functioning properly mentally, we will never gain control of a fireground.

How do you measure that? How do you analyze how somebody’s doing mentally in a chaotic situation?
We’ve brought in different training opportunities. We’ve done a lot of work with members of the FDNY, who have a program called Leadership Under Fire. It’s that higher level mental training and conditioning that really helps you. We put people through the Fire Academy where we develop physical agility—you hear all about that. But where is that mental agility? We now have training designed to really address the mental demands. We’ve seen a lot of very positive results.

We’ve suffered a lot of losses over the past few years, and we’ve really had to take a look at who we need to be to prevent that in the future. There’s been a lot of operational changes, tactically speaking, with how we respond to certain situations.

People have heard a lot about our Code X program. For us, a Code X means “no go” for interior firefighting. The only exception is if we have very credible information that there may be someone trapped inside and it appears as though there could be a chance that they’re alive. When we do our smoke alarm installs, we’re looking for those buildings that, as they stand on a warm sunny day, appear to be extraordinarily dangerous, aka in a condition where there may be imminent collapse. You take that situation, you add fire to it, and it expedites the rate at which that building will collapse.

Those go into our fire records system, and then they’re exported into our computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system. When we get a call for a particular address, the dispatchers bring it up in the CAD system, and it flashes if it’s a Code X. When it’s dispatched, our people are told Code X on the dispatch, and they’re told it’s a Code X while en route.

That takes us back to that mental function piece. You’re speeding towards a fire. You want to get in there, you want to make the rescue, you want to stop the fire. But early on, upon dispatch, we put that it’s a Code X building right up front. This is a very dangerous building that you’re en route to, so we attempt to frame that mentally for our personnel.

How are the Code X buildings physically labeled now? I recall in 2022, after the Stricker Street fire, red signs were put on doors.
Yes, a red placard, like a red diamond. And it’s a challenge because people rip those things off. That’s why it’s so essential to have that CAD program and real-time credible data that is coming from either us or the Department of Housing & Community Development [DHCD]. Their data comes to us. Our data goes to them. That sharing is very crucial among agencies, especially in these times, because firefighting has changed. Furniture and [other household items] are way more petroleum-based than what they used to be. They burn hotter and quicker.

What are the main causes of fires in the city?
The three top causes of accidental fires are probably falling asleep with a cigarette, cooking, and creative heating in your house. We do a lot of campaigning on cooking safety and portable space heaters. Kerosene heaters are illegal in the city, but we get the plug-in ceramic heaters and small space heaters. They need to be three feet away from anything combustible, more if you can get it. We talk a lot about extension cord use and power strip use, too.

Unfortunately, vacant housing is something a lot of outsiders associate with Baltimore City. What does fighting fires in these buildings signify to you?
It’s just one of many challenges. As the world evolves, fire departments have to evolve with it. And that’s what we’re doing here. Whether it be in the industrial world, an urban environment, a wildland-urban interface environment. You just saw it on the West Coast—you have a fire up in the hills and it comes all the way down, it runs through the Palisades, and it goes right to the ocean. We’re probably more of an “all hazards” department now. We have a harbor, we have rail, we have passenger rail, we have an airport fairly close by. There’s significant industry. We’re a densely populated city, so we’ve got to evolve with our surroundings.

You were one of the first people speaking to the public following the collapse of the Key Bridge. What’s your training for that situation? What were you thinking going into that?
In a press conference setting, or on incidents of a significant size, I really try to focus on one statement that keeps my mind straight: Command the facts. Everything else is noise. I try to ask myself, what do I know? What do I think I know? And what do I need to know? Then, as I’m evaluating an incident, and this is used a lot, it’s called a CAN report: What are the current conditions? What are the actions that have been taken? And what are our needs? That’s how I try to keep myself organized.

The other thing I’ll tell you is, and I very much believe in this, when an incident moves fast, your heart has to beat slow. You cannot let the incident run away with you. Because if you get excited, your heart’s pounding, you’re moving fast, you’re going to become part of the incident. That’s why it’s so crucial that we train. It takes you back to some of the training that we’re doing now because that’s what we’re teaching our people to do—really evaluate yourself. Sometimes it’s hard to get your mind in the right place with certain things.

How did that morning start for you?
I got a phone call from the captain working in our dispatch center. Right away she said, “Are you awake?” Of course, the simple answer is, “Well, I answered my phone.” Then she said, “No, I need you to make sure that you’re not dreaming what I’m about to tell you.” …While I was talking to her, our first units were arriving there and they made the confirmation that the bridge, in fact, had collapsed. It was our Engine 57 that had gone up on the beltway and reached that point where the police had stopped the traffic and the bridge in front of them was gone.

Then, the primary phone call that I made, the most important, was to the mayor. I told him the same thing. His reaction was like mine, “Wait, what?” I said this is reliable intel, something has hit that bridge and it’s down and we have people in water.

When I got there, I went to the boat launch [at Fort Armistead Park] right down the water’s edge. Because when we would get water rescues down there, that’s where we launch our zodiac boats. It was just an empty skyline. I can’t even tell you how I felt. You were just stunned that that bridge was laying on top of that ship, and it was in the water.

Your team initially led the rescue effort. How long was that the case before it became a before a unified command situation?
Some of that unified command started to stand up early day one over on the other side of the river at the MTA building. We ran in rescue mode all day. We had everything we needed at our fingertips—Secretary [of Transportation Pete Buttigieg came out the first day and came right over to me, as well as the governor and the mayor, and said, “Whatever you need, just tell us. We’ll get it.” We had all the resources we needed, but it was becoming a very large incident. By five o’clock, day two, it had transitioned into a state operation.

In emergency services, incidents always begin at the lowest level, and they’ll escalate up through state and federal level, but eventually they’ve come right back down to local government. As we moved to beyond rescue, it became recovery. But then it evolved. They started looking at the criminal side, the legal side, the support for the family side, support for the industry and infrastructure around here. There’s a lot to take in on something like that.

The fire department could be viewed differently among the community than the police department, where there’s a certain tension. But it seems like you have an opportunity to connect with people in a positive way.
We’re in the process of developing a program where we do a lot of our community engagement together. You’re going to see us very soon doing our weekend neighborhood safety walks with the police. When we go out on Saturdays and really do our heavy sweeps for smoke alarm installs, we’re looking for the Code X’s, the police are now going to be with us. And when we engage residents in conversation, we’ve offered an opportunity for residents to now talk to both police and fire about their concerns. It’s a big win-win situation.

How are you using technology to interact with residents?
We now champion a 3-1-1 app to report illegally occupied vacant dwellings, so [the city] can go out, offer services, try to get people into shelters and things like that. My assistant-chief put it together this year. We do a lot of smoke alarm installs. City residents can call 3-1-1 and request a smoke alarm installation and we’ll be out there within two hours [for free]. If you have other smoke alarms in your house, we’ll check the batteries and will replace those if needed as well.

Where do you recruit new firefighters? What are those efforts like?
Up until right now, they would advertise out locally. I don’t know how they would reach outside of the city, but there were times when written tests would be given up at the Convention Center. You’d have thousands of people show up. Then you transition into other phases—physical agility testing, a physical, interviews and things like that.

Now, we have a company that we’ve contracted with that does our advertising nationwide. Once I get a list of candidates, we’re going to start doing physical agility testing and face-to-face interviews on the same day. If you succeed in both, we’re waiting on you with a list of dates where you can go get your physical. We want it to be a quick turnaround. We’ve taken probably a six- or seven-month process and hopefully compressed it into about a month or two. The department’s growing, and we’ve got like 70 in the academy right now.

Have you made any changes in the academy after the Sticker Street and Linden Heights incidents?
In our academy, [prospects] used to go through about nine months of training. After that, they would be put in the field. We changed this after the Linden Heights incident. Now when they come out, they’re assigned to do 10 shifts in the field under direct supervision. As an example, you’re assigned to Engine 5 in Fells Point. You will go to that station, and for five 24-hour shifts, you will ride on a shift with me, and you’re on an engine, a pumper, and you’re attacking fire, and I’m evaluating you. After those five shifts, we’re going to have you ride on the opposite discipline, which is Truck 3 in Fells Point. Now you’re going to do ladder truck work. You’re going to ventilate buildings, climb ladders, search and rescue. You’ll do that for five shifts.

At the end of that time frame, I, as the engine officer, will evaluate you, and the truck officer will evaluate you, but you’re also going to evaluate yourself. How comfortable are you? What have we done? We also do a complete 360-degree evaluation of your first year in the fire department. We take that data, we look, and we say, “Well, we had 20 people that said they weren’t very confident in ladder truck work. So what do we do?”

We adjusted the Fire Academy so that when they come out, they do feel more comfortable. We may need adjustment just as much as a student does, and if we don’t realize it ourselves, we’re destined for failure. [This evaluation] has been a huge tool for this fire department. And that’s something that, again, we’ve done just in over a year.

I heard you’re doing something interesting with predictive modeling and EMS?
We track our call locations and call types, like opioid overdoses. We’ve collected enough data now that we can model the busiest day of the week, the busiest time of day, using historical data. We have 29 EMS transport units in the city under the fire department. We’re about to be fully staffed at 30. Those have either EMTs or paramedics on them. What we’re finding is we’re a very high call-volume fire department. Right now, we are averaging 500 to 520 EMS calls a day.

Wow. A day?
Yeah, a day. But in that, somewhere between 200 to about 230, we actually transport people to the hospital. To go even deeper, we see that 100, 125, 140 are advanced life-support calls, where a paramedic is needed. So we’re attempting to do what we call a chase-car model, which is we’re pulling our highest-level trained paramedics back and replacing them with EMTs, who are a basic life-support provider.

The data shows half of the calls you actually transport, and the other half, EMTs can handle. But we still have those critically ill and injured patients. So, we put our paramedics in twos or threes in a Tahoe or a Suburban that we’ve fully equipped with everything except a stretcher [which will arrive with the ambulance]. Then, we strategically dispatch them to support on critical calls, as opposed to running them around the city and burning them out. This keeps your high-level providers available for your most critical calls, because when you need those clinicians in certain places, you need them right now. We’ve been piloting that program for a little over a year, and we have some very successful data.

It boils down to resource management, but most importantly, it comes down to putting the right clinician at the right place with the right patient at the right time. It’s strategic deployment. It’s not new by any means, but it’s new to our city. Our median response time for that unit is about 7.5 minutes. Almost 87 percent of the calls are high acuity, where we need the paramedics. The data structurally supports the program.

[Editor’s note: In March, the city reported BCFD exceeded its $333 million budget for fiscal 2024 (July 1, 2023 to June 30, 2024) by $33 million, or 10%, due to staffing shortages that have forced employees to work considerable overtime. For instance, David Lunsford, a 21-year BCFD paramedic, took home $358,586 despite his $113,158 salary because of overtime, making him the city’s highest-paid employee in 2024, including the mayor.]

We’ve talked about a lot. Is there anything else you want to mention?
One final thing that I’ll show you is this book [a three-inch-thick, three-ring binder on the conference table between us] that I’ve kept since I came over here on what we’ve done as a fire department to improve. Any order that we put out—policy change, training, recommendation—we now do after-action reports on all our significant [incidents]. I’ll go through at the end of each month and I’ll review it, and ask myself, what did we do this month? What changes did we make? [It began with] one of the internal reports that was done after the Stricker Street incident.

And that fire this morning, there is an after-action report right now being worked on. We will take it from the 9-1-1 call till the time the last unit leaves. We will do a 360-degree evaluation of ourselves. We’ll call out what we did wrong and we’ll call out what we did right.

A lot of things were being worked on since I’ve been here, but a lot has changed since I’ve gotten here. I can’t take credit for everything and never would, but it has to continue. There may be a day when I hand this to the next person and say this was mine, it’s now yours.

After what became Brandon Hyde’s final game as Orioles manager on Friday night at Camden Yards—a befuddling and disheartening 4-3 loss to the Washington Nationals—he didn’t have a clear answer for what happened. 

“Kind of disbelief, honestly,” Hyde said in the O’s media room, beneath the seats behind home plate.

O’s closer Félix Bautista, a reliable fan-favorite, ultimately gave the game away with a mental error in the ninth inning. While covering first base on a ground ball, Bautista took a late throw from Ryan Mountcastle, then failed to remember another runner, the Nationals’ José Tena, who rounded third and scored the go-ahead run unimpeded. 

The Orioles’ offense scored three runs on 14 hits and left 15 runners on base, the latest shining example of a common trait—failing in the clutch—that has plagued the team since mid-2024, and in two consecutive winless postseasons. 

By Friday night, the O’s owned a 15-28 record due to mounting injuries, faltering starting pitching, and a mix of unreliable hitting and shaky defense. This was their worst record at this point since 2021, early in the organizational rebuild guided by Hyde and general manger Mike Elias.

The 2025 early-season performance recently turned from a struggle into a freefall. Losing 10 of their last 12 games diminished the O’s slim postseason chances less than two months into a year that was expected to result in a third straight playoff appearance. 

“I think we have the best talent in baseball. I think you can go all the way,” O’s owner David Rubenstein told the team after winning the home opener at Camden Yards in April, 8-5 over Boston. The team’s record was 3-2 after splitting a series in Toronto, but Opening Day in Baltimore was the last time they’ve been above .500 this season. 

After recent offensive performances (or more accurately, lack therof), Hyde said players were “pressing” and lamented production against left-handed pitching, similar to remarks he made toward the end of last season. At other times, Hyde attributed the poor performance to “inexperience,” though with former prospects like Gunnar Henderson and Adley Rutschman more seasoned, that explanation seemed hard to accept. On other occasions, the O’s bullpen faltered despite effective starters and enough runs from its offense. The ugliness snowballed quickly.

After Friday’s loss, Hyde didn’t know what to say and didn’t seem motivated to say it even if he did—resigned to the club’s plight. “We’ve addressed a lot of things this year,” Hyde said when asked if he’d have a message for the team in the clubhouse. “If you continue to address, it’s going to fall silent at times. There’s been a lot of addressing. I’m sure we’re going to talk about some things. I don’t know if tonight or tomorrow is the right time—I think timing is important—because there are a lot of people that are upset in there right now.” 

Hyde and the players never had that talk. On Saturday morning, GM Mike Elias fired him. And it was Elias, instead, who addressed the team at noon in the clubhouse and announced a “difficult decision” in a brief gathering.

A few hours later, the O’s lost again to Washington, 10-6, in interim manager and former third-base coach Tony Mansolino’s first game in charge, where starting pitcher Kyle Gibson allowed six runs in the first inning. (The O’s cut Gibson on Sunday.) On Sunday, the O’s lost again. The team’s best starter, Zach Eflin, gave up eight runs and 10 hits in 5 1/3 innings of a 10-4 defeat.

In one weekend of the post-Hyde era, not much has changed—aside from the team’s first six-game losing streak since 2022, before Rutschman, the former No. 1 pick, made his debut—which was the catalyst for altering the franchise’s direction. Until lately. 

Why now? 

When the O’s announcement relieving Hyde and assistant coach Tim Cossins—Hyde’s confidant—arrived in my inbox at 12:08 p.m. on Saturday, the timing surprised me. The pre-Preakness news had some significance, too. Three years ago, the O’s brought up Rutschman on the third Saturday in May for his MLB debut. And exactly three years later, they fired the manager who guided him and other Birds through a yearslong rebuilding project that resulted in 275 wins from 2022-24, including 101 in an A.L. division-title winning 2023.

Just weeks ago, Elias publicly supported his manager and took “responsibility” for the disastrous season start. Some took the message as Elias acknowledging he didn’t do enough to upgrade the roster in the offseason, particularly while trying to replace ace Corbin Burnes, who left for Arizona in free agency.

Elias signed Japanese veteran Tomoyuki Sugano (who has been very good) and 41-year-old Charlie Morton (not so good) to one-year contracts and brought back Gibson for depth in March, after front-end starter Grayson Rodriguez went down in spring training with an elbow injury. Eflin began the year as the O’s No. 1, but missed several weeks with a back muscle injury. He was one of 14 players to go on the injured list, something that’s hard for any team to overcome in less than two months. 

Last week, before a game against the Los Angeles Angels, Hyde said he appreciated Elias’ public support and was focused on winning with this team. However, this last stretch of baseball became too much for Elias and the front office to ignore. 

“As the head of baseball operations, the poor start to our season is ultimately my responsibility,” Elias said in a statement. “Part of that responsibility is pursuing difficult changes to set a different course for the future.” 

Said Rubenstein: “As is sometimes the case in baseball, change becomes necessary, and we believe this is one of those moments.” 

On Friday night, amid a relatively sparse crowd, Rubenstein and co-owner Mike Arougheti witnessed the defeat from the front row firsthand. A day earlier, Rubenstein was at an investment conference at Baltimore Center Stage after leaving a 4-0 home loss to the Minnesota Twins early.  “I was at the game a little while ago. They lost,” Rubenstein said. “I thought if I left the game, maybe they’d do better. They didn’t do better. It’s great when you win and it’s not so great when you lose.” 

For a team that prided itself on being data-driven and scrupulously process-oriented, all the losing was as surprising as it was upsetting. Elias acknowledged that. Players did, as well.

“Losing sucks. Nobody here is having a good time,” Ryan O’Hearn, the leading veteran voice in the clubhouse, said after Thursday’s game. “I’m as frustrated as anybody,” Hyde said before the first pitch Friday. And nobody seemed to have solutions nor answers to relevant questions, like why so many players have failed with runners in scoring position, and what to do about poor pitching digging the O’s into a hole early in many games. 

Angst spilled out in strange, unproductive ways. “Come on, Charlie Morton. Need you,” Hyde said, almost pleadingly, of the next day’s starter ahead of a mid-April game against Cincinnati with the O’s bullpen taxed. Next came the most embarrassing defeat of the year. On Easter, the O’s lost 24-2 to the Reds. Morton, pegged as a reliable starter at season’s start, allowed seven runs in 2 1/3 innings and has since been demoted to the bullpen. 

But firing Hyde was more than a reaction to the bad moments this season. It stretches back to the postseason exits. Vocal critics on social media wanted the manager fired after a second-straight postseason without a win in five games. Second-guessing lineup and bullpen decisions is warranted, but Elias stuck with Hyde this offseason.

However, in the interest of change and a sign of things to come, Hyde’s longtime assistant Fredi González was let go as part of an assistant-coach shakeup. Notably, Buck Britton, the Triple-A manager for many O’s prospects-turned-major-leaguers, was added to the staff. The hitting coaches changed, too. Robinson Chirinos, the former O’s catcher who played for Hyde and helped groom Rutschman as a rookie, replaced González as bench coach. 

In an interview Saturday with MLB Network Radio, González said Hyde “got set up, somehow, and he’s got to pay the price for it. It’s a shame…They go through a bad start, and he’s got to take the blame for it.” 

González spoke to Hyde. “He was fine. He was professional. I told him, ‘Welcome to the club. You’re a manager who’s been fired,’” said González, who has been let go twice. But “I thought he was going to be safe when Mike came out and said, ‘This is not his fault. This is my fault. I put together a roster that wasn’t right.’”

So, what’s the message behind this move? “The only thing I could think about is, the players see it, the locker room… Every time you lose a game, you’re waiting for the shoe to drop,” González said. “You’re waiting for somebody to come in and say, ‘We’re getting rid of two coaches. We’re getting rid of the manager.’ So maybe… let the guys breathe a little bit. And go, ‘OK, it happened… We got the manager fired and now let’s just go play baseball’ and see what happens. Because everybody’s expecting it. Everybody’s on Twitter, everybody’s on Facebook, everybody’s on the news, and that’s all you hear, [that you’re] playing bad.” 

What comes next? 

The change might impact the short-term mood. Hyde was never as charismatic as other managers—even when things were going great—nor as verbose with the media as, say, Buck Showalter. But lately, as the losses piled up, Hyde looked and sounded increasingly sour. Hearing another voice may benefit the players.

On his first day on the job, Mansolino—an assistant since 2021 who players describe as a great communicator with high energy—delivered a refreshing message with the goal to get back to .500 quickly. 

But who knows how this will go. There are big uncertainties about the O’s path forward. Hyde’s firing should make the rest of 2025 a judgment on everything, including Elias and the Orioles’ approach for the past six years. 

In pro sports, a general manager’s fate is often tied to the head coach or manager they’ve hired. When the Orioles fired Showalter in 2018 as Peter Angelos’ sons got involved in daily operations, GM Dan Duquette was let go the same day. 

Elias hired Hyde in 2019. It’s uncommon for a GM to last long enough to hire and fire more than one head coach or manager—unless it’s a long-term GM like the Yankees’ Brian Cashman—because team owners typically see responsibility for decisions going from the top down. 

So far, Rubenstein, who took over the Orioles from the Angelos family in 2024, has expressed public confidence in Elias—two years removed from MLB’s Executive of the Year nod—and has marveled at the data-driven approach to building the team.

“I’m still guided by Mike and his judgment,” Rubenstein told us during an interview for our April profile of him. But Rubenstein sounded like he was willing to at least be skeptical of front-office moves, too. “I guess I mostly agree with what they’re doing,” he said, “but I’m trying to learn a lot.”

Rubenstein may not be a baseball expert with decades of front-office experience (he jokes that he peaked as a Little Leaguer), but he’s a billionaire who has managed various business matters. He co-founded The Carlyle Group, a global investment firm with over $450 billion of assets under management. He also values history, avoiding the mistakes of the past, and relentlessly asks questions. He likely knows that chasing MLB’s upper echelon differs from remaining there. (Under Rubenstein, the team has replaced the heads of every major department except baseball operations, and now has fired Hyde, who was only two years removed from being named American League manager of the year.)

Players respected Hyde for any faults he had, and, according to O’Hearn, he “didn’t lose the clubhouse.” So, the focus for accountability now shifts to the players and the roster composition, via the front office. 

Unfortunately, given the O’s depth in the standings, 15 games below breakeven, this is already a “lost season.” They might become sellers at the trading deadline (pending free agents like Cedric Mullins could be on the move). Personnel decisions in the rest of 2025 could now indicate the franchise’s future direction.  

The Orioles aren’t ever going to spend quite like the Yankees (and nobody is like the Dodgers), but they can do better with their resources. Sign better free agents, make better trades, and they could give long-term contracts to young stars, indicating a commitment to a World Series run and attracting fans to the best ballpark in baseball. 

In the meantime, though, a promising rebuild plan with a clear goal and a low bar—to get competitive again—is now in a messy state.  

“It starts with one win,” Henderson said on Sunday. “Get one win and see what happens.” 

It’s a worst-case scenario start to the season, and the finish is up in the air. Hyde’s firing could reboot the next 117 games, keep the O’s young core together, and be a defining experience for many of them. Or it could plunder this year’s team further into a substantial organizational revamp with more questions to follow.  

Boy, how the trajectory of these Orioles has changed—and fast.

On his drive to the stadium Monday morning, Orioles veteran first baseman Ryan O’Hearn noticed things looked different.

In some ways, it felt as if he hadn’t left six months ago. The sights of Camden Yards, the brick B&O Warehouse, the stadium lights, and the route to the clubhouse are all familiar after a few years here.

But in one big way, the scene before 10 a.m. around Oriole Park was distinct. Orange-clad fans were already walking the streets, finding a place to meet friends, having a pregame meal or maybe a (very early) drink. 

It was more than four hours until game time, but it was also Opening Day. “It’s going to be a fun day,” O’Hearn said.

Oh, was he right. 

Later, the “loud environment” notification on my Apple Watch went off twice. The first time was right after a National Guard fighter squadron flyover and as a sellout crowd of about 45,000 fans screamed “O!” during the national anthem, performed by Baltimore native and American Idol contestant Gabby Samone. The second came when O’s closer Felix Bautista (returning after injuring his arm in August 2023) entered the game against the Boston Red Sox with the O’s holding a four-run lead before the bottom of the ninth. 

“That was an amazing atmosphere today. Really cool in the home opener to have that kind of crowd and energy and support,” Orioles manager Brandon Hyde said. “Really cool for Felix to feel the love from Baltimore fans. The energy in the ballpark today was fantastic.”

Somehow, though, the decibel meter on my wrist missed what sounded like the loudest moment: The collective roar after centerfielder Cedric Mullins came to bat with the bases loaded in the eighth inning.

“It was really cool,” he said afterward, “almost to the point where it was dull because I was just trying to zone in.” 

The 30-year-old, now the O’s longest-tenured player, delivered in the situation—hitting a two-RBI single up the middle and off the right foot of Red Sox reliever Cooper Criswell. The fans who had given Mullins a standing ovation during pregame introductions were alive again, and it sounded like a playoff game—if it were one where the Orioles scored multiple runs (unlike last year when they scored just one in two losses at home to the Kansas City Royals in the A.L. wild-card round.) 

On an 80-degree Monday afternoon, the O’s won 8-5, marking a strong start to a potential third-straight postseason run. (Next step: win a game, but there’s time…)

Even without star Gunnar Henderson (out for at least two more games with a muscle strain near his right ribs), the offense is off to a hot start, scoring 12, 9, and 8 in three wins in the first five games of 2025, and against division foes Boston and Toronto to boot. 

During the home opener, outfielder Tyler O’Neill was 4-for-4, first baseman Ryan Mountcastle went 2-for-3 with one RBI, and the Birds scored on a double by Mullins that one-hopped the right-center wall in the first inning—giving them a 4-0 lead before starter Cade Povich threw a pitch.

The hits not only put early numbers on the scoreboard, but helped calm Povich, the O’s second-year pitcher and fifth starter, who likened Monday’s feeling to his first MLB start. 

“They were definitely there,” Povich said of pregame and first inning jitters, but getting the ball with a four-run lead “makes it easy. My job is to keep them from scoring more runs than we have, and when they put up four right away, it definitely makes it pretty easy to go out there and pitch.” 

Povich left with a 4-3 lead after 94 pitches, then the O’s offense scored four runs in the eighth against the Red Sox bullpen.

To start the run, a Mountcastle single put runners on second and third with no outs. Designated hitter Heston Kjerstad’s hit to leftfield scored O’Neill to make it 5-3 before Red Sox reliever Justin Slatin loaded the bases and exited, paving the way for Mullins’ heroics.

Jackson Holliday, playing shortstop in place of Henderson, added another RBI to make it 8-3. Bautista ultimately finished the game, though he allowed two runs in the ninth and had a wild pitch. 

Before the game, thousands of fans wandered Eutaw Street and the concourses. Orange was everywhere. Long lines formed for the centerfield bar deck, at new permanent food stands like Ekiben and Attman’s Deli—and the Coca-Cola fountain machines. “There’s free soda this year,” we overheard. 

That’s not quite the case. This year at Camden Yards, there’s a new 12-item value menu. Among the offerings: You pay $4 for a Coke product and cup, and you can refill it as many times as you want during a game at automated machines.

“The point is making sure there is something for everyone here. This is a personal project of mine,” says team president of business operations Catie Griggs, hired from the Seattle Mariners last July by Orioles owner David Rubenstein. 

The O’s note that with an affordable food menu and $15 bleacher seats in center and right field, a family of four can go to a game, eat, and drink for under $100 at the ballpark, at a time when many fans have accepted overpriced items at sporting events.

Of course, they’d like fans to buy season ticket packages, too, and the team hopes to fill seats and luxury boxes to corporate buyers to boost attendance. About 2.2 million attended games in 2024, the highest since 2015, but still below the 3 million-plus from all but the 1994 strike-shortened season during Camden Yards’ first 10 years.

“If you start with doing the right thing for your fans, it tends to work out,” Griggs told us. “This is the right thing for our fans. We’ve got an incredible ballpark. It’s in the middle of the city. We realize that we’re not necessarily welcoming in as many people. For many of them, price is an obstacle or at least is a concern. So, anything we can do to address that, it’s good for the fans and hopefully it ends up being good for us.” 

Don Rovak, the Orioles’ new chief revenue officer, previously worked for the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons, which launched a similar program in 2017.

“We saw people were enjoying it, coming to more games,” Rovak said, and ultimately spending more on concessions, but “overall, it’s a give back to the fans.” 

That can’t hurt. “We’re here for our fans, truly,” Griggs said. “We want our fans to be here.”

On Opening Day, it felt, looked, and sounded like everyone was happy to be back in Birdland. 

“It was awesome out there,” said O’Neill, who signed a three-year contract with the O’s this offseason after playing for Boston in 2024 and six years in St. Louis. “There was definitely a buzz with the fans…I’m really excited [about] what we got going on here in Baltimore.” 

Unfortunately, Derik Queen, hometown hero and Maryland’s NCAA basketball tournament star, air-mailed his ceremonial first pitch over O’Hearn’s head. But he delivered a reasonable assessment immediately afterward, saying “I didn’t know my pitch was going to be that bad,” and “I think I let it go too high,” though he added he hadn’t practiced. 

Rubenstein—who filmed a pregame interview for MASN, sat near the O’s dugout, and threw out hats to fans before the key eighth inning—addressed the team in the locker room. 

“Special guest!” said Orioles manager Brandon Hyde, as disco lights glinted off the ceiling and walls. 

“Thanks for winning today,” Rubenstein said. “It was great for the fans, and great for Baltimore.” 

If you happened to catch a teenage David Rubenstein during an Orioles game at Memorial Stadium in the 1960s, you might have noticed that he wasn’t always paying attention to the action on the field. Instead, his head might have been buried in a biography of John F. Kennedy or the pages of some other history text.

“I usually took my books,” he says, “and read so much that my friends would make fun of me.”

Rubenstein’s voracious reading was perhaps a sign that he’d one day work in the White House and later pen a book about U.S. presidents, but it was hardly an indication he would one day become a billionaire or the team’s owner some 60 years later.

But make no mistake, he was also a huge fan. He was the type of kid who snuck down from the 75-cent bleacher seats to the mezzanine, then to the newly created box seats as the innings wore on to get a better view of his baseball idols. Among his favorite O’s were some of the modern franchise’s early folk heroes: 6-foot-3, 215-pound catcher Gus Triandos (“slow runner, but hit a lot of home runs,” Rubenstein recalls); 1960 American League Rookie of the Year Ron Hansen; and All-Star first baseman Jim Gentile.

Then came along a young Brooks Robinson (“a modest, unassuming, low-key guy; I really admired him”), followed by an even younger Jim Palmer, who at age 20 was just a few years older than Rubenstein when he left town for college in 1966, the year the O’s won their first World Series.

Sometimes, an usher working the box seats tapped Rubenstein or one of his buddies on the shoulder and told them to leave. They’d scram, then come back. “We were just kids having a good time,” says Steve Baron, a longtime friend of Rubenstein’s. They rode the city bus to the stadium from their middle-class, predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Fallstaff in northwest Baltimore. In the fall, they split $2 student season tickets to watch the Colts play football, too.

In the pages of his books, Rubenstein was exploring a broader world, but at those games, he mostly just had fun. Making his way to the box seats where O’s then-owner Jerry Hoffberger sat was not part of some master plan.

“I didn’t know what ownership was,” Rubenstein says, chuckling.

On Opening Day late last March, five days after longtime Orioles owner and Greektown-raised lawyer Peter Angelos passed, another local kid who made good—one even richer than Angelos and more of a prodigal son—held his first press conference at Camden Yards.

Sporting a white O’s home jersey, an enthusiastic grin, and a seemingly limitless bankroll, Rubenstein announced, “This is a new day, a new chapter,” from the sixth floor of the B&O Warehouse. And O’s fans, who had soured on the previous regime’s recent underfunded payroll and a 40-plus-year championship drought, were eager for the chapter to begin.

It’s early January and Rubenstein, 75, bespectacled with parted white hair, sits in front of a computer in an office at his suburban Bethesda home. He’s dressed in a suit and tie, typical for his many public appearances. As tycoons go—especially one who got rich in private equity—Rubenstein is astonishingly well-liked, largely due to his easy manner, disarming sense of humor, and fluency in a variety of subjects, including business, politics, history, and, increasingly, sports.

A mural of the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.—where he made his career and fortune—is behind him. At 27, Rubenstein achieved his dream of working in the White House, as President Jimmy Carter’s deputy domestic policy advisor. Ten years later, he co-founded the private-equity firm Carlyle Group, which made him extraordinarily wealthy (Forbes estimates his net worth around $4 billion).

Over the last few decades, he’s given away more than $700 million and become known for “patriotic philanthropy,” like buying and then loaning a rare copy of the Magna Carta to the National Archives and putting up at least $10 million to fix the Washington Monument. Until this February, he was the chair of the board of the Kennedy Center. (Donald Trump removed him from the position and installed himself.)

He’s become a prominent interviewer of public figures, too, hosting TV shows on Bloomberg and PBS. He has written books on investing, politics, and leadership. His latest, The Highest Calling, includes interviews with most living U.S. presidents, including Joe Biden and Trump.

Maybe as impressive as Rubenstein’s connections is the fact that he never uses notes when giving a speech or interviewing someone.

“He has a photographic memory,” says Baltimore’s Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, a friend. “He absorbs and devours information.”

Rubenstein has been focused on baseball a lot more lately. In his first full offseason as Orioles owner since he led the group that bought the team from the Angelos family for $1.7 billion last March, Rubenstein and ownership partner Mike Arougheti have spoken with general manager Mike Elias almost daily about personnel decisions—and Rubenstein is getting up to speed on the modern game.

Gone are the days of his youth when batting average, RBI, and home runs were the only important stats. Today, teams value wonky-sounding metrics like “on-base plus slugging percentage” or “wins above replacement”—an estimate of how many wins a player contributes compared to an average MLB Joe at his position.

“OPS, WAR. I’m learning,” Rubenstein says. But he stresses that he’s not a meddling owner: “I’m [not] saying, ‘Mike, pay this, pay that.’”

Importantly, Rubenstein has put no limit on how much his GM can spend, a luxury for a middle-market team in a salary-cap-less sport where tickets and concessions generate most revenue.

The Orioles’ spending had plummeted in recent years to among the lowest in baseball. Fans were told to trust the process as the team fortified its farm system and spent little in free agency. The rebuild seemed to be working—the club made the playoffs the year before Rubenstein purchased it—but the O’s clearly needed an influx of energy and cash.

In walked Rubenstein. This year, the payroll is up to more than $150 million, 15th of 30 MLB teams, 40-percent higher than early 2024—and more than triple the budget from 2021. (The O’s also made the playoffs in Rubenstein’s first season, although, for the second year in a row, they didn’t record a postseason win.)

This offseason, Elias signed free-agent outfielder Tyler O’Neill to a three-year, $49.5-million contract, the first multiyear deal Elias has given out since becoming GM in November 2018. “We can [now] run the team the way we feel is optimal,” Elias says. “They’ve really liberated us to do our jobs.”

But even with a lot of cash on hand, difficult decisions must sometimes be made. Undoubtedly, the most-discussed topic of this Orioles offseason was the one who got away: O’s ace Corbin Burnes, who signed a six-year, $210-million deal with the Arizona Diamondbacks in December. Fans thought, “uh oh, here we go again,” even though baseball insiders had never expected Burnes to stay here after he arrived in a trade with one year left on his contract.

“Money was not the issue,” Rubenstein insists. Family was. Burnes, 30, and his wife have had a home in Phoenix for six years and are raising three young kids there, including twin girls born last summer. It’s hard to beat driving them to school and going to your home ballpark the same day, Burnes said upon introduction in Arizona.

“I’m not sure any amount of money would have made much difference,” Rubenstein says. “We had an offer that, when you add it all up, was very competitive. We were prepared to put in the money necessary.”

“WE CAN RUN THE TEAM THE WAY WE FEEL IS OPTIMAL.”

Rubenstein didn’t always have the money. His father, Robert, a former Marine who served in World War II and whose family immigrated from Ukraine, worked as a U.S. Postal Service file clerk. His mother, Bettie, went to work making dresses when her only child was six. They lived in a modest, two-bedroom rowhouse at 4834 Beaufort Ave., bought for $6,000, followed by another at 4213 Fallstaff Rd., purchased for $8,000 in 1959.

Like many sports-mad boys, Rubenstein’s childhood dream was to be a pro ballplayer—but he quickly realized he was too small and slow. Later, he was greatly inspired by JFK’s televised inauguration address on Jan. 20, 1961—“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

The next day, Rubenstein and his classmates analyzed the speech in Mrs. Joan Shaw’s sixth-grade class at Fallstaff Elementary. And when he found out that a lawyer, Ted Sorensen, had written it, Rubenstein had a new dream.

“I was reasonably good at writing and reading and talking,” he says. “That’s why I ultimately went to law school. I thought being a policy advisor in the White House would be the highest calling of mankind.”

Rubenstein bussed to high school at City College, about a 75-minute ride each way, and joined clubs to strengthen his college applications. He went to Duke University and law school in Chicago on scholarship. After graduation, he got a job with a New York firm where his idol, Sorensen, worked. And then one day he got a fateful call about working on the presidential campaign of a peanut farmer from Georgia. He said yes.

In the years to come, Rubenstein was a regular in the Oval Office and flew on Air Force One. But then Jimmy Carter lost his 1980 re–election bid and Rubenstein faced a new reality: as a political has-been. He became a partner in a D.C. law firm, but didn’t enjoy it and saw friends making more money in business.

In 1987, newly married and raising the first of his three children, he cofounded Carlyle, a leveraged buyout firm that grew out of his and his partners’ Washington relationships. Six years later, the firm held a majority stake in about a dozen companies that generated billions in revenue annually, chiefly from the U.S. government. (A 1993 New Republic cover story by Michael Lewis said Rubenstein “almost unwittingly” helped create a “new social type: the access capitalist.”)

Carlyle eventually went global and has gone on to have more than $400 billion of assets under management. Rubenstein stepped down as co-CEO in 2017.

Over the years, he didn’t completely forget Baltimore. Rubenstein served on the boards of Johns Hopkins University and Hospital. In 2007, he donated $5 million for a building on Wolfe Street that’s part of Johns Hopkins Children’s Center. And he’s reunited with at least half a dozen old friends from the Lancers Boys Club of his youth who’ve gone on to disparate careers.

“For a couple years, he would fly us all up to Nantucket,” says Baron, the former CEO of Baltimore Mental Health Systems, referring to Rubenstein’s private jet and $39-million estate on the exclusive New England island. When they last visited two years ago, the guest book included a familiar name: Joe Biden.

But after Rubenstein returned home for his parents’ funerals at Mikro Kodesh Beth Israel Cemetery in East Baltimore in 2012 and 2017, his perspective changed. He realized he had neglected his hometown, especially after his parents retired to West Palm Beach, Florida, years earlier.

“Baltimore gave me a good public school education. My parents grew up here, my parents were married here, my parents are buried here, and I’m going to be buried here,” he says. “I gave away a fair amount of money, but I didn’t do as much for Baltimore as I thought I should have.”

He took note of the population decline, crime, and relative lack of corporate headquarters. He had long talked privately with friends about doing something big, namely, buying the Orioles, to help “revitalize” the city, he says.

But as far as he knew, the team wasn’t for sale.

Then the details spilled out about an ugly lawsuit filed by Louis Angelos against his brother, John, and his mother, Georgia, revealing that Peter Angelos—who’d bought the Orioles at auction for $173 million in 1993—had been incapacitated since a collapse in 2017.

Roughly three years later, John, the eldest of Peter’s two sons, was appointed the team’s MLB-mandated “control person” by his mother. By 2023, John would say publicly that the team would be “financially underwater” if it signed players to long-term contracts.

Meantime, a new long-term Camden Yards lease agreement between the state and the Orioles was overdue. Deep-rooted fears about the team leaving the city (aka The Colts, v2.0) grew. In 2022, Ted Leonsis, the D.C.-based owner of the Capitals, the Wizards, and a burgeoning sports streaming channel, Monumental, proposed Rubenstein invest in his two teams, media platform, plus the Orioles, if Leonsis could reach a deal to buy the team. He negotiated unsuccessfully, but the wheels were greased.

In July 2023, John Angelos asked to meet Rubenstein for lunch in Nantucket, where Angelos was renting a home. He offered a minority share. Rubenstein was intrigued but wanted more: a “path to control” in a few years.

A few weeks later, he heard better news. Angelos was willing to sell complete control.

Georgia Angelos endorsed the idea. She liked that Rubenstein was from Baltimore and she “had seen my TV shows, read my books, and thought I might be a good owner,” he said in a 2024 podcast.

Negotiations began and continued for months, through Christmastime 2023, when lawyers and bankers joined a massive Zoom call between interested parties—and everything nearly fell apart. Rubenstein bristled at comments from Angelos’ reps he considered “somewhat insulting about our knowledge of finance” regarding an item on the team’s balance sheet.

“I don’t want to put up with this anymore,” he said on the call in frustration. “I’m done.”

He logged out, walked away, and left everyone wondering what to do. “I thought they would sell to somebody else,” Rubenstein says now, but a week later, cooler heads prevailed, talks renewed, and the deal was finalized.

Since taking over, few dispute that Rubenstein has hit almost all the right notes. Last Opening Day, he proclaimed his goal of returning a World Series winner to Baltimore for the first time since 1983. Excitement filtered to the clubhouse.

“We want leadership to want the World Series as much as we do,” Gunnar Henderson said to reporters.

On Eutaw Street, Rubenstein chatted with fans and famed beer vendor Fancy Clancy and took selfies with anyone who asked. Across the street at Pickles Pub, Rubenstein’s ownership partners, led by Arougheti, bought everyone a pre-game beer. Rubenstein has since attended dozens of games and has deliberately spoken directly to Baltimoreans.

“I want to give people a sense that there’s real hope in Baltimore,” he said in a speech at Beth Tfiloh Congregation in November. “The Orioles are the heart and soul of the city in many ways. When they do well, it makes the whole community feel much better about itself.”

He now has his own box—Suite 33—and he’s invited season-ticket owners to share it with him, perhaps remembering the thrill he felt as a kid at Memorial Stadium. But he finds that he prefers his front-row seat near the home dugout, on top of which he once awkwardly danced to “Thank God I’m a Country Boy.” He was Mr. (Ruben)Splash another evening, hosing fans in Section 86. He has tossed vintage O’s hats—the style he wears—into the seats and made funny promotional videos.

“He loves it,” says longtime friend, former Baltimore Mayor and current University of Baltimore president Kurt Schmoke, who’s part of the new ownership group. “He enjoys getting out into the crowd, walking around, taking pictures.”

“THE ORIOLES ARE THE HEART AND SOUL OF THE CITY IN MANY WAYS.”

People seem to enjoy seeing him, but goodwill only goes so far. Fans remember the Angelos era, which started with a similar narrative about a locally invested, wealthy owner. Even if this offseason underwhelmed some—on top of losing Burnes, no truly marquee player was signed—the payroll increase signals a will to win.

The O’s have revamped their business operations, hiring Catie Griggs from the Seattle Mariners last July to oversee things. The club has $400 million in state funding to refurbish Camden Yards, part of a new 15-year lease agree- ment that began in 2023. The O’s can unlock $200 million more from the state and add another 15 years to the deal if it agrees on a ground lease to redevelop the real estate around the ballpark, which Rubenstein has said he intends to do. Meantime, a 12-item value menu for fans—including $5 beers—revealed in January was a popular choice.

The primary question, though, is whether the O’s will agree to long-term contracts with young stars such as Henderson and Adley Rutschman. If not, what’s the point of anything, really?

“Those are complicated things,” Rubenstein says. “I would just say the Orioles have a tradition of having some players stay with the team for a long, long time,” referring to two of his boyhood heroes, Palmer and Robinson, as well as Cal Ripken Jr. “And I hope Gunnar Henderson and Adley Rutschman will be in that tradition.”

Rubenstein knows the optics and reality: They are a new generation’s baseball idols. In October, on the first day of the O’s short-lived 2024 postseason, Rubenstein headlined a networking event hosted by nonprofit media outlet The Baltimore Banner at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall.

“How many people think we should keep more of our young players in Baltimore?” he asked the audience. A roar of applause followed.

Months later, on the eve of the 2025 season, he shares this answer: “I’d like fans to know I’m focused on trying to win a World Series. It’s not easy. There are 30 teams, and only one can win, but we have a good young team, and we’re prepared to spend the money to get a good team and make it even better.”

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What a beautiful St. Patrick’s Day it was: a sun-splashed Monday in Fort Myers on Florida’s West Coast, with a Gulf breeze blowing 74-degree air across the Boston Red Sox’ Fenway Park-inspired spring training complex. That afternoon, a group of orange-clad Orioles wearing holiday-themed green hats left the place—dubbed Fenway South, featuring an imitation Green Monster in left field—with a convincing 12-3 win.

Of course, in spring training, final scores aren’t important. Nobody cares what a team did in February or March, especially if you’re not playing meaningful games in September or October. It’s all about individual preparation for the regular season. Pitchers aim to work their arms into game form. Hitters get comfortable. But, sometimes, a useful narrative emerges, like last Monday when a group of O’s mostly bound for the minor leagues downed the Red Sox’ likely starting lineup.

For the Orioles, there was no Gunnar Henderson, no Adley Rutschman, and no one casual fans are likely familiar with. They brought zero projected Opening Day starters from their spring home in Sarasota, and just one player—Gary Sanchez, the team’s backup catcher behind Rutschman—was expected on the O’s 40-man roster. (Two, if you count shortstop Livan Soto, who could see playing time early this year as Henderson, who is nursing a ribs-area muscle injury, begins the season on the injured list.)

O’s manager Brandon Hyde said this was the plan when you play a division rival in spring training, a team you’ll face 13 times during the year—including during your home opener (March 31) at Camden Yards. What’s the point of giving them more looks at you? Well-thought-of prospects like infielder Coby Mayo, outfielder Enrique Bradfield Jr., and catcher Samuel Basallo (as a designated hitter) were there, but so were several more unfamiliar minor-league names like Vimael Machin, Griff O’Ferrall, and Collin Burns, as well as a few pitchers, Zach Fruit and Blake Money, with surnames more associated with common nouns than league-wide reputations.

Yet this group trailed the Red Sox by only 3-2 when Boston’s projected No. 2 starting pitcher Tanner Houck left in the fifth inning. Fruit and Money each tossed three strong innings in relief, shutting down the Sox’ likely starting lineup of hitters such as Alex Bregman and Rafael Devers, while the baby and little-known Birds broke things open against Boston’s bullpen with an eight-run sixth inning.

In front of a sellout crowd of 9,194 enjoying the sun, the game was out of reach. Bradfield, Soto, rightfielder Daz Cameron, and second baseman Luis Vazquez ended up driving in two runs apiece. “I’m really happy with how we played,” Hyde said afterward.

If a group of mainly Orioles prospects can beat the Red Sox’ possible starting lineup, what will the major-league O’s do against Boston on Opening Day at Camden Yards next Monday?

Here are more questions and storylines to consider as baseball soon returns to Baltimore:

A team without an ace?
Zach Eflin will start Opening Day for the Orioles in Toronto on March 27. Before we get to the analysis of that, here’s a charming video of his wife and four children delivering the announcement in an arrangement set up by the O’s coaches:

Eflin ended last season as the O’s No. 2 starter behind Cy Young-caliber Corbin Burnes, who left for Arizona in free agency this offseason. Eflin is a quality pitcher. He won 16 games for the Tampa Bay Rays in 2023 and went 5-2 for the Orioles last year after a midseason trade. He allowed one run in four innings of a postseason loss in Game 2 of the A.L. Wild Card round.

But this offseason, the Orioles’ front office didn’t replace Burnes with another true No. 1 starter. General manager Mike Elias opted to start the year with Eflin and made signings like 41-year-old Charlie Morton (who will start the second game of the season) and Japanese veteran Tomoyuki Sugano. On Friday, the team also brought back 37-year-old Kyle Gibson, who won 15 games for the O’s in 2023, on a one-year deal. Homegrown talent Grayson Rodriguez remains ace material, but will start the year on the injury list with an elbow issue. Injury plagued him last year, too, with an upper-back muscle strain ending his season early.

We’ll soon find out if the starting pitching staff can handle the O’s A.L. East rivals. Right now, Dean Kremer and Cade Povich (who will start the O’s home opener next Monday) will complete the rotation. Alberto Suarez, beginning the year in the bullpen, can fill in if or when needed. Same with Gibson once he works into shape.

Two other things to keep in mind over a 162-game season: The O’s may seek more pitching at this year’s trade deadline, assuming they’re again on the hunt for a division title. Also, Kyle Bradish, front-line starter material, should return in the season’s second half after Tommy John surgery last June.

We’re waiting on Gunnar.
Gunnar Henderson is one of Baltimore’s biggest stars, and among the brightest in all of baseball. He landed on the cover of MLB The Show ’25. But he will begin the season on the 10-day injured list (backdated three days) due to a physical setback sustained in a second straight spring training.

On February 27, early in spring training, Henderson strained the intercostal muscle on his right side (around the ribs) while leaping for a catch. Last year, he dealt with an ab muscle strain on his left side. Elias said on Sunday that Henderson won’t be available for Opening Day and will continue rehabbing in Sarasota, but could be good in a week. In his place, we expect Jackson Holliday, Jorge Mateo, or Soto to fill in at shortstop.

Better news: The club’s other foundational everyday player, catcher Adley Rutschman, seems to have recovered from last season’s disappointing second half—hitting .132 in July, .229 in August, and .214 in September and October. The Orioles’ social media channels have featured videos of him launching home runs during spring training. Some speculate Rutschman had multiple injuries last year, but neither he nor the O’s front office has admitted it, though regular catcher wear and tear was at least a factor.

After the O’s were quickly eliminated from the playoffs last year, an emotional Rutschman said he was planning to get healthy. “I’m going to let my body get right,” he said. This spring, he’s made tweaks to his swing for better, consistent contact too.

Were the moves made in the off-season enough?
The Orioles have reached the playoffs two straight years, but they haven’t won a postseason game in a decade—looking overmatched against more veteran, higher-priced teams. Spending more on the right players can help.

After David Rubenstein’s first full offseason as owner, the O’s payroll is around $155 million—a figure that ranks 15th of 30 MLB teams, is 40 percent higher than last year, and is more than triple what it was in 2021. That was deliberate and due to Rubenstein and fellow owner Mike Arougheti allowing more spending.

Elias signed free-agent outfielder Tyler O’Neill to a three-year, $49.5 million contract; Sugano to a one-year, $13 million deal; and Morton to a $15 million pact. Deals like these weren’t made in previous years with a tighter budget. O’Neill’s was the first multi-year deal since Elias became GM in 2018. The three are the highest paid players this season, behind only Eflin. And the team essentially replaced Burnes with three veteran pitchers. Sugano, Morton, and Gibson will make approximately $33 million combined, about the same Burnes is set to make per season ($35 million) in Arizona.

Of course, long-term deals for Rutschman, Henderson, and Jordan Westburg or Colton Cowser (playing on cheaper, rookie deals) remain outstanding. Burnes left in free agency, and the O’s offseason addition may lack the star power many fans wanted. However, the players the O’s signed are a higher caliber than recent years, and could better support the team’s young talent, who will also be asked to take another step this year.

Speaking of moves, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the physical shift of Camden Yards’ left field wall—a symbolic and practical representation of the organization’s approach to winning baseball games. Three seasons ago, the front office pitched previous ownership on a move back and up, intending to help O’s pitchers allow fewer home runs to right-handers.

This November, Rubenstein approved construction to diminish Walltimore. The fence was brought in by 20 feet in some areas and lowered by as much as six. The idea is to attract righty power bats (like O’Neill) to the club and balance the interests and value of current ones (like first baseman Ryan Mountcastle, or switch hitters like Rutschman).

“Moved out, moved back. I’ve seen the data, and it says we’ll be better off. So, I hope we are,” Rubenstein recently told us in an interview for his profile in our April issue.

It remains to be seen whether these moves will help the O’s push deeper into the postseason, if they make it again, and if tinkers to what Hyde described as the team’s long-ball-reliant offense last year will be made. For now, Rubenstein has put full faith in Elias and the front office.

“His life is baseball, and my life has not been baseball,” Rubenstein told us. “I’m trying to use the skills I have to learn, but I’m still guided by Mike and his judgment.”

“It’s unbelievable how much data they have,” Rubenstein added, which is a notable observation from a guy who made a fortune in private equity. “I’m not an expert in it, and I kind of listened to them. I guess I mostly agree with what they’re doing, but I’m trying to learn a lot.”

It will be interesting to see if Rubenstein’s hands-off, empowering approach changes depending on this year’s outcome. He has a likable persona (see the team’s “The Chill” series the owner filmed with Kremer and Westburg at spring training), but he isn’t naïve.

He marvels at the O’s predictive analytics that nailed their 91 regular season wins last year, but wants more. He quips about modern game strategies, like his “favorite” new stat, a quality start, considered six innings thrown by a starting pitcher allowing three runs or less. “It’s like Little League, everybody gets a trophy,” Rubenstein quipped. “You had a quality start.” In other words, he has the capacity to be skeptical.

Last but not least, Felix Bautista is (almost) back…
We close with the return of the closer—Felix Bautista—and its importance cannot be ignored.

Bautista was a dominant game-ender for the Orioles, with 33 saves during an All-Star 2023 campaign that ended with an arm injury in late August.

Every person who talked about Bautista returning to the team following his Tommy John surgery has expressed optimism. Rutschman loves hugging the 6-foot-8, 280-pound guy after a save. Hyde said he’s energized just by seeing “The Mountain” around again. Closing out games last year became an adventure and led to Craig Kimbrel’s midseason departure.

If Bautista stays healthy—Hyde said this week that he’s still working back into shape—the O’s can plan backwards from having a reliable ninth-inning performer. That would make everything else easier, allowing the team to mix more relievers in earlier innings, and, perhaps, not depend on starting pitching to go deep in games.

An estimated 60 million Americans experienced a mental-health related illness in the past year, and some researchers believe roughly half of the U.S. population will encounter one at least some time in their life.

For many, traditional front-line treatments like talk therapy and medications such as antidepressants—which have been found to help roughly two-thirds of the population—are effective. But for others, alternative options have been limited until recently.

Some treatments are newer than others. Psychedelics, for example, are ancient but remain taboo in many circles. Much like the brain itself, many are just starting to be understood.

“We can take pictures and try to measure some things, but the brain is a little harder to study than other areas of the body, because it’s obviously inside of our skull and it’s hard to access,” says Trish Carlson, a psychiatrist at Sheppard Pratt.

The following innovative treatments, practiced and researched locally, show promise to help meet the challenge.

TRUST THE PROCESS
Eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR, can calm the brain to help you make sense of trauma, anxiety, and stress.

A black plastic bar, about to be illuminated with green dots, rests on a tripod a few feet away. You’re handed a pair of mouse-sized buzzers, told to think of your distressing thought and follow a speck of light as it moves from left to right and back again. The buzzers occasionally stimulate your hands.

The sequence moves quickly. It can be difficult to keep up. After 10 seconds or so, a clinician pauses everything, asks you to briefly share what you’re thinking now, if you’re still stressed at a level 10. Repeat. Again. For up to an hour, or maybe even another session, until you report you’re feeling closer to zero—calm—while thinking of what’s been bothering you.

This is what eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR, looks like at Bolton Therapy & Wellness in Bolton Hill, one place you can find the mental health treatment technique that can help heal trauma or other troubling experiences.

The process, which can include tapping opposite sides of the body or listening to sounds, mimics natural dual attention (or bilateral) stimulation in the body thought to help the brain properly store and process distressing memories.

The eye movement and other stimuli are “calming the right brain that’s feeling the anxiousness and bringing onboard the left brain that’s reasonable,” says Lisa Robinson, the practice director at Bolton. “At the end, you don’t have the same agitation, physical sensations, or arousal due to the memory, and you can move on.”

Developed in the late 1980s by New York-based psychologist Dr. Francine Shapiro, who found that walking paired with moving her eyes back and forth eased her distress, EMDR has since been found to help people cope with PTSD, anxiety, stress, phobias, addiction, and to rewire memory networks in adults and children.

“It’s changed my practice,” says Dr. Desyree Dixon, who founded Bolton in 2013, got trained in EMDR in 2019, and now teaches others to use the method. “Sometimes I want to reach out to some of my earlier clients and say, ‘Come back, let’s work on some of these things using this new tool.’”

IT’S ELECTRIC
Transcranial magnetic stimulation is a non-invasive, in-office potential solution for treatment-resistant depression.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, can be a relatively simple, life-changing choice for those with treatment-resistant depression. (Patients who qualify have tried at least two antidepressants that have not proven effective.)

Transcranial means across or through the skull. With TMS, a magnetic coil is positioned over the head that delivers electrical pulses one to two centimeters deep, usually to stimulate a part of the left side of the brain (the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex) that’s been found to be underactive in people with depression.

So long as patients don’t have epilepsy or seizure disorder or metal in the head or neck, the treatment is considered safe and delivered under the guidance of a doctor, nurse, or trained technician. Patients sit in a chair for roughly 20 minutes a day, five days a week, for five or six weeks, and let the machine work. There’s a three-minute protocol that’s also effective.

“What it’s thought to do, in the same way that we think oral medications work, is change the neurotransmitter balance in the brain,” says Trish Carlson, a psychiatrist and service chief of the TMS program at Sheppard Pratt in Towson.

She notes that everything in our brain works off electrical energy. “TMS is focusing directly on the area of the brain we think needs to be rebalanced.”

The noninvasive procedure is thought to rebalance neurotransmitters in the brain like serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine, that help to regulate mood, and increase blood flow in the targeted area.

The FDA approved TMS as a major depression treatment in 2008 and Carlson says the majority of people will see some improvement. Research shows that roughly one in four patients experience full remission and about half enjoy partial relief, with about two-thirds still feeling better a year later.

Most insurances cover TMS use for depression. In 2018, the FDA also approved it for treating obsessive-compulsive disorder by way of targeting a circuit across both sides of the brain while a patient is asked to think of, or be exposed to, what makes them anxious. More research is being done relative to cognitive disorders, addiction, and PTSD.

REALITY SHIFT
Psychedelics still have limited legal use for mental health, but that could be changing.

You don’t need to travel far to realize Baltimore is an epicenter of psychedelic research. Johns Hopkins Hospital has a research center that’s been dedicated to psychedelics for the last two decades and at Sheppard Pratt, the Institute for psilocybin has been exploring uses since 2022. And beyond those institutions, there’s a local community exploring the potential mental health benefits of psychedelics’ mind-altering power.

David Jun Selleh, a psychotherapist and licensed clinical professional counselor at Inner Path Wellness in Mt. Washington, for instance, is a part of Maryland Gov. Wes Moore’s task force—established in 2024 as the seventh of its kind in the U.S.—due to deliver policy recommendations for psychedelics from mushrooms and plants to state legislators by the end of July.

“Generally, all psychedelics induce neuroplasticity in the brain,” Selleh explains, “the growth of new cells—which allows for new ways of thinking and new perspectives. When you combine that with [talk] therapy, it breaks everything open to possibilities.”

He’s sitting on a couch at Inner Path, alongside University of Maryland, Baltimore alumna Lauren Going, who co-founded the city’s first psychedelic-assisted therapy center in 2022.

Here patients are given an eye mask, headphones, a mat, and a private room to sustain them on their travels, and as soon as four minutes after receiving a supervised injection of the psychedelic drug ketamine, they usually experience the peak of what’s typically a 45 minute to hour-long “journey,” says Selleh.

It’s a hallucinogenic trip often described as an out-of-body experience. Ketamine, primarily a synthetic drug used legally for decades as a general anesthetic, creates a surge of the neurotransmitter glutamate in the brain. At Inner Path, ketamine is used off-label for treatment-resistant depression, suicidality, or other mental health disorders.

With a low psycholytic dose, people can think and speak clearly while they’re under the influence. With a higher dose, after patients return to reality, a second hour of talk therapy follows, the idea being the trip can spur more lasting change.

Times and tastes have changed since the heyday of the Grateful Dead and in the roughly 50 years since most psychedelics were outlawed by President Richard Nixon in what became known as the War on Drugs. Names like “magic mushrooms,” (psilocybin), LSD, or MDMA still get a bad reputation. Ketamine is also still known as the “Special K” party drug.

But psychedelics, which some archeologists say humans may have experienced tens of thousands of years ago, delivered in a supervised clinical setting have shown great promise.

In 2019, the FDA approved a ketamine nasal spray for major depression. The Department of Defense is funding psychedelic research for veterans with PTSD and traumatic brain injury. Additional legal pathways for uses could be coming. The 19-member state task force of which Selleh is a part won’t directly change the regulatory status of any psychedelics, but their recommendations could be a catalyst.

“There is rising support,” Selleh says. “People are hearing enough to know there’s something to this.”

Ravens linebacker Roquan Smith, always direct, summed things up like this: “It sucks.” In frigid Buffalo on Sunday night, the third-seeded Ravens lost to the second-seeded Bills, 27-25, ending Baltimore’s season in a game the team had so many chances to win. Here are five takeaways from the brutal AFC divisional round defeat—something we’ve sadly seen before.

Mark Andrews needs a hug or something.
You hate to see it. Mark Andrews—Mr. Reliable, Lamar Jackson’s longtime “safety blanket,” the Ravens all-time leader in touchdown receptions, a guy who literally helped save a woman’s life earlier this year—was part of not one, but two crushing, game-changing plays that you could say cost the Ravens a win.

He dropped a potential game-tying pass on a two-point conversion after the Ravens completed an eight-play, 88-yard scoring drive with 1:44 left. And on the Ravens previous drive, which also looked like it could have ended in a (go-ahead) score, Andrews fumbled for the first time since 2019.

Social media almost immediately lit up with relentless harsh words and memes about the final play, in particular. So, yeah, suffice it to say, he could probably use a hug.

“There’s nobody that has more heart and cares more or fights more than Mark,” coach John Harbaugh said Sunday night. “We wouldn’t be here without Mark Andrews.”

The two-point play drop will go down in Baltimore sports lore for the wrong reasons (and remind people of another missed catch in the 2019 playoffs against Tennessee), though it wasn’t as simple of a grab as it may have looked. The pass wasn’t entirely on target, but we’ll spare you the video replay and CBS announcer Jim Nantz screaming: “The ball was dropped!”

As for the fumble, Andrews was punished for an extra effort when he could have just gone down to the turf. After catching a 16-yard pass from Lamar in the middle of the field, Andrews—who had five receptions for 61 yards in the game—tried to juke linebacker Terrel Bernard and Bernard punched the ball from Andrews’ left arm.

It was the Ravens’ third turnover of the night, and reminiscent of another gut-punch in last year’s AFC title game on wide receiver Zay Flowers. And it was uncharacteristic of Andrews, who had four drops all year. He had two in this game alone, plus the fumble.

Andrews didn’t talk to reporters after the game, but teammates spoke up for him. “Any other situation, Mark holds onto the ball,” fellow tight end Isaiah Likely said.

If only Lamar’s first half didn’t happen.
There was a first-quarter interception—an ugly floater in the face of a blitz that sailed above Rashod Bateman near the right sideline and was easily caught by Bills safety Taylor Rapp. “[It was] a B.S. interception,” Jackson said. “I saw it was man coverage. I just didn’t get my eyes on the safety. If I got my eyes on the safety, there wouldn’t been no interception.”

Then there was a second-quarter fumble, where Lamar simply dropped the ball under pressure after a bad snap from center Tyler Linderbaum. “I was trying to make something happen, tried to squeeze the ball, it slipped out of my hand,” Jackson said, and he lamented the decision. “[I needed to] just go down. It’s a playoff game.”

These were the kind of mistakes that Lamar more often made in previous years, when he didn’t put together 40-plus touchdowns and only four interceptions. Barely halfway into the second quarter of Sunday night’s game, he had two turnovers for the first time all season. The extra possessions tilted the game in Buffalo’s favor early and put the Ravens in an early hole. The second giveaway led to a Josh Allen quarterback sneak that gave the Bills a 14-7 lead.

It looked like “antsy” Lamar in the first half, but he appeared more poised for all of the second half, most notably connecting on five straight passes before the 24-yard touchdown strike to a sliding Likely in the front of the end zone to pull the Ravens within two points late. Jackson had 254 yards passing and 39 rushing. But potential late-game heroics wouldn’t have been necessary if he had played a cleaner first half. If that happened, the result might have been more like the Ravens’ comfortable 35-10 Week 4 win against Buffalo at home.

As much as you didn’t want to see the turnovers, neither did Lamar.
We hadn’t seen or heard him this mad after a game in a while. “Tonight, turnovers, we can’t have that s***. That’s why we lost the game,” he said in a postgame press conference. “We were moving the ball wonderfully. It’s hold on to the f***** ball. This s*** annoying. I’m tired of this s***.”

What does he feel like he needs to do to avoid this feeling again? “Protect the ball. If we protect the ball, we’re still on the field. I believe we’re driving down the field [and] putting up points…Protecting the ball. That’s the No. 1 priority, and we didn’t do it. Especially me. I’m the leader.”

As he spoke, he slapped the back of one of his hands into the palm of the other in frustration. “I got to protect the ball,” he said. “So, I’m hot.”

The defense gave the Ravens a chance.
Despite the turnovers, the Ravens were still within striking distance the entire game. That was thanks to their defense, which stopped the Bills quick on their first two drives of the second half and handed the offense the ball, down only 21-13. After that, Derrick Henry (84 yards on 16 carries) started to heat up, ripping off runs of 17 and 15 yards, and a five-yard touchdown that pulled the Ravens within two. They didn’t convert that two-point attempt, either, when a Lamar pass was tipped inside.

On the ensuing drive, the Ravens defense stepped up again, holding the Bills to a field goal that made it 24-19 early in the fourth quarter. Even after Andrews fumbled, the defense again kept the Bills out of the end zone, stopping Allen on a third-and-goal run to force another field goal and give the Ravens another chance to tie the game.

The Ravens held Allen to just 127 passing yards and allowed 273 total. In the meantime, the offense gained 416, but again…the three giveaways doomed them. The Ravens became the fourth team in NFL history to lose a playoff game without punting.

A Super Bowl remains elusive for Lamar and company.
The good news: The Ravens have reached the postseason in six of seven seasons since Jackson took over as starting quarterback in 2018. The bad news: For the third time during that span, the Ravens’ season ends two wins short of a Super Bowl appearance, and the Allen-led Bills have now beaten Baltimore twice in the AFC divisional round in games in subfreezing Buffalo four years apart.

But Jackson could very well win his third NFL MVP award when it is announced just before the Super Bowl in a few weeks. Voting was done before this game, meaning whatever the result between Allen and Lamar—the two frontrunners—on Sunday night wouldn’t matter. But another individual award is little solace for Lamar, who has been fixated on winning a Super Bowl from the moment the Ravens drafted him.

The closest he and the Ravens have gotten to the Super Bowl since then was last year’s AFC title game appearance in Baltimore against the eventual champion Chiefs, who will now host the Bills in this year’s AFC championship next weekend. The Ravens last played for—and won—an NFL title at the end of the 2012 season with Joe Flacco at QB.

“We’re right there,” said Jackson, whose playoff record is now 3-5 in seven seasons. “I’m tired of being right there.”

Well, that was almost too easy.

In the first-ever postseason matchup between the archrivals in Baltimore, the Ravens handled the Pittsburgh Steelers, 28-14, in a game that wasn’t even as close as the final score indicated. On a frigid night at M&T Bank Stadium, 70,546 fans watched as the Ravens built a 21-0 halftime lead and mostly cruised from there to advance to next weekend’s AFC divisional round.

Here are five takeaways from an almost completely satisfying Ravens win:

Lamar is MVP worthy (again).
In a way, Lamar Jackson went back in time. In the first half of Saturday night’s game, he looked like he did in the early years of his Ravens career. You remember—when Greg Roman was coordinating the offense and relied on Jackson mainly running around and past anyone who tried to tackle him? With the Steelers defense clearly keyed on stopping Derrick Henry early, Jackson rushed 11 times in the first half, including on five straight edge-rushing plays on the Ravens first scoring drive. He finished with 81 yards on 14 carries.

But here’s the thing: Lamar put together an efficient passing performance, too—the kind that has become more common as the 28-year-old has developed as a pro. He was 16 for 21 passing for 175 yards and a pair of first-half touchdowns. That’s when we saw this other kind of Jackson vintage: a how-the-heck-did-he-do-that evasion of multiple rushers before finding Justice Hill leaking out of the backfield for a five-yard TD.

“All you can say is wow,” Ravens coach John Harbaugh said of the play with 11 seconds left in the half, which was designed for Jackson to throw the ball away if a receiver isn’t open early. “He runs around and finds a touchdown pass…I think I said wow about seven times right there.”

Put it all together—Jackson improved to 3-4 in his postseason career—and the recently minted first-team all-pro pick looks worthy of winning a second MVP in a row. The stuff Jackson has done this year is historic. He’s become the first quarterback in NFL history with more than 40 passing touchdowns and fewer than five interceptions, and the first in league history with more than 4,000 passing and 900 rushing yards.

Late on Saturday, fans serenaded Jackson with “M-V-P” chants when the Ravens had the ball in the fourth quarter, but he signaled to the crowd to be quiet instead. “He is in full control,” Harbaugh said.

Jackson said this week he’d gotten “antsy” in previous playoff games. But not this one. “I was just chill,” he said, adding that he avoided his phone, including calls and messages from his mom. “I was eager for the whole week to hurry up and become Saturday, but when the day came, I was just cool throughout the day.”

One concern to keep an eye on in the week ahead: Jackson confirmed after the game he got kneed in the back at the end of a first-half scramble and he wore a heat wrap after to keep his muscles loose. He said he’d be okay, but clearly it bothered him.

King Henry did his thing, too.
A signature Derrick Henry stiff arm of Steelers safety Minkah Fitzpatrick at the tail-end of this play early on was a sign of Henry’s dominant night on the ground, as well:

It was also a brand-new play the team put in at practice on Thursday, featuring a direct snap to Henry and a fake toss to Lamar running in the backfield. Standing at the podium in his postgame press conference, Jackson said the image of the 6-foot-3, 250-pound Henry running through the Steelers defense reminded him of Lightning McQueen in the Pixar animated movie Cars. Ka-chow.

Henry was unstoppable, finishing with 186 yards on 26 carries and two touchdowns including an eight-yard scamper that capped a remarkable 13-play, 85-yard first-half scoring drive during which the Ravens didn’t throw the ball once—the first time any NFL team did that on a touchdown drive in a game since 2006.

But that’s what you can do when you have a pair of running stars in the backfield. “I can just hand the ball off, [and he gets] 10 yards, 20 yards, 30 yards, and I’m just chilling,” Jackson said. “I’m fresh. It’s just making my job a lot easier. We just piggyback off each other.”

The Ravens totaled 299 rushing yards.

“It’s the best job in the world blocking for Derrick Henry and Lamar Jackson,” center Tyler Linderbaum said in the Ravens locker room after the game. “It would be a disservice not to go out there and play hard with those guys in the backfield.”

The Steelers were more pathetic than we thought.
We know the Steelers had lost four games coming into this one—and against good teams (like the Chiefs, Eagles, and Bengals, in addition to the Ravens last month), but this performance from Pittsburgh was unbecoming of arguably the NFL’s greatest rivalry, especially early.

The Steelers’ offense punted four times in the first half, gained just two first downs, and only almost managed one big play in the first 30 minutes, when wideout George Pickens pushed Marlon Humphrey in the back on a deep pass that was called back for offensive pass interference. Meanwhile, the Pittsburgh defense looked lethargic and at times confused as Jackson and Henry ran over and past them.

Pittsburgh showed signs of life coming out for the third quarter, with Russell Wilson connecting on a handful of deep sideline throws to Pickens and Van Jefferson for a pair of a scores, but the early advantage the Ravens built was too large to overcome. When Lamar and company got a couple early fourth-quarter first downs, the Ravens’ win felt inevitable.

You have to wonder if the locker room issues that emerged in Pittsburgh in the second half of the season played a role in the Steelers reeling heading into the playoffs. A few weeks ago, several players seemed to point the finger at the veteran Fitzpatrick for playing “hero ball” and not doing his job in the secondary after a loss to the Chiefs. Former Ravens-turned-Steelers linebacker Patrick Queen also lamented the team’s communication after losing to Baltimore in December. Miscues showed up again Saturday, particularly on Henry’s second TD run right up the middle of the Steelers defense.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Queen said afterward.

You can come back, Patrick. Just sayin’.

No Flowers, no problem.
The Ravens’ top receiving threat, Zay Flowers, missed the game because of a knee injury sustained in the regular season finale last week against Cleveland. It ended up being a good week for Flowers to rest and get healthy.

Rashod Bateman scored the Ravens’ first touchdown on a beautiful throw from Jackson to the back of the end zone between two defenders. That capped a 95-yard drive. And Bateman caught a key third-down pass with less than two minutes left in the first half that kickstarted the Ravens’ nine-play scoring drive. Isaiah Likely had three catches for 53 yards, and five different Ravens had multiple receptions.

A Super Bowl dream isn’t far-fetched.
With Jackson and Henry being trouble for any opposing defense and the Ravens own defense looking mostly stout in the second half of the year, a deep playoff run for this team is not out of the question.

The third-seeded Ravens will likely travel to Buffalo for next weekend’s AFC divisional round. That is, if the second-seeded Bills beat the seventh-seeded Denver Broncos on Sunday, as they are expected. If they do, the Ravens next playoff matchup would pit the two leading candidates for NFL MVP, Jackson and Bills quarterback Josh Allen. It would also be a rematch of one of Jackson’s early-career postseason losses in Buffalo, a good place to exorcise some demons.

Should Denver upset the Bills, however, the third-seeded Ravens will host the divisional round against the Houston Texans, for the second straight year, next weekend.

Asked if he was rooting for Denver to win, “I’m not rooting for nobody,” Jackson said.

Harbaugh was more revealing. “I can always root for a home game,” he said.

From 1991 to 2011, Superintendent Nancy Grasmick oversaw all the public schools in the state of Maryland and, for five consecutive years during that span, they ranked top in the nation. Yet when she retired, the Baltimore native, now 85, still had a gnawing feeling that she could have done more. That’s the thing about real leadership. It always strives to better itself.

To that end, three years ago, she founded the Dr. Nancy Grasmick Leadership Institute at her alma mater, Towson University, with the goal of nurturing competent, ethical, and civic-minded leadership across a variety of industries. It has since welcomed about 2,700 participants—from organizations like Under Armour, the nonprofit ShareBaby, and the Maryland Department of General Services—to its programs, which range from one-day events to months-long workshops.

Why did you want to start the institute?
When I decided to leave as state superintendent, even though our schools were top-notch in the nation, I felt that if I had the opportunity to really dig into my own leadership—exploring where I felt strong, where I felt vulnerable—I could have been better than I was. I also had an opportunity to observe leadership not just in education, but business, nonprofits, and government. When I retired, I found that we had a lagging group of leaders in many ways, and it wasn’t necessarily their fault. You can see leaders who are just sort of stuck, there’s no creativity, and when I looked at government, I was also concerned about the ethical dimension.

What’s unique about your programming?
No two leaders are exactly the same, because we’re different people. We have a cascade of programs…You decide what’s right for your company, or as an aspiring or current leader. We don’t want people to leave saying we’re just a facilitator of some of the tried-and-true philosophies about leadership. We want them to say, “Wow, that was really fantastic.”

What are the challenges leaders face today?
There are some ethical ones. Part of it is, if you work with people who are unethical, it influences you. Often, if you are not in the lead position, there’s an expectation that you’ll buy into unethical behavior. How do you deal with that? If we don’t have ethics as a core, I don’t think we have anything. The other thing is people don’t think they have the clout to make changes if they’re not at the top. How do you get your thoughts heard? What’s persuasive? [The answer is] presenting yourself as knowledgeable and confident and deeply believing in something. We had someone from Under Armour. For her capstone project with us, she looked at family-leave policies. As a result of her having the confidence to be bold and suggest changes, they’ve changed their program.

It’s not easy being a leader today. Like in classrooms, we see teacher shortages. How do you address that idea?
Well, first you acknowledge that it is difficult…Things are changing rapidly. Look at how AI is influencing every profession. But you find ways of coping, overcoming, and turning what’s been negative to a positive.

Gunnar Henderson, Adley Rutschman, and everyone else circled the locker room on Wednesday night, slapping hands with each teammate they crossed and seeking out those they hadn’t.

“Love you,” Henderson and Ryan O’Hearn said to each other, hugging.

“Next year,” pitcher Kyle Bradish said to Henderson as he walked another part of the room.

In the meantime, Rutschman’s eyes watered as he meandered from a group of O’s pitchers that included Keegan Akin and Danny Coulombe. 

“We spend so long together and here it is in two minutes, the season comes crashing down,” veteran catcher James McCann said near his locker to reporters. “It’s not what we expected. The emotions hit you like a freight train. It happened so quick.” 

Again.  

For the second straight year, the Orioles hosted a playoff series at Camden Yards in which they were favored—and didn’t win a game.  

Last year, the eventual World Series champion Texas Rangers took two at Camden Yards and swept the top-seeded O’s—winners of 101 regular-season games in 2023—from the American League Divisional round. The sweep was easily chalked up to inexperience and not enough pitching.  

This time, the fourth-seeded O’s—who won 91 regular-season games—scored just one run in two postseason contests. Cedric Mullins’ solo homer into the right-center field seats in the fifth inning tied Game 2 of the best-of-three Wild Card Series with the Kansas City Royals. Just three batters later, the O’s loaded the bases with no outs on a Ramón Urias single, a Henderson walk, and a Jordan Westburg chopper that Royals starting pitcher Seth Lugo misplayed.  

The 36,000 or so fans in attendance at Camden Yards (clearly not a sellout, as evidenced by empty green seats in the left field upper deck) roared with anticipation for more good sights.  

But instead came a self-inflicted series of cuts, emblematic of the team’s offensive struggles the day before in a 1-0 shutout loss, and in a 33-33 second half of the season. Anthony Santander popped out. Colton Cowser turned on a 97 mile-per-hour sinker from Royals reliever Angel Zerpa for strike three that fractured Cowser’s left hand. Then Rutschman grounded out to second base. In frustration, Urias tossed his batting helmet halfway down the third base line. Scoring was not in his, or anyone’s, future.  

The game—and the season—wasn’t officially over at that point, but it felt like it could be. Then, O’s reliever Cionel Perez surrendered the Royals go-ahead run on a single to Kansas City star Bobby Witt in the top of the sixth. Three innings later, it was really over in a 2-1 loss.

A season that began with so much promise—good vibes and new ownership—but broke down midway through with injuries to pitchers (like Bradish, Grayson Rodriguez, and John Means) and everyday regulars (like Jorge Mateo, Ryan Mountcastle, Westburg, and Urias) was finished. Optimism returned when all but Mateo returned to the lineup a few weeks ago.

The questions about why things went wrong in the postseason—again—began almost as immediately. And nobody seemed to have an answer.

“I don’t know,” O’Hearn said. “It seemed like every time something positive was going to happen, it didn’t…I’m shocked. It sucks. It’s a little bit embarrassing, honestly. Feel like we let the fans down.”  

Said McCann: “I wish I could give an answer that made sense.”  

Henderson got the closest, citing experience: “The more we’re in it, the better prepared we’re going to be…We’re looking forward to taking that next step. [We’ll] let this sit, and use this as fuel.” 

Though nobody on the roster has been around for this entire dubious streak, the Orioles are now 0-10 in the playoffs in the last 10 years. That spans the end of the Buck Showalter era, the start of a years-long organizational rebuild, and now two years of good, if not great, baseball in Baltimore that have ended with similar quick thuds in the postseason.  

This time, O’s ace Corbin Burnes, acquired just before spring training in a trade, pitched a spectacular Game 1 going into the ninth inning. But he’s likely headed elsewhere as a free agent with dreams of filthy rich money. “We’ll see what happens,” Burnes said postgame. (Not exactly a strong indication he wants to return to Baltimore.)

The O’s Game 2 starting pitcher, Zach Eflin, was good, as well—providing validation of one of general manager Mike Elias’ trade deadline moves in July to bolster a hurting O’s pitching staff. (Although another trade, sending young talents Kyle Stowers and Connor Norby to the Miami Marlins for one-time All-Star pitcher Trevor Rogers, paid zero dividends, with Rogers being demoted to the minors a month after being acquired and not making a postseason appearance.) 

But on Thursday, in a postseason press conference that he said was far too early for his liking, Elias acknowledged that the offensive woes were the “main theme” of the O’s faltering down the stretch, which Henderson said Wednesday night was “something we need to take care of.” 

The Orioles left 16 runners on base in the two playoff games, got just six hits overall, and went 1-for-13 at the plate with runners in scoring position. They too often relied on home runs to produce offense throughout the season, rather than driving in runners with hits to all parts of the field.  

“Definitely experienced the frustration of that. Who didn’t?” Elias said. “We are going to examine everything about our offensive approach, teaching, the mix of personnel…I don’t believe it’s necessarily all chance.” 

“We relied on the homer,” manager Brandon Hyde said. “When you’re facing really good pitching, that’s tough to do.” 

In the two playoff games, Henderson and Mountcastle were both 0-for-7 with four strikeouts. Santander was 1-for-8 with two strikeouts. Westburg was 1-for-6 and Coswer was 1-for-7 with three strikeouts, as Royals pitchers kept Orioles’ hitters consistently off balance with a mix of overpowering fastballs and breaking balls weakly hit, if at all. 

The most glaring of extended struggles were from Rutschman, who hit .322 in the season’s first month and actually finished with one home run and one RBI less than in 2023. He only hit .132 in July, .229 in August, and .214 in September and October. He was 1-for-8 in the playoff series, and his groundout in the fifth inning of the last game of the season with the bases loaded might gnaw at him for a while.  

“I would have gotten a hit,” a bleary-eyed Rutschman replied to someone’s question about what he would’ve done different in the situation. He also alluded to being worn down physically. “I’m going to let my body get right,” he said. Though Elias said there wasn’t a specific injury to speak of with the two-time All-Star catcher and the team’s No. 1 overall draft pick in the 2019 MLB draft. “He’s our guy,” Elias said of the face of the franchise. 

That may be true, but now Rutschman—and every other Oriole that’s been around for the last two seasons—has something new to deal with compared to the low expectation days of the rebuild. Now, the Baby Birds have some adult scar tissue (in some cases physically, if not mentally) to deal with heading into 2025, which could add to the challenges of returning to the postseason for the third straight season. (That would be a first for the O’s since 1969-1971, when the team lost two World Series and won one in the span.) And then advancing further. 

Not everyone will be back. Next year’s team will look different. Here’s one telling scene: About 45 minutes after the Orioles were eliminated from the postseason, and as the Royals still celebrated on the infield at Camden Yards, Santander sat in the swivel chair in front of his corner locker, perhaps for a final time.  

After hitting 44 home runs and playing solid right field, the 29-year-old Santander—a rare holdover from the Showalter era—will likely command a big contract as a free agent. Separate, but related questions remain about potential long-term deals for Rutschman, Henderson, and the O’s young core. While payroll will assuredly increase under the David Rubenstein ownership regime, the O’s likely won’t keep every free agent around in perpetuity. 

With that as the backdrop, as the O’s clubhouse started to empty Wednesday night, Santander noticed Rutschman had just performed an all-too-soon season-ending ritual: signing one of his game-worn jerseys as a parting gift at the request of his catching partner McCann. Rutschman tossed the signed jersey over the chair in front of McCann’s locker.  

Burnes had just handed Henderson a similar piece of memorabilia: a white No. 39 jersey and with a message in silver marker. Your heroes were trading mementos, expecting they might not see each other for a while. 

“Rutsch, don’t forget mine please,” Santander said. 

“You want one?” Rutschman replied.

He needed to find another jersey. Henderson pointed him to the equipment room. A few moments later, Rutschman emerged, laid a white No. 35 jersey on a table, and starting writing on the orange lettering—a gift for a friend and an early, yet perhaps merciful, goodbye for the Orioles’ 2024 season. 

A slice of Baltimore sports heaven is found, for now, in the climate-controlled basement of 216 Emory Street in Ridgley’s Delight. Two blocks from Oriole Park at Camden Yards, and two floors below where Babe Ruth was born almost 130 years ago, neatly arranged on shelves below UV-filtered light are dozens of artifacts fit for a spectacular episode of Antiques Roadshow. Or their own museum, in addition to the one already upstairs.

“This is Johnny Unitas’ first contract—$7,000, 1956,” says Michael Gibbons, director emeritus of the Babe Ruth Birthplace & Museum, before pulling another file: hand-written lyrics to “Thank God I’m a Country Boy,” penciled in cursive by John Denver’s fiddle player, John Sommers, on yellow legal paper. Inevitably, there’s also one of Ruth’s 714 home-run balls sitting in a box on a table.

“Many of these things have stories,” says Gibbons, pictured right, above, and he’d like you to know them.

The origin story of Ruth—the Great Bambino, one-time Oriole who became a Yankees legend, Hall-of-Famer, and American cultural icon in the early 20th century—is exhibited above ground here, as it has been for 50 years.

Since this “national shrine” opened in 1974, thanks to a campaign to save the building and those around it from demolition, hundreds of thousands of visitors have seen the centerpiece second-floor bedroom, where, on Feb. 6, 1895, Katherine Ruth delivered baby George Herman, later known as “Babe.” The living museum also includes pictures of the Ruth family, rare Ruth baseball cards, and items from his childhood, like a bat he likely used as a teenager.

But a skinny three-story brick rowhouse is only large enough to showcase so much, especially when the independent nonprofit that operates it has grown over the decades to include duties as the Orioles’ official museum, the Colts’ archives, and essentially a repository of all Maryland sports that was, until 2015, largely displayed in the Ruth Birthplace Foundation’s Sports Legends Museum next to Camden Yards. When that closed, renovations expanded the shrine’s original footprint to accommodate myriad artifacts.

“A LITTLE WOULD GO A LONG WAY TO BRING BALTIMORE SPORTS GLORY INTO THE DAYLIGHT.”

You can find the hymnal that Ruth scribbled in as a pro-claimed “incorrigible” boy at St. Mary’s Industrial School. “George H. Ruth, world’s worst singer—world’s best pitcher,” reads his first known autograph. The Colts’ Super Bowl V and the Orioles’ 1983 World Series trophies are also featured. But plenty of other priceless items are in storage, like Maryland men’s basketball coach Gary Williams’ NCAA title-game suit, and an orange Cal Ripken Sr. jersey with pockets sewn in the chest to hold packs of cigarettes.

“Our mission is to get this collection on display,” says Gibbons.

He and current executive director Shawn Herne, who helped launch the Legends Museum in 2005, consider this golden milestone as an opportunity to spread the word.

“Babe Ruth’s birthplace will be here,” says Herne, pictured left, but they’re seeking additional physical space to share the history, all while attracting at least 25,000 visitors annually at $15 per adult and $7 a child—their primary revenue source.

As part of the museum’s anniversary celebrations, Emory Street was just dubbed “Babe Ruth Way.” Of course, an Orioles team winning more games helps draw in bigger crowds. In the years ahead, so could part of the $1.2 billion in state funding allocated to redevelop the nearby stadiums.

In late July, Orioles owner David Rubenstein, a noted history buff, toured Ruth’s birthplace—basement included. “We’re hopeful that as he develops a plan, he thinks of us,” says Gibbons. “Maybe we can help a little bit.”

And a little would go a long way to bring the entirety of Baltimore sports glory into the daylight, and keep Babe’s hometown legacy alive and well.

Standing in water so shallow, it looks like he’s walking on it, Jack Cover gazes just below the surface. Next to the nearby grasses, above the algae-clad deck at the soles of his rubber boots, there swims a school of young Atlantic silverside.

“Just look at that,” says Cover, the longtime general curator of the National Aquarium, noting that the tiny fish prefer ankle-deep water to avoid predators, like the Atlantic needlefish that he’s seen cruising lately, too. “It’s amazing—that’s what you see when you’re out on a real marsh. And here we are, in the Inner Harbor.”

Specifically, we’re in the Harbor Wetland, the Aquarium’s newest living exhibit, a 10,000-square-foot recreation of what would have been found along Baltimore’s shoreline hundreds of years ago. Floating between the Aquarium’s pedestrian bridges, spanning the Harbor’s Piers 3 and 4, it’s viewable to the public starting in August.

“Nature is here,” says Cover, and he wants you to see and learn about it, and maybe lower your blood pressure in the environs.

There’s the water, of course, like everywhere else in the harbor, but here it moves around grasses and sapling trees rather than abutting concrete. The low-lying plants grow from a recycled plastic base attached to pontoons, while air handlers move water to mimic tidal flow. Oyster reefs have been added, too.

It’s nature meets engineering, created to educate kids and other visitors, promote healthy water, and bring back native species—and it’s already working. When the vegetation was planted in mid-May, animals like crabs, eel, dragonflies, turtles, and more swam on in like they did in pre-industrial marsh.

“On day one, a mallard duck nested,” says Charmaine Dahlenburg, the Aquarium’s director of field conservation. “And the biggest shock of our life, two weeks in, were the sea otters.”

People won’t be allowed in the Harbor Wetland, to be clear, at least unsupervised. But the associated new dock overlooking it is open (and free) during the Aquarium’s business hours.

After four prototypes, it’s the first exhibit of its kind and size in the U.S. And it’s a marvel of aquatic design—the Aquarium has patents pending for the buoyancy technology.

“We hope to set the example of what you can do with a waterfront city, rather than just sweat on concrete, or watch trash float by,” says Cover.

The project is also a culmination of his life’s work. Originally from Hampden, the 67-year-old first found pleasure in nature as a kid during family vacations to Kent Island, eventually joining the Aquarium staff in 1987.

“I can’t tell you how excited and joyful I am walking through here,” he says. “I spent my youth going up little channels like this. They’re full of life.”

Maybe the most telling bit of lore about Orioles pitcher Grayson Rodriguez begins, ironically, with a home run.

“Growing up, I was actually a better hitter than a pitcher,” he says, though this story features a blend of both skills.

In the first scrimmage of his junior year at Central Heights High School in the small East Texas city of Nacogdoches, the already 6-foot-5 Rodriguez swung hard at an inside fastball. A left-handed batter, he muscled a homer to right field but hurt his pitching hand (the right one) in the process—wrist tendinitis, an athletic trainer later told him.

For the rest of the season, it pained him to hit and throw, but even with a compression wrap around his hand, he still threw harder than 90 miles per hour. Still, it wasn’t quite the more attention-grabbing 95 mph that had put him on pro prospect lists a year earlier. Scouts, who’d been coming around, stopped showing up for his starts. Rodriguez guessed they thought he was regressing and maybe wrongly presumed he’d become complacent, already having an offer to play college ball at nearby Texas A&M.

What they—and he—didn’t know was that Rodriguez was throwing with a broken hand. A doctor’s visit following the season revealed he had a cracked hamate bone. It’s just below the pinky and ring finger, a delicate spot, especially for a pitcher who relies on gripping a baseball. After surgery to repair the break, Rodriguez’s velocity returned—he reached 98 miles per hour as a senior—and the scouts did, too.

Six years later, the stakes and expectations could not be higher. At 24, he’s more seasoned and more muscular, though at 230 pounds, given his height, he’s still not bulky.

The fastball he slings now at Camden Yards often touches 100 miles per hour, running in on righties and away from lefties. The off-speed pitches he has developed since he was drafted with the 11th overall pick in 2018—like an 85-ish mile-an-hour changeup that drops an average of three feet—often confound the best pro hitters.

“I feel like I’m a very competitive person, and baseball is something I can do where I can be competitive,” Rodriguez told Baltimore at the start of the season. “I like the one-on-one, me versus the hitter, being able to have a fight with the guy that steps in the box, every five days. It’s a lot of fun.”

Today, with stops at Orioles minor-league affiliates in Delmarva, Bowie, Aberdeen, and Norfolk, Virginia, behind him, Rodriguez is a bona fide big leaguer and the most electric and beloved homegrown hurler on the O’s roster. He sits among the Major League leaders in wins and strikeouts through his first five starts, and gives last year’s AL East division champs a chance to win every time he takes the mound. (Dedicated fans on social media celebrate “Grayson Rodriguez Day” when it’s his turn to pitch.)

“He’s got the ability to reach triple-digits as a starter, and he’s got the ability to do it late in the game, late in the season, and that’s not something you see very often,” says Norfolk Tides pitching coach Justin Ramsey, whose career in the Orioles’ farm system rose alongside Rodriguez. “And he’s a freak when it comes to how he’s able to generate the spins on the baseball, whether it’s the fastball, the breaking balls, the changeups, whatever. It’s special. The sky’s the limit for him.”

When Rodriguez was growing up in the Lone Star State, his dad, Gilbert, who had played outfield at a small West Texas college, built a field on the family’s 13-acre property for his son to practice. He cleared brush, used a tractor to level a slope, and added a dirt mound and baselines—and eventually a 200-foot home run fence. It was a practical matter. A field in town they liked to use was often occupied. Young Grayson didn’t need any extra encouragement.

“I just always wanted to play baseball,” Rodriguez says.

The sport is in the family blood. His mother, Temple, was a softball coach. Not-so-little Grayson had hands big enough at 10 to utilize the seams on a baseball to create uncanny spin, an arm strong enough at age 12 to make a catcher’s mitt pop, and the size, strength, and swing as a teenager to hit a ton of home runs.

But it wasn’t until he was a high school senior that he learned the fundamentals of a good windup and delivery, and how to use his lower body to generate power, thanks to instruction from mentors like David Evans, a former O’s pitcher who ran a training facility near Houston, a two hour and 15 minute drive south from Nacogdoches.

On draft day, however, Rodriguez had no clue the Orioles were planning to pick him so high until he and his family heard his name announced on television during a selection show watch party at home.

In many ways, Rodriguez remained raw when he first joined the organization. He was all power, little finesse. Not until 2019, after the O’s current front-office and coaching regime led by general manager Mike Elias and manager Brandon Hyde took over, did Rodriguez develop a second “out” pitch to complement his heater—a changeup with unusual downward movement. With high-speed video cameras showing how the ball, depending on the grip, left his hand, Rodriguez learned quickly and was repeating the pitch consistently in two days.

Nonetheless, as is the case with most ballplayers, there were unexpected roadblocks on his path to the majors. First, the pandemic hit. He suffered a back muscle injury in 2022. Then he had a few false starts en route to The Bigs, leading to a bout of self-doubt.

Despite years of recognition as one of the top pitching prospects in the game, Rodriguez did not get his first real taste of major league ball until last April. He had struggled in spring training in 2023, did not make the Opening Day roster last season, and instead started the year in Norfolk. Only out of necessity, after an early-season injury to Kyle Bradish, did Rodriguez get called up last April. Then, after a couple of uneven months, he was sent back down.

Back with the Tides, Rodriguez proved resilient, regrouping with Ramsey, finding better form, more reliable command, and maybe most importantly, renewed confidence.

“It was partially a rhythm and timing thing of delivery we were working on,” Ramsey recalls, “but also just the intent to get [the pitch] there, trust it, and not try to be too fine.”

“WHEN HE’S ATTACKING THE STRIKE ZONE RIGHT AWAY, GOOD THINGS CAN HAPPEN FOR HIM.”

Rodriguez returned to Baltimore in July, and he delivered, posting a 2.58 earned run average the rest of the season, a massive improvement over his 7.35 mark in the first half. He struck out more batters, yielded fewer home runs, and held opponents to a .227 batting average after the mid-season call-up. A dominating eight-inning, seven-strikeout performance against rival Tampa Bay in the middle of the division title race demonstrated why so many have long considered Rodriguez ace material.

“He’s got such a good fastball and change-up,” Hyde says of his young right-hander. “If he gets 0-1 on hitters, it puts the hitter in a defensive mode because his stuff is so good. When he’s attacking the strike zone right away, good things can happen for him.”

When everything is clicking, you can see Rodriguez scream with excitement into his glove after a strikeout or successful inning. His emotion on the field belies what could otherwise be described an unassuming nature—that is, as unassuming as 6-foot-5 can be.

He is friendly and approachable with teammates, coaches, friends, and the media. He speaks with a charming Texas accent and is gracious with his time. On his non-pitching days, he laughs easily, trades friendly trash talk, and plays video games like Call of Duty.

And while baseball has him in Baltimore and on the road for most of the year, he’ll tell you he’s a homebody and country boy at heart. The first thing he bought with his $4.3-million signing bonus was a Ford F250 pick-up truck. In December, Rodriguez married his high school sweetheart, Madison, and they’ve already built a home on a 22-acre lot next to his parents’ house on the outskirts of Nacogdoches. Rodriguez’s grandfather left the land to him and his brother, Garner—a 6-foot-7 high school basketball and baseball prospect.

“Our family has been here for generations,” Rodriguez’s mom, Temple, says, and jokes, “We are pretty much kin to everyone, especially now that Grayson is in MLB.”

If he didn’t make it in baseball, Rodriguez says he’d probably be working for his grandmother’s interior design business back home like his parents. In the offseason, Rodriguez retreats as often as possible to the Texas woods or neighboring Oklahoma or Kansas, to bowhunt whitetail deer. He hides in camouflage amid the bramble, thicket, and trees for hours, waiting for an older buck to appear.

As with baseball, Rodriguez started hunting as a kid, tagging along with his uncle, a wildlife biologist who introduced him to the concept of state-regulated deer population management.

“It’s not like the first thing that has horns is what I shoot,” Rodriguez explained one day in the O’s clubhouse, describing his fascination with food plots, forage, and a healthy deer herd. (On Instagram this offseason, he posted a picture of himself smiling in camouflage behind his “first Axis buck.”)

He said he plans on hunting on the Eastern Shore this year, too. “We don’t want to diminish the herd,” he said. “You’re actually trying to grow the deer population. In return, we get to harvest the mature deer. There’s a lot that goes into it.”

Sort of like pitching. On the mound, there’s a hunt-or-be-hunted game between pitcher and hitter that casual fans don’t see but is the heart of professional baseball. Is Rodriguez going to throw his good fastball on the first pitch? Probably, but maybe not. Will he throw one again in a two-strike count to punch a batter out? Possibly. Or, as the hitter might guess, will catcher Adley Rutschman call for the nasty changeup?

Hitters also watch pitchers’ arm angles and deliveries for hints, as do advance scouts, looking for a “tell” about what may be coming. The best pitchers throw different pitches with the same motion and hand location every time.

“That’s a big thing,” Rodriguez says. “It’s called tunneling, making it harder for the hitter to pick it up out of your hand, so they don’t know the difference between a fastball, a changeup, a curve ball, or a slider.”

Having the physical skill to throw different pitches consistently in the strike zone is one thing, but mastering the mental game can be a difference between a good pitcher and a great one. More often than not, Rodriguez has his good stuff these days, but when he doesn’t, he knows it’s still his job to throw strikes, no matter the conditions or pressure. Even with his trusty fastball, command remains a challenge at times for the young starter.

“Some days are better than others,” he says. “Sometimes you break the plate into thirds, halves, or just the whole thing [is your target].”

When you’re a prospect as hyped as Rodriguez, fans expect greatness out of the gate. And for the most part, Rodriguez has delivered. But the truth is, Rodriguez—along with fellow young stars Gunnar Henderson, Adley Rutschman, Colton Cowser, and Jordan Westburg—is still improving, learning from the experience that comes from playing at the highest level.

Last year, Rodriguez threw more than 120 innings for the first time as a pro, helping the O’s win 101 games. But everything ended abruptly in the postseason, when they were swept out of the AL Division Series in three games by the eventual World Series champion Texas Rangers (one of Rodriguez’s favorite teams growing up).

It was Rodriguez’s rough Game 2 performance in front of a jazzed-up home crowd that was cited as a primary cause. He lasted less than two innings, gave up five runs, and walked four in an 11-8 loss. After, he looked downtrodden, lamenting that he couldn’t throw his fastball where he wanted. He figured out he was trying to throw too hard, and his technique broke down. Two nights later, the O’s season was finished.

“A big thing from that game’s going to be experience,” Rodriguez says. “Playoff baseball is a lot different. The stakes are a lot higher. I thought I had to do a lot more than what I’d been doing, and obviously, that wasn’t the case. It’s still nine innings, three outs, three strikes, and everything’s the same. I think that’s going to help me a lot moving forward.”

After that disappointing sweep, one of the O’s front office’s priorities was adding a proven, playoff-caliber starter to the pitching rotation. That became Cy Young Award-winner Corbin Burnes, acquired in a trade with the Milwaukee Brewers, around the same time the O’s learned that Bradish would again miss the start of the season with an injury. If anything, the high-profile trade took pressure off Rodriguez, who entered this season as the team’s No. 2 starter.

“He’s a lot more relaxed [this year] knowing he has a job,” Gilbert Rodriguez says of his son. “When I went to watch him at spring training, I could tell that he’s settled down.”

On days he’s scheduled to pitch in Baltimore, Rodriguez eats breakfast at Miss Shirley’s on Pratt Street. And when he bends his lengthy frame into a seat, he doesn’t need to see a menu.

“Cy Young Omelet, please,” he says, ordering the dish of egg whites mixed with applewood-smoked bacon, spinach, and white cheddar that’s also a favorite of the best pitcher in Orioles history, Hall-of-Famer Jim Palmer. (Palmer won three Cy Young Awards in the 1970s, as the American League’s top pitcher.)

The order is a fitting choice for Rodriguez, and it says something about his attitude. He’s not shy about wanting to reach the standard by which all O’s starting pitchers are measured. When he wakes up the morning of a game he’s starting, it’s not long before he begins thinking about “getting ready to dominate,” though that doesn’t mean jitters don’t creep in.

Before he arrives at the ballpark, Rodriguez “gets his mind relaxed,” he says, often by watching hunting shows. Either that, or educational YouTube videos about deer herd management. In other words, you can put Baltimore on his jersey, but you’ll never take the Texas out of him.

“…YOU CAN PUT BALTIMORE ON HIS JERSEY, BUT YOU’LL NEVER TAKE THE TEXAS OUT OF HIM.”

About 20 minutes before his first start of this season against the visiting Los Angeles Angels, on a chilly Saturday at Camden Yards, Rodriguez looked around at the stadium and the fans in the stands. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Then he started throwing warm-up pitches in the Orioles bullpen to Rutschman.

Seven fastballs. Then, a changeup, a slider, and a cutter, followed by a mix of about a dozen more pitches. In the game, everything came together. Rodriguez followed Burnes’ 11-strikeout, winning Opening Day performance with a career-best nine Ks of his own in six strong innings, where he allowed only one earned run, one walk, and four hits in a 13-4 win.

“That was one of the better outings, for me, that he’s thrown here,” Hyde said. “He was in total command.” Even Palmer, Rodriguez’s breakfast inspiration, noted the excellence in the MASN broadcast booth.

Afterward, Rodriguez smiled in front of his locker.

“I was pretty eager,” he said, standing before an assemblage of reporters and several TV cameras. “That last outing [the playoff loss against Texas] put a sour taste in my mouth. Being able to come back to this ballpark, erase that, and move on to 2024 was pretty big for me.”

Maryland-born country singer Jimmy Charles had been to Preakness before. “But I was throwing beers up to people on the porta-potties,” he said Saturday afternoon, referencing the infield scene he experienced years ago. 

This year, he stood on a black carpet inside the Pimlico Race Course infield near the finish line, wearing a suit, among many others dressed in the same attire. “I definitely wasn’t wearing this, either. This is fancy.” 

Now—wearing a white jacket, matching pants, and a red, yellow, and black flowered shirt—he was about to sing the Star-Spangled Banner ahead of the 149th running of the Preakness Stakes, the second jewel of the Triple Crown. “It’s a huge honor,” he told us.

The Ocean City native, who played football at Towson University, mingled Saturday in the infield, where local celebrities—like Baltimore Ravens wide receiver Zay Flowers and outgoing Maryland Senator Ben Cardin—strolled and dodged the rain beneath dry tents.

But the main attraction that got tens of thousands of fans (though certainly not as many as the 140,000 we’ve seen in prior years) to Park Heights on a rainy day, of course, was the horse race itself. Nine-to-one shot Seize the Grey, a name that alludes to the horse’s color, upset favorite and Kentucky Derby winner Mystic Dan. It was 88-year-old trainer D. Wayne Lukas’ 15th Triple Crown victory, seventh Preakness win, and first since 2013.

It was also a $2 million haul for the 2,570 crowd-funded owners of Seize the Grey, 48 from Maryland and some of whom were in attendance. Many of them filled a busy winner’s circle around Lukas, who was aided by a cane.

“I’ve been to some cattle drives that were more organized than that,” Lukas joked at a post-race press conference, sitting next to lead owner Michael Behrens, the founder of the micro-share service MyRacehorse, and jockey Jaime Torres of Puerto Rico, who won his first Triple Crown race. “This place has been a lot of fun for all of us.”

Afterward, iconic white-haired trainer Bob Baffert, whose lone entrant Imagination finished seventh out of eight horses, congratulated Lukas on the victory as he walked to accept The Woodlawn Vase.

“If I’m going to get beat, you want to see Wayne win it. He’s creeping up on me,” said Baffert, who has won an all-time record 17 Triple Crown races.

The story of Preakness Day is about the race, pomp and pageantry, and infield revelry, yes, but there’s also always the underlying narrative about the setting itself: Pimlico Race Course, a 154-year-old source of nostalgia for those in the horse racing industry.

Pimlico has long been discussed as a place in desperate need of refurbishing, but a litany of rejuvenation plans have never materialized. As of this week, there is (another) new agreement—for real this time, stakeholders insist (again)—to redevelop decrepit Pimlico.

In a deal announced just a few days ago by Governor Wes Moore and The Stronach Group, which has owned the track since 2011, ownership of Pimlico has been transferred to the newly established Maryland Thoroughbred Racetrack Operating Authority, a state-run nonprofit entity that will operate Pimlico year-round.

With the transfer, the state plans to issue $400 million in bonds to fund a “full renovation of Pimlico facilities,” including the grandstand, track, stables, parking, and new hotel and event spaces. The agreement also calls for $10 million of investment into the neighboring Park Heights community—while The Stronach Group keeps the rights to the Preakness and Black-Eyed Susan Stakes for $3 million annually starting in 2026, and gets a two percent cut of the weekend handle (bets on the races.)

“I’m thrilled that we were able to come to an agreement,” Stronach Group CEO Belinda Stronach said during a state Board of Public Works meeting approving the deal. “This has been a long time coming.”

If all goes according to plan, next year’s milestone 150th running of the Preakness will still happen at Pimlico during construction—which could start early next year. The race will then move to Laurel Park’s track 30 miles south of the city in 2026, and return to a rebuilt Pimlico in 2027.

“The good news is it’s not going to be the last one [here],” Lukas said. “I talked to the governor briefly on the stand up there, and I don’t know the details, but this has been a special place not only for me, but a lot of trainers…They know they’ve got a facility that’s not perfect and they really go all out to make sure that everybody is taken care of and it’s a great spot.

“There’s something about the Preakness—that the intensity and attention and everything between the trainers drops down a little bit, by putting us all in the same barn, sharing the same locker room. The camaraderie comes together. This place becomes special.”

The Stronach Group also owns Laurel, which was a former permanent relocation target for the Preakness. Belinda Stronach told us in 2018 she sought to renovate and create a “supertrack” there. Later, debates in Annapolis ensued, given a state law that requires approval to relocate the Preakness race outside of Baltimore. The new deal keeps the Preakness in the city, and The Stronach Group maintains ownership of Laurel, which the state says it will lease from 2025 to 2027 during renovations at Pimlico.

Until shovels are in the ground and cranes are taking wrecking gear to the property, though, it’s hard to say when and what might ultimately come from all the words and paperwork. And even then, the timeline figures to change if history is any indication.

The most recent example: Back in October 2019, The Stronach Group, the city, and the Maryland Horsemen’s Association agreed to a framework to cede ownership of the track to the city (rather than the state) and fund renovations to Pimlico and Laurel with roughly $335 million in state bonds. But action never materialized, partly because of negotiations over tax implications, post-pandemic inflation, and higher borrowing costs that made the original deal unfeasible.

But back to the main event. (The horses, nor most of the people traipsing the muddy infield and waiting to listen to Jack Harlow on Saturday night, couldn’t care less about all of this, we don’t think.)

Before the race, Charles got things going with his rendition of the National Anthem, and he knew to pause for the “O.”

“I’m very aware,” Charles, who lives in Nashville, said beforehand, mentioning its place in the music video to his 2022 song, “It’s A Maryland Thing, You Wouldn’t Understand.” “If I sing it somewhere else, and I don’t hear the ‘O’, it’s like something went wrong. I always give it an extra breath to let everybody get that out of their system.”

About an hour later, the horses vying for the Preakness were loaded into the starting gate on the soggy dirt. They galloped and thumped down the front stretch, then all the way around the one-mile oval and back in front of the crowd to the finish line.

After crossing first atop his gray-haired ride, Torres threw a fist in the air. And just like that, two minutes after the race began, it was all over until next year.