Fifteen-year-old Mike Sparaco and his buddy, Bill Wheatley, had made plans to meet two girls for miniature golf on Sunday, May 8, 1966. Instead, they got stood up. Not a great feeling, but it happens. On the teenagers’ dejected walk home, however, a greater fate—there is no other word for it—intervened.

While cutting through the parking lot at Memorial Stadium, a roar erupted, causing them both to glance up. Suddenly, fans in the top row of the bleachers began yelling and gesturing toward them.

“We thought, ‘What’s going on?’” Sparaco recalled in a 2016 interview with The Sun. “Bill said, ‘Maybe somebody hit one out.’ I said, ‘Great, maybe we’ll get a new baseball and play with it.’”

The first car he peaked under was a white Cadillac and there was the ball, almost but not quite in reach. “No sooner had I crawled under to get it than all these people came running over. A guy with a transistor radio shouted, ‘Frank Robinson just hit that!’”

Robinson’s blast, off Cleveland’s Louis Tiant, who had tossed three straight shutouts to start the season, was like a scene from The Natural. Departing Memorial Stadium high above the leftfield line, the tiny sphere cleared the Colts’ press box before bouncing over a fence and rolling to a stop 540 feet from home plate.

The Orioles needed to sweep that day’s twin bill to vault into a first-place tie with Cleveland. Buoyed by 11,000 youngsters on hand for Safety Patrol Day, a record crowd of 49,516 watched the O’s take the opener, 8-2, behind Robinson’s first home run of the day.

Paced by his epic first-inning salvo off Tiant, they won again, 8-3, in the second contest. The feat so inspired the city that the team’s booster club, the Orioles Advocates, commemorated it. During a pregame ceremony a week later, they raised an orange flag with black lettering at the spot where the ball exited the park. It simply read “HERE” and flew until the O’s final season on 33rd Street.

More importantly, the moonshot put the American League—and Baltimore, then a Colts town—on notice that the O’s, known for their pitching and defense, were now a potent offensive force as well.

The O’s had acquired the veteran slugger in the offseason from Cincinnati, where Reds’ owner Bill DeWitt described Robinson as “not a young 30” after the deal. The words haunted DeWitt, who would sell the team at year’s end, and lit a fire in Robinson. He smashed a home run in each of his first three games in his new uniform. Still, this one was different.

As Robinson jogged to right field to start the next inning, public-address man Bill LeFevre announced the HR was the first ever hit completely out of Memorial Stadium. During a nearly minute-long standing ovation, Robinson tipped his cap several times.

The moment went beyond baseball. Not only had he spent a decade in Cincinnati before being told to pack his bags, he and his wife, Barbara, had confronted prejudice in buying a house in Baltimore, their adopted, racially diverse, but segregated city.

On the 50th anniversary of the mythic blast, Robinson called the ovation a seminal moment in his career. Hearing the cheering, the slugger told The Sun, “I felt like I really belonged in Baltimore.”

Jackie Robinson was venerated for the abuse he silently withstood while breaking baseball’s color line. Frank Robinson, whose rookie year overlapped Jackie Robinson’s last season, was not a turn-the-other-cheek ballplayer.

“Bad trades are part of baseball—now who can forget Frank Robinson for Milt Pappas, for God’s sake?”—Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon’s character) in Bull Durham.

In early December 1965, when baseball news typically sprinkled the sports section like light snow, the Orioles and Reds announced a swap that would rank among the most consequential in the history of professional sports. So much so that, like Boston’s short-sighted sale of a certain larger-than-life Pigtown native to the Yankees, it became a part of baseball lore.

In Cincinnati, DeWitt framed it as forward-looking. Milt Pappas had won 16 games in ’63 and ’64 for the O’s. He was 26 and the team’s all-time winningest pitcher. The Orioles threw in Jack Baldschun, a solid reliever, and untested outfielder Dick Simpson. Suffice to say, none played up to the Reds’ hopes.

Robinson belonged in another class altogether. With guys named Mays, Mantle, Aaron, and Clemente. He had won Rookie-of-the-Year honors, an MVP trophy, and carried Cincinnati to the ’61 pennant. The year prior to the trade, in an era dominated by pitching, he mashed 33 homers and drove in 113 runs. DeWitt, however, a devotee of former Brooklyn Dodger GM Branch Rickey, believed “it was better to trade a player a year early than a year late.” He also maintained his club needed pitching, which was true. Left unmentioned was DeWitt’s contentious relationship with his star.

In Baltimore, the reaction was jubilation.

“Cannons at the four corners!” Harry Dalton, the O’s director of player personnel, shouted upon completing the deal, referring to the power-packed foursome of first baseman Boog Powell, third baseman Brooks Robinson, left fielder Curt Blefary, and the new slugger in right.

Considered one of the sharpest baseball executives ever, Dalton understood how Robinson would impact the O’s lineup. Batting behind him, Brooks and Boog drove in 209 runs. Behind them, Blefary added 23 home runs and another 64 RBIs. Frank? He won the Triple Crown (.316, 49 HRs, 122 RBI) and the MVP—the only player to win the award in both leagues until Shohei Ohtani accomplished the feat in 2024.

The Orioles took the pennant by a landslide nine games. Then, in one of the most dominating World Series performances ever, the O’s swept the favored Los Angeles Dodgers. Robinson drilled a first-inning HR in the opener out west. Then another in the series-clincher here.

“Sometimes, you can point to one incident in a season as a big one,” veteran O’s reliever Moe Drabowsky recalled  to longtime Sun sportswriter John Eisenberg. “To me, when Frank hit that ball out of the stadium off Tiant, it galvanized the whole team. It was like, ‘We’re going to be tough to beat this year.’”

Jackie Robinson was venerated for the abuse he silently withstood while breaking baseball’s color line. Frank Robinson, whose rookie year overlapped Jackie Robinson’s last season, was not a turn-the-other-cheek ballplayer. He leaned over home plate and defied pitchers to throw inside. Hit 198 times in his career, he gained a reputation for dusting himself off and getting his revenge with a retaliatory home run. (Don Drysdale, who Robinson homered off in his first at bat of the ’66 Series, was a familiar nemesis.)

Even at 51 in an old-timers’ game, after being accidentally knocked down by former big-league pitcher Jim Bibby, Robinson dug back in and put one over the fence. Similarly, Robinson was a menace on the basepaths, breaking up double plays like a linebacker. Early in his career, a hard, spikes-up slide into third base led to a scrap with Braves’ Hall of Famer Eddie Matthews, who blackened his eye with a right cross. Robinson had to leave the field, but, true to form, returned for the second game of the doubleheader and responded with a home run and decisive catch.

He had played in segregated environments in Utah and South Carolina in the minor leagues, places where he wasn’t allowed to eat in the same restaurants or stay in the same hotels as his white teammates. Those experiences and others may have hardened his exterior as a young ballplayer.

But, raised in hardscrabble Oakland, California, he was never a go-along-to-get-along type. Neither, coincidentally, were two guys he played ball with growing up—Bill Russell, who became the first Black head coach in the NBA in 1966—and Curt Flood, the Black centerfielder who challenged baseball’s reserve clause and set the stage for free agency in the 1970s.

Robinson, of course, would become baseball’s first Black manager with Cleveland in 1975—and win AL manager of the year honors for helming the O’s 1989 “Why Not?” run. One thing Robinson let his new teammates know was that he didn’t believe in fraternizing with the enemy. The O’s were a little too congenial for his liking.

“If somebody was talking on the field with one of the opposing players, Frank would say, ‘Why do you go out and talk to those guys when in five minutes, you’re going want to kick their butt?’” Powell says. “‘Take them out for dinner after the game. They’re not your friends on the field.’ And he was right and we stuck to that.”

Robinson, who did not lack for a sense of humor despite his fierceness between the lines, also instituted and served as the presiding judge of the team’s Kangaroo Court. With a mop over his head and a broom handle as his gavel, Robinson dispensed fines for mental errors and botched routine plays.

“We only did it after games we won so there’d be no hard feelings. If you threw to the wrong base, it cost you a dollar,” Powell says. “It wasn’t the dollar. It was that someone was paying attention [to your mistake] and you knew it. That was the edge Frank brought to the team.”

“What did Frank mean to the Baltimore Orioles franchise?” Jim Palmer mused, phoning into a MASN show shortly after his ex-teammate passed in 2019. “He put us on the map.”

In fact, Drabowsky’s prediction that the O’s would be “tough to beat” in ’66 after Robinson’s parking lot shot proved an understatement. During Frank Robinson’s playing career in Baltimore, the O’s were the best team in pro sports and maybe the best baseball club ever.

From 1966 to 1971, they won 100 games three times, captured four pennants, and took a second World Series in 1970. (Not incidentally, Drabowsky, who tossed 6-plus innings of scoreless relief in Game 1 of the ’66 Series, played a significant role on several of those clubs.)

To be clear, the Orioles were a very good baseball team before Robinson came over. They finished third in the 10 team AL in ’64 and ’65. And they didn’t just have “cannons at the corners” in ’66. They had Hall of Famers at third in Brooks and at short in Luis Aparicio. And future All-Stars Paul Blair and Davey Johnson stepping into full-time roles in center and at second.

The O’s themselves weren’t sure they needed Frank Robinson. A fourth future Hall of Famer, 20-year-old Jim Palmer, was set to join 23-year-old standout Dave McNally in the rotation.

“When the trade was announced, I was sorry to see Milt go,” Powell recalls from Florida as the 2026 preseason gets underway. “He was a friend, teammate, and a genuinely good pitcher.”

Indeed, Pappas finished with 209 career victories. “I respected Frank, we all did,” Powell says. “But we didn’t know Frank.”

The devotion the team receives today can be traced back to the heyday of Frank and Brooks and that first, unlikely championship 60 years ago.

Robinson had carried a rep in Cincinnati as a difficult guy. That changed quickly. As far as his new teammates were concerned, it was love at first sight. Robinson later commented the city might not have been ready for him, a reference to the housing bias, “but the Orioles were.”

“The day he arrived at spring training, he hit one after another into the palm trees,” Powell says. “I still remember telling Etch [catcher Andy Etchebarren], standing next to me, ‘We’ve taken a step up.’ Frank fit in right from the start. We liked the way he was and didn’t want him to be anyone other than who he was.”

Robinson’s issues with the Reds management stemmed from racial prejudice, salary disputes, and his outspoken personality. Pete Rose later said the club gave him grief for becoming too friendly with Robinson and Vada Pinson, another Black ballplayer. When fans and the Cincinnati media gave Robinson a hard time during the ’65 slump, it convinced DeWitt he could move him without too much blowback.

Meanwhile, Baltimore Afro-American Hall of Fame baseball writer Sam Lacy, civil rights groups, and Black fans had pushed the O’s for years to sign Black players. For their part, the Orioles acknowledged they hoped Robinson would appeal to the city’s “Negro” community.

The team’s leader when he arrived was the guy whose last name he shared. Brooks Robinson’s soft-spoken modesty and civility endeared him to everyone—never more so than when Frank Robinson joined the club.

A six-time All-Star, Brooks had earned his own MVP in 1964. The addition of another superstar, a Black slugger who’d been labeled “a troublemaker” by his previous club, could’ve potentially disrupted the team’s chemistry. But while Frank dealt with remnants of legal segregation in Baltimore, his acceptance in the O’s clubhouse was a non issue. (On the cusp of the World Series, Mayor Theodore McKeldin appealed to bar owners to ignore state law allowing them to ban Black residents: “I find it a distasteful piece of irony that I must make this plea in light of the fact that without Frank Robinson, a person who could be excluded by such business, we would probably have no World Series.”)

In his 1988 autobiography, Extra Innings, Frank said race relations on those Orioles teams were unlike any other club he played for. Brooks and Frank dressed next to each other for the entirety of their six years together in Baltimore, setting the tone for the team. The pair became known as the “Robinson Brothers” and after their playing careers, made a Lite Beer commercial playing off their names and similarities, clarifying, however, “we are not identical twins.”

The images of Brooks and Frank—one from Little Rock, Arkansas, the site of pitched segregation battles, the other from the birthplace of the Black Panthers—standing shoulder to shoulder, hitting in tandem in the heart of O’s batting order spoke volumes during the Civil Rights era.

“I suspect Brooks was the key reason why, for the first time in my 14 years of professional baseball, Black players and white players had drinks together and meals together when we were on the road,” he wrote. “Not every single night, but two or three times on most road trips. None of the players really invited me, Paul Blair, or Sam Bowens to join them. But Brooks might ask me where I was going after a game, and not knowing the restaurants in most American cities, I might say I wasn’t sure. Then Brooks would say something like, ‘Well, Boog, Jerry [Adair], Curt, and I are going over to this restaurant.’”

Winning helps, and Orioles fans responded in kind, embracing the club as never before. The devotion the team receives today can be traced back to the heyday of Frank and Brooks and that first, unlikely championship 60 years ago.

Jim Melonas, whose son, Mark, raised a replica HERE flag at the old Memorial Stadium site—now a recreational field—on the 50th anniversary of Robinson’s home run, grew up in Hamilton. He had started his freshman year at the University of Maryland when the O’s met the Dodgers. He and his friends squeezed into a VW Beetle to greet the team at then-Friendship Airport after they won the first two games in L.A. Then they followed the team to Memorial Stadium.

“Somehow, we got stuck between two of their buses, and were waved into the team parking lot,” Melonas, who went on to a career in business, enthusiastically recalls. “We ended up helping carry some of the players’ bags. It was one of the best moments of my life.”

Though there was an encore. Days later, a girlfriend invited him to Game Four. Her father had an extra ticket. “Frank Robinson’s home run sailed two rows over our heads in left field.”

“Do I remember Frank Robinson coming to Baltimore?” asks Rev. Alvin Hathaway, who grew up with Elijah Cummings in West Baltimore and recently led the restoration of Thurgood Marshall’s elementary school. “I was at City College High School from 1966 to 1969. Those were the Orioles’ hottest years. I worked at Memorial Stadium part-time. Not only do I remember Frank Robinson, I was selling popcorn when Louis Tiant threw that ball that he knocked out of the park.”

Hathaway highlights how accessible Robinson was, as well as the city’s other pro athletes. “You’d see him and his wife, Barbara, at Cross Keys, around town. They were a regal couple. That era of sports figures were community-minded people. He embodied it.”

Hathaway also notes Baltimore was a Colts’ town prior to ’66 in the city’s white—and Black communities. For good reason. “They won championships, and had personalities like Lenny Moore, Jim Parker, Willie Richardson, John Mackey, Lenny Lyles. When Frank came in, this was a homerun guy, and you coupled him with Paul Blair, and things started to shift in terms of African Americans being attentive to the team.”

Academics were important at City College, but so were sports, Hathaway continues, adding he worked 15 to 20 ballgames at Memorial Stadium a year. He carried popcorn because it was light.

“I wanted to see the game,” he says. “I was on left field side when Frank stepped in against Tiant, who came up with that big windup. It was tense already when he threw that pitch, and man, and the next thing, all you heard was ‘pop!’ Everybody turned their head. I dropped my tray. I couldn’t believe how hard he had hit that ball. I still can’t.”

This article first appeared in our April 2026 issue. If you connected with it, consider becoming a print subscriber. 

Larry Lucchino grew up in the Greenfield section of Pittsburgh, the next neighborhood over from Schenley Park and Forbes Field. When the former Orioles president was a kid, he and his buddies only had to jump on a city bus to see Bill Mazeroski, Smoky Burgess, Dick Groat, and a glorious young outfielder named Roberto Clemente in the turn-of-the-century ballpark.

Built in 1909 with Pittsburgh’s finest steel, the elegant, Bouquet Street-situated Forbes Field possessed a wonderful repeating arch and window exterior, copper roof, asymmetrical dimensions, and a scoreboard embedded into the left field wall.

“It was a baseball field in a neighborhood park,” says Lucchino, who was 15 when Mazeroski smashed a walk-off home run over Forbes’ fence in the seventh game of the 1960 World Series. “Maybe the obsession with old ballparks began there. I also grew up going to football games at Pitt Stadium, which was a concrete doughnut,” he continues. “Two different concepts.”

In short, this is why Baltimore has Camden Yards.

Thirty years after the fact, we’ve forgotten that most Baltimoreans—yes, even Orioles fans—would’ve rejected building Camden Yards had it gone to ballot. Funding for renovating Memorial Stadium? Absolutely. Abandoning Memorial Stadium? No way. But all the debates and objections about public money going for a new stadium—recall the Marylanders for Sports Sanity lawsuit?—and about World Series memories and Waverly being left behind, were erased the moment Rick Sutcliffe’s called third strike clinched the O’s Opening Day shutout on April 6, 1992. (Irony: city planner Evans Paull, who lived near Memorial Stadium, had organized the local fan group “Save Our Stadium,” before going to work on, and falling in love with, Camden Yards.)

Of course, the full story behind The Ballpark That Changed Baseball Forever™—the Orioles trademarked the phrase in 2012—is more complicated than a reluctant fan base and the team president’s nostalgia. It involves a city jilted by a duplicitous Colts owner and his snowy night run out of town; an O’s team then-owned by a big-shot Washington lawyer; a stubborn Baltimore mayor on his way to the governor’s mansion; a Syracuse University student’s architectural thesis; and a 31-year-old woman with no baseball experience hired to oversee the entire Camden Yards project.

“It plays. That was my immediate thought after the last out on Opening Day,” says Janet Marie Smith, the sharp urban planner ultimately hired by Lucchino to manage the development of Camden Yards for the Orioles. “You test everything you can. We’d built a scale model to test the impact of the warehouse on the wind. You flush all the toilets at once. You run a vendor check. But you just don’t know until there is a ballgame, and so you hold your breath. Then, the game barely lasted two hours. It ended in the middle of rush hour [because of Opening Day’s late afternoon start], but no traffic jam materialized.”

The combination of parking, trains, and pedestrian access worked. “But no, I didn’t think of it as ‘a hit.’ We had the whole season in front of us.”

The Orioles shortstop that day, who would celebrate his own historic moment at the former train yard three years later, knew otherwise. “It feels like baseball has been played here before,” Cal Ripken Jr. said at the time.

Affectionately known as “The Old Grey Lady of 33rd Street,” Memorial Stadium reached the end of its natural lifespan at the worst of times. Baltimore was a ship taking on water in the economic tumult of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The steepest population decline in city history came in the decade leading to 1980, when 120,000 Baltimoreans, including our NBA team, left for subsidized suburban pastures. Mayor William Donald Schaefer famously responded by charting a bold course and remaking the Inner Harbor, but even as that effort succeeded beyond all hopes, the departures continued. Among others renting moving trucks, our beloved Colts rolled out, heading for a new, domed stadium in Indianapolis. That left the teetering Orioles, who had been sold in 1979 to high-profile Washington defense attorney Edward Bennett Williams. He soon began signing one-year leases at Memorial Stadium, while making his own demands for a new park.

Over the previous decade and a half, Astroturf concrete multipurpose stadiums had been built in St. Louis, Houston, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Arlington, Seattle, Minneapolis—and, yes, Pittsburgh—many replacing historic urban parks. The Washington Senators had been lured to Texas after 1971, and Williams and others in the Orioles front office saw the opportunity to create a regional franchise. The concern in Baltimore was our championship Birds might migrate further south, and, in fact, six months after Williams bought the team, Schaefer said publicly he believed they were on their way to Howard County.

Against expectations, however, Williams assured Schaefer he’d leave his options open about keeping the Orioles in the city. Unlike the owner of the Colts, Williams kept his word to Schaefer, too, giving him time to act, as mayor and then later as governor. Shortly after the Colts left, Schaefer set up a local commission to study the twofold stadium issue—the goals at that point were to lure an NFL team back to Baltimore and renovate Memorial Stadium to keep the Orioles in their nest.

Meanwhile, the Maryland Stadium Authority was formed in 1986 and a new state commission that year recommended a 70,000-seat multi-purpose stadium in Lansdowne in Baltimore County. Their findings touted the beltway-adjacent site because it was equidistant from Baltimore City to Washington. City of Baltimore planners, including Paull, responded with their own study, however, which poked holes in the state’s findings, specifically calling out the wisdom of constructing a massive parking lot that would encircle the stadium, and proposed a bold idea: a brand new stadium in downtown Baltimore, namely Camden Yards. They cited the benefits: public transportation, which would include a new light rail, and nearby hotels, restaurants, bars, and tourist attractions already in place.

“We leaked it to the press,” Paull says proudly today. “It worked. Momentum turned back to a downtown park.”

The Camden Yards location—Port Covington had also been under consideration—had the O’s backing. It satisfied Lucchino’s desire for an urban park and Williams’ wish to move closer (than Memorial Stadium at least) to baseball fans in the D.C. area. Lucchino, all along, had remained adamant about building a baseball-only venue. He’d recognized the friendly confines of Wrigley Field and Fenway Park were the reason Chicagoans and Bostonians turned out even as the Cubs and Red Sox often put mediocre clubs on the field. Williams and Schaefer eventually came around to the idea, too. In 1987, just months after becoming governor, Schaefer pushed the General Assembly to approve the Camden Yards project and then blocked a referendum campaign to put the whole thing on the ’88 ballot—which polls had indicated would not have passed.

Lucchino, who had been hired by Williams to serve as the team’s vice president and general counsel, was promoted to team president in 1988. That off-season, he got a resumé from Janet Marie Smith, which she’d sent on her 31st birthday. She was from Mississippi, but she had studied the Inner Harbor in graduate school. She’d worked on a Battery Park makeover in Manhattan and a similar effort in Los Angeles, though never in baseball. Lucchino found her resumé in his HR director’s “thanks, but no thanks” file.

“This is a woman who is an architect with a master’s degree in urban planning,” Lucchino recalls saying to his HR head, explaining he had enough baseball men around him. “Don’t you think a person with this kind of experience is someone we ought to be talking to?”

Lucchino invited Smith in for an interview and promptly asked if she knew what league had the designated hitter. She rightly took offense and he responded by asking her to look at an early draft of the Camden Yards master plan in his office. She identified some shortcomings in the working design and impressed Lucchino with her mix of baseball knowledge, aesthetic eye, attention to detail, and confidence.

“The plan hadn’t yet come together,” Smith says, recalling the preliminary drawings didn’t fully capture Lucchino’s vision of an old-style ballpark, which took cues from its urban landscape. If he wanted someone who would offer the conventional sports response it wouldn’t have been the right fit, she says.

Little did Smith know her career was about to change forever. Not only did Lucchino hire her for the job, she would go on to oversee ballpark efforts in Atlanta, Boston, and L.A., where she now works for the Dodgers. Twenty years later, in 2009, she returned to supervise Camden Yards’ renovation.

With Smith in place to help carry out Lucchino’s vision, baseball was about to get its first retro ballpark—Lucchino fined staff members $5 whenever one of them used the word “stadium”—of the post-World War II multi-purpose era. But not until Smith and her team figured out what do with the eight-story, 1,116-foot warehouse, the longest brick building east of the Mississippi. The 1899-built B&O warehouse that many people thought was standing in the way of progress, and blocking a potential view of the harbor, instead became the key to its entire concept.

The man who saved the warehouse is largely forgotten today. But it was fifth-year Syracuse architectural student Eric Moss who made the first model of Camden Yards utilizing the neglected B&O building. A Phillies fan who grew up going to Veterans Stadium, Moss had an epiphany during a visit to Fenway. While casting around for a final project idea, he’d become aware of the Orioles’ relocation plans, and the image of the warehouse reminded him of Fenway’s Green Monster. He thought, what if they incorporated the warehouse into the right field fence? Among Moss’ thesis jurors was Syracuse alum Adam Gross of the Baltimore architecture firm Ayers Saint Gross, who hired the young man and brought him and his plans back in the hopes of winning the Camden Yards contract. The Ayers Saint Gross bid didn’t win, but Moss’ idea generated news and buzz.

That said, the back and forth over the warehouse continued for several years. Among the warehouse detractors, notably, was John Steadman, the longtime Evening Sun columnist. “That warehouse offers absolutely nothing, and it destroys the vista of downtown Baltimore,” Steadman wrote. “And if you buy the best seat in the house, next to the Baltimore dugout, you’re going to spend nine innings staring out at a brick wall that reminds me of the Maryland state penitentiary.”

Steadman was wrong, obviously. The warehouse brought in almost everything we value about Camden Yards, and probably now take for granted. For starters, the warehouse, like the train tracks out front, runs north and south. By coincidence, the ideal direction for a third-base line is north and south because it means the sun, crossing east to west, never shines directly in the eyes of batters or outfielders. That also meant that the warehouse could sit perpendicular to the first-base line, and its massive backdrop, as Moss imagined, would create a sense of authentic intimacy.

And it meant Eutaw Street, with the Bromo-Seltzer Tower in view to the north, could be gated at each end on game day, and left open on non-game days to further establish a genuine connection to its immediate environs.

“I’m not gonna say I had all the best ideas,” Moss told Bloomberg CityLab several years ago, “but I still think it would be fun to have the warehouse in play.”

 

“…BUT I STILL THINK IT WOULD BE FUN TO HAVE THE WAREHOUSE IN PLAY.”

 

In the end, the debate around keeping the warehouse came down to the cost of its renovation and whether or not it could be utilized, because the Maryland Stadium Authority didn’t intend to assume care of an empty building. Developer Bill Struever, who was doing groundbreaking adaptive re-use projects around the Inner Harbor, was brought in to provide his expertise and offered encouragement that the warehouse could be put to good use. Once there was a realization the building could house the Orioles’ and Maryland Stadium Authority’s offices, the park’s commissary kitchen, the Stadium Club, and the locker rooms for stadium workers, form and function came together.

“We thought of the warehouse as a natural feature, I said like a cliff or waterfall, that was my soundbite, but it’s true,” says Joe Spear, the lead architect of Camden Yards at what was then HOK Sport and is now Populous. “It was familiar to Baltimoreans and in terms of the city scape, its scale became an important element.” The warehouse remains the ultimate target for lefthanded sluggers. To date, Ken Griffey Jr. is the only batter to reach it, during the 1993 All-Star Home Run Derby.

Another key decision was sinking the field of play 18 feet, which dropped the outfield walls to street level and helped keep the ballpark from towering over nearby rowhouses in Otterbein, Ridgley’s Delight, and Pigtown. Fusing the warehouse with steel rather than concrete infrastructure was a creative choice, adding to the park’s throwback feel and appropriate size. The brick warehouse also served as the foundation of its classic visual composition.

“Once we had a decision to keep the warehouse, we knew the color palette of the warehouse would pretty much become the color palette of the ballpark,” Spear says. “A lot of time went into deciding the absolute best color for the brick.”

It was Smith, he says, noting her research into historic ballparks, who suggested the dark-green slatted seats, another traditional baseball look. The metal frames of the seats, stamped with the emblem of 1890s O’s star Wee Willie Keeler, furthered the pre-modern era vibe. The Oriole birds serving as weathervanes atop the scoreboard were another inspired touch. As was using the “H” and “E” in the block letters of advertisement for T-H-E S-U-N to signal a hit or error. That idea was borrowed directly from Ebbets Field’s legendary Schaefer beer sign.

When the editor of Architect asked if she could take a tour, Spear began to believe they were on to something special. They spent two hours walking around Camden Yards before he finally asked, “What do you think?” She said, “Oh, this place is totally hot. This is going to be a huge story.” He also recalls Herb Belgrad, then the Maryland Stadium Authority chairman, asking how long it would last. “I told him if we do our jobs well, fans will fall in love with it,” Spear recalls. “If the community cherishes it, then they will maintain it and that means it can last ‘indefinitely,’ like Wrigley Field and Fenway Park.”

Inspired by the success of Camden Yards, which drew 3.5 million fans in 1992, including 1.6 million out-of-town visitors who accounted for a 12 percent increase in downtown tourism, retro parks exploded across the U.S. “It put us on the map,” Spear says with a laugh, noting subsequent HOK Sports projects in Cleveland and Denver in 1994 and 1995. The gaudy attendance numbers here largely put to rest questions about the propriety of using state lottery money and state bonds for its construction. (Though not permanently. Earlier this year, the Maryland Stadium Authority told the state legislature they are seeking $1.2 billion for combined upgrades for Camden Yards and M&T Bank Stadium. The Orioles’ current lease expires in two years.)

The literal chef’s kiss was the opening of former star Boog Powell’s BBQ stand—another hit since Opening Day in 1992. Powell had the idea to do it at Memorial Stadium, but it wasn’t viable until Eutaw Street created a cozy corridor behind the right-field wall.

“We’ve had everyone from astronauts to politicians,” Powell told Baltimore a few years ago. “[William] Donald Schaefer stopped by when he was governor, and we shook hands. That was memorable for me. I was a big Donald Schaefer fan.”

The Eutaw Street utilization was critical, not just for delicious barbecue, but for everything else. It enabled home plate to be placed at the site’s south end—an unconventional distance from the park’s main entrances, by creating outfield vistas for fans as they entered, as well as the picnic area. It was while wrestling with some of the dimensions of the field that Murphy recalls receiving an unexpected letter from an older Baltimore baseball fan.

“You could tell an elderly person had written the address,” Murphy recalls. “I opened it and it was a letter from a gentleman that said Babe Ruth’s father’s saloon had been just behind second base in the outfield. We started to research it, you know, and wow, sure enough, he’s right. The building was gone, but at one point, it was there. So that added a little bit more to the sacred-ground aspects of the ballpark. You got goose bumps on your arm.

“That was kind of magical. That was kind of a cool discovery I’ll never forget.”

Or, like Camden Yards, a rediscovery.

Boog Powell had the best view of anyone at a packed Shea Stadium. The O’s slugger had just singled Frank Robinson to third and stood at first base as the potential go-ahead run in the top of the ninth. Only two teams in modern Major League history had posted more regular-season wins than this ’69 Orioles club—the legendary ’54 Indians and ’27 Yankees. But at this confounding moment, Powell and his teammates trailed the New York Mets 1-0 in pivotal Game 4 of the 1969 World Series. More disconcerting: They also trailed the previously laughingstock Mets, who had never finished better than ninth place in the National League, 2-1 in the series.

With two runners on base and one out, Brooks Robinson, who had more All-Star appearances (10) than the Mets had seasons (7) under his belt, stepped to home plate to restore order to the universe. New York manager Gil Hodges slow-walked to the mound to buy time for his fading young starter, but to no avail. On cue, Brooks ripped Tom Seaver’s next delivery into the vast green ocean in right center field. With the ball whizzing by in front of him, Powell took off for second.

Watching clips of the game on YouTube a half-century later, it’s still hard to believe Robinson’s line drive does not hit the turf, skip off the warning track, and bounce to the fence. But out of nowhere, diving headlong into NBC’s shot, comes Ron Swoboda, an outfielder nicknamed “Rocky” because of his less-than-smooth reputation with the glove, who proceeds to make what is possibly the greatest catch in World Series history. Certainly it is the catch of his life—a full-speed, belly-up, lose-your-cap plunge across the Shea grass. As Swoboda staggers to his feet—the 396-feet sign visible on the outfield wall behind him—and improbably finds the ball in his mitt’s leather webbing, Frank Robinson tags and scores from the third. The O’s rally, however, has been thwarted.

“I’ve seen the replay dozens of times,” Swoboda recalls with a laugh. “You know who isn’t in the picture? [Center fielder] Tommie Agee, who was playing Brooks to pull. It was ‘do or die,’ and 99 percent of the way there I didn’t think I was going to make it.”

“Oh, I remember the catch,” Powell says. “I can see it like it happened yesterday. What I don’t remember is how I reacted. I don’t know if I stopped dead halfway between first and second or tried to get back to the bag. I was stunned. Mesmerized.” Destiny on their side, the Mets won on a controversial bunt play in the 10th. After another break from the umps in Game 5—known since as “The Shoe Polish Incident” (Google it)—Swoboda, a fun-loving, career .242 hitter, finished the Orioles with a go-ahead-to-stay double.

That it was the unlikely Swoboda who struck the mortal blow to Baltimore’s last, best hope of a championship in 1969 proved the perfect, fluky capstone to the most heartbreaking year in the annals of professional sports. He was a Sparrows Point kid who grew up going to Memorial Stadium. Brooks Robinson was his favorite baseball player.

“Listen, I worshipped the Orioles and Colts. I still have a John Unitas-autographed Colts helmet in my office,” Swoboda says. “To this day, I practically genuflect every time I walk past it. Fifty years later, it still burns me up they didn’t bring him in earlier in the Super Bowl that year.”

Yes, the 1969 Super Bowl. We’re getting to that.

Heading into the Super Bowl, NBA playoffs, and World Series in 1969, the Colts, Bullets, and Orioles had each posted the best regular-season record in their respective sports—a feat never accomplished before or since by a single city’s franchises. The Colts went 13-1 and redeemed their only loss (to Cleveland) with a 34-0 thrashing of the Browns in the NFL title game. The Colts and the O’s—who topped the Major Leagues in pitching and fielding and finished third overall in runs scored—were bandied about as possibly the greatest teams ever. Maybe they were. But when it mattered most, all three Baltimore powerhouses were soundly toppled in the postseason by underdog squads from the Big Apple.

In January, favored by 18 points, the Colts were upset by the New York Jets of the second-string American Football League. In March, Wes Unseld, Earl “the Pearl” Monroe, and the Bullets were swept in four games by the Knicks. Then, in October . . . where do you begin? For most of the season, the Cinderella Mets lineup averaged 24 years old. (“The last miracle I did was the 1969 Mets. Before that, I think you have to go back to the Red Sea,” George Burns cracked in the movie Oh, God!)

“Not a very good year for Baltimore, was it?” sighs Powell, who knew some of the Colts—the O’s shared the same workplace after all—and watched his buddies lose Super Bowl III from the sidelines in Miami.

Local scribes had a diagnosis for the city’s sports woes: “The New York Syndrome.”

The City That Never Sleeps was a darker place in the 1960s, struggling with poverty, crime, racial strife, and conflicts over the draft and the Vietnam War, like most cities, including Baltimore. But New York also remained exciting and seductive. It was still Broadway, Wall Street, Frank Sinatra, pop art, mod fashion, and Greenwich Village. (Good luck staying awake all night after a shift at Beth Steel or General Motors.) “Tug McGraw and I were naïfs when we arrived in New York,” Swoboda says. “We’d walk around during the day staring at the skyscrapers, talk our way into the audience of The Tonight Show, and then take the subway to the ballpark.”

It certainly wasn’t like that in hardscrabble Baltimore, which acclaimed New York sportswriter Pete Axthelm described as a “dreary city.” Perhaps, although at the time no one imagined a third of the city’s population would flee over the next three decades. Pockets of civic pride and hope remained in Baltimore’s neighborhoods, and it’s not a stretch to say that much of that public optimism was tied to the blue-collar city’s dominating sports teams.

“Oh, we wanted to kill Joe Namath,” recalls former Colt star Tom Matte.

“We have a tendency, and did then, to measure ourselves against New York,” says longtime former Sun columnist Michael Olesker, the author of five books about Baltimore, then a 23-year-old reporter with the Baltimore News-American. “It’s glamorous, and we’re a little insecure about our working-class roots. The Colts were Sunday religion, and 1969 was going to be ‘The Year of the Three Earls’—Earl Morrall, Earl ‘the Pearl,’ and Earl Weaver.” (For non-Baltimore sports historians: Morrall, playing in place of injured Hall-of-Fame quarterback Johnny Unitas, had won the NFL MVP award; the aforementioned Monroe averaged nearly 26 points per game for the Bullets; and the feisty, foulmouthed, diminutive Weaver, of course, managed the Orioles.)

But it didn’t turn out that way.

Ever since free agency entered pro sports in 1976, the teams have become fairly homogenized. Players move from city to city. The Baltimore Ravens are not really from “Baltimore.” They’re a professional football team who happens to play here. Not the case when Unitas, Tom Matte, the Colts’ all-purpose back who spent his entire 12-year career here, the great tight end John Mackey, and all the rest lived in Baltimore, worked at Black & Decker and Sparrows Point, and sold liquor in the off-season. They raised families here. They were part of the community fabric.

In that environment, Unitas’ crew cut, high-top black cleats, and no-nonsense demeanor meant something to a town that valued substance over style.

Conversely, “Broadway Joe” Namath wore a Fu Manchu mustache, expensive suits, mink coats, white cleats, and dated New York actresses. He was the first rock star football player. Sports Illustrated followed him around and chronicled his late-night exploits in a piece titled, “The Sweet Life of Swinging Joe.” He was cocky. Braggadocious. A hedonist anti-hero straight out of Easy Rider, which had been released in the summer of ’69. Namath, like Muhammad Ali, did not play well in Baltimore in those days, when the city was a more of conservative, Southern town.

“Oh, we wanted to kill Joe Namath,” says Tom Matte.

At a dinner given by the Miami Touchdown Club before Super Bowl III, glass of scotch in hand, Namath—18-point spread be damned—responded to a heckler with his famous boast: “We’re gonna win the game. I guarantee it.” The next morning, The Miami Herald dutifully ran “Namath Guarantees Jets Victory” on the front page of its sports section, creating a firestorm. Then Namath repeated his decree when confronted by Lou Michaels, a Colts defensive end and kicker, nearly starting a brawl. This was after Namath, who from the photos appeared to be spending the week lounging by the team hotel’s pool, told a reporter he thought five AFL quarterbacks were better than Morrall—including himself and his backup, Babe Parilli.

It is suffice to recall that Morrall blinked in the klieg lights, heaving three interceptions and failing to see wide-open Jimmy Orr waving his arms in the end zone. The Colts, cut down 16-7, were shut out until the sore-armed Unitas, who also threw an interception, was called upon in the fourth quarter. Namath, named MVP, went on to star in a biker movie with Ann-Margaret, take Raquel Welch to the Academy Awards, and shoot a shaving cream commercial with Farrah Fawcett.

The silver lining? There wasn’t one.

The Colts went 8-5-1 the following year and missed the playoffs. “We were embarrassed, we had embarrassed the whole NFL,” Matte says. “And everyone took it out on us following year.”

“To lose three times to teams from New York was a dagger to the heart. A bloodletting.”

Though it is less remembered because an equally precocious Knicks team sideswiped them in the postseason, the Bullets were the feel-good story in Baltimore in 1969. The Colts and O’s had championship track records. But the year before the Bullets won the most games in the NBA—topping the likes of the Bill Russell-led Celtics and Wilt Chamberlain-led Los Angeles Lakers—Baltimore had finished last in the Eastern Division. The year prior, they were the worst team in the entire NBA—by 10 games.

After the back-to-back basement finishes, they lost the coin flips for the first pick in the draft, too. A blessing in disguise, however. Monroe, taken with the second pick in ’67, and Wes Unseld, taken with the second pick in ’68, each earned Rookie of the Year honors (and Unseld took home the MVP trophy as well). The Bullets leapt from 20 wins to 57 in the process. “I liked to say we lost the coin flip, but won the toss,” recalls former Bullet public relations man Jim Henneman, another longtime Baltimore sportswriter.

With Monroe’s whirling dervish act and Unseld’s length-of-the-court outlet passes, the Bullets became one of the most colorful, fastest-paced, and highest-scoring teams in the league overnight. The Knicks, also an up-and-coming team, had a better bench, however. They trounced a bruised, road-weary Bullets squad by double-digits in the first two games of the opening round of the playoffs.

The much-anticipated series was over before it had started, as were the dreams of a first-ever NBA title in Baltimore. “The NBA All-Star Game had been in Baltimore that January, too,” Henneman remembers. “But it was a bittersweet end to the season.”

In a Greenmount Avenue barroom near Memorial Stadium, Mayor Tommy D’Alesandro III watched Mets left fielder Cleon Jones cradle Davey Johnson’s fly ball and put the World Series—and Baltimore’s three goose eggs—in the books. There were no signs of shock in the subdued tavern, just resignation, and the sense of a familiar tragedy being played out.

“I’m getting used to it,” D’Alesandro told a New York Times reporter on hand, as he drafted yet another good-loser telegram to New York Mayor John Lindsay. “They were making unbelievable plays. I’m going to call a legislative [conference] and see what I can do about an ordinance forbidding Baltimore teams to meet New York teams after the regular season is over.”

Olesker was born in the Bronx, but he moved to Baltimore as a child and grew up a diehard fan of all three local teams. Six years out of City College high school, he took the accumulative losses with less humor than the mayor.

“To lose three times to teams from New York, oh boy, that hurt,” Olesker says. “That was a dagger to the heart. A bloodletting.”

In hindsight, 1969 was a weird year. Strange juxtapositions made it appear the country was being yanked apart at its seams. In January, Richard Nixon was inaugurated and in March, John Lennon and Yoko Ono began their Bed-In For Peace. In July, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. The next month, Woodstock rocked Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in upstate New York. In October, massive demonstrations—the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam—coincided with the afternoon start of Game 4. Mets Fans for Peace handed out flyers with Seaver’s image, highlighting the pitcher’s recent anti-war remarks.

In the context of the sports world, Baltimore’s postseason debacles proved more of a blip than anything else.

The O’s would come back and win another staggering 108 games the following season and dismantle Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine in the 1970 World Series. “Weaver rode us like the whole way like a jockey down the stretch at Pimlico,” recalls Jim Palmer, the O’s Hall of Fame pitcher. After taking their licks following their humiliating defeat to the Jets, the Colts rebounded and won Super Bowl V.

Meanwhile, the Bullets and Knicks continued one of the fiercest rivalries in sports. In 1970, the Knicks, on their way to their first title, bested the Bullets again in the playoffs, but in seven games. The match-ups were epic: Unseld vs. Willis Reed, Gus Johnson vs. Dave DeBusschere, Jack Marin vs. Bill Bradley, Monroe against Walt Frazier, Kevin Loughery against Dick Barnett. The next year, in the Eastern Conference finals, the Bullets broke through and beat the Knicks in seven games.

Of course, nothing lasts forever. As thrilling as they were, the Bullets didn’t draw. The Civic Center wasn’t a great venue and, in the wake of the ’68 Baltimore riots, a lot of fans decided to stay home. Unseld’s uniform still read “Bullets” when they finally won an NBA title in 1978, but now he played in Landover for the Washington Bullets. In 1972, Colts owner Carroll Rosenbloom traded the team to Robert Irsay, and after a flurry of division titles in the mid-’70s, well, we all know how that ended.

By the 1970s, deindustrializing Baltimore was folding under the weight of soaring unemployment, crime, interest rates, and subsidized white flight. Quickly shifting from a segregated, majority-white city to a majority-black city, the social upheaval had been acute during the previous decade.

“Those teams, the Colts and Orioles, in particular, and the Bullets bound the city together through difficult times,” says Olesker.

It was a two-way street.

When the Orioles lost in Game 5 at Shea Stadium, delirious Mets fans rushed the field. In the midst of spontaneous celebrations across New York, the O’s players still had to make their way back to Baltimore. “Shea was going crazy,” recalls Powell. “We had to pack everything up and then deal with some obnoxious fans as we got on the bus to the airport. Nobody really said a word the whole way. It was quiet. Same thing on the flight home.”

Flying into Friendship Airport (now BWI) that evening, Powell was exhausted, dispirited. The Orioles had scheduled a shuttle bus to take most of the players to Memorial Stadium to pick up their cars—the burly first baseman lived in a rowhouse five blocks away in same neighborhood with Dave Johnson and Eddie Watt. He was fond of firing up his backyard barbeque on nights the O’s won. The off-season would be long.

“So, we get off the plane and 5,000 fans are there to greet us, cheering,” Powell recalls. “No cell phones in those days. We had no idea. You can check it—I don’t know if it was 5,000—it might have been 20, but I know the way I felt, it seemed like 5,000. We went toward them, reaching through the fence to shake hands with everyone who had turned out for us. I know I shed a tear. I don’t think there was a dry eye on the team. You don’t have words for something like that.”

It was, to turn a certain phrase around, the worst of times, it was the best of times.

Boog Powell was back in the national news recently when another Boog Powell—the Oakland A’s rookie who takes his nickname from the former O’s great—paid a visit to his renowned BBQ stand before a game.

The meeting of the Boogs got us thinking it was time to catch up with the 76-year-old former MVP, who famously liked to fire up his rowhouse backyard grill behind Memorial Stadium after home games as a ballplayer. 

It’s impossible to measure the positive public relations Boog has generated for the O’s since their move to Camden Yards. As PressBox founder and publisher Stan “The Fan” Charles notes, several teams have tried to replicate the success of Boog’s BBQ, the Phillies, for example, with Greg “The Bull” Luzinski at Citizens Bank Park, but none compare to Boog’s success, which took everybody by surprise—including Boog—when he opened his stand on April 6, 1992. 

I guess the first question is—what did your namesake, the 24-year-old budding Oakland outfielder order when he stopped by? 
We got him a real nice pork sandwich with a little mustard BBQ sauce—he said he didn’t like horseradish—and some onions. 

Nice. He deserved it after nearly reaching the BBQ stand with his first career home run the night before. Whose idea was it to launch a BBQ stand at Camden Yards? 
My idea. I’d tried to do it years earlier at Memorial Stadium, but we couldn’t find a place that would work—that people could get to. Then, a year before Camden Yards opened, I was playing golf with Bobby Footlick, of Bond Distributing, and Hugh Gallagher, who was with Aramark, which had the concession at the ballpark. Hugh and I were celebrating our good round over some drinks when I brought it up.

The bar, where all good ideas are born.
Well, I had been running a marina in Key West and they flew me up for meeting soon enough. They said: ‘What’s it going to take to get you out of Florida?’ I threw out a number.

You already had the recipes.
I had my own ideas about how I liked BBQ sauce. They put me with Camden Yards chef Russell Szekely and we further developed my dry rub. I like it spicy and we took some of the cayenne pepper out of it [laughs]. We kept it simple at first—pork and beef. We sold out on Opening Day. We were caught off guard. It just totally exceeded everybody’s expectations. We’ve could’ve done 10 times as much business that day.

What were the initial struggles?
We were just trying to figure how to handle the lines. It was a great problem to have, but I didn’t want people waiting in lines like they did.

Has anyone come by that stands out?
We’ve had everyone from astronauts to politicians. Donald Schaefer stopped by when he was governor and we shook hands. That was memorable for me. I was a big Donald Schaefer fan. 

The main thing I do out there is to try to make people feel good about coming to the ballpark. We talk a little baseball and it never feels like work to me. The only hard part is the drive to the ballpark. I live in Grasonville. 

You were known in your playing days for firing up your backyard rowhouse barbeque—you lived near Memorial Stadium—and eating and drinking beer pretty late with some of your teammates after games. Was that the start of all this? 
Well, I’m from the South and that’s really where it all starts. But yes, I lived about five blocks from Memorial Stadium and my neighbors would occasionally complain about the noise—we might start at 11 p.m. and be outside until 2 a.m. We didn’t have to go to work in the morning, but they did [more laughter].

So, last question. What about future plans? Hopefully, you’re not retiring anytime soon.
 “I’ve got three more years on my contract. I’ll be here until then, I hope. I’ll be 80. We’ll see after that. I’ll be a free agent. I guess, I deserve that after all these years.

Let’s call what it is—kismet.
First, let’s be clear. Boog Powell is no Boog Powell. By which we mean the rookie Oakland A’s outfielder—a 5-foot-10, 185-pound contact hitter—is hardly Boogian in stature. Nor had the 24-year-old hit a major league home run before Monday. It’s all the more reason to suspect that the baseball gods were in action this week, organizing the circumstances around the young Powell’s first career round-tripper. Not only did he smash his first HR in Baltimore, home of his legendary namesake, his shot over the right-field fence nearly reached the original Boog’s BBQ stand in right field.

The two Boogs—the younger Boog’s real name is Herschel Mack Powell IV, he acquired “Boog” to avoid confusion with his father and grandfather—then met in-person the next day. Naturally, Baltimore’s beloved former first baseman brought lunch. “We got him a real nice pork sandwich with a little mustard BBQ sauce—he said he didn’t like horseradish—and some onions,” big Boog told Baltimore magazine later.

Boog, of course, had nothing but nice things to say about the Oakland ballplayer.

“I’ve known about him for a couple of years now. He’d been with [the] Tampa Bay and Seattle [organizations] before, but it looks like he found home now. He got a hit off Zach Britton the other night and that’s no easy feat for a lefthander.”

Amazingly, there was one more Boog for those two Boogs to meet—“Boog 3”— stout 12-year-old Jeffrey “Boog” Powell of Tennessee’s Little League World Series team, who face-timed with the professional pair while in school Tuesday.

Our Boog, for his own reasons, received his nickname from his dad as a kid. “In the South they call little kids who are often getting into mischief ‘buggers,’ and my dad shortened it to Boog,” he once said. “Hardly anybody ever calls me John. I don’t know if I‘d even turn around if someone called me that.”

Gervonta Davis fights for world title Saturday.
Baltimore’s boxing star—who trained at the Upton Boxing Center—Gervonta Davis will be co-featured in Floyd Mayweather’s junior middleweight bout on Saturday night. Davis will be defending his 130-bound belt for the second time against Francisco Fonseca. “I think I have the skills to be able to carry on what he is leaving the boxing fans with,” Davis told ESPN. “I’m preparing myself to be a great, great fighter and also a big star in the sport.” All the action starts at 9 p.m. on Showtime PPV—or head to places like Corner Charcuterie Bar in Hampden, the QG downtown, or other bars that will be screening the fight.

Manny’s curtain calls.
All we can say is we hope the O’s somehow manage to resign our third baseman. Manny Machado was named American Player of the Week for the period that ended Aug. 20 after hitting four home runs, including a walk-off grand slam, driving in 12 runs, and batting .385. For an encore, Machado blasted another walk-off home run this week—in the 12^th inning no less—to pick up Zach Britton after the O’s closer botched his first save since Sept. 20, 2015. (Yes, nearly two years ago.)

Ravens beef up roster (of their broadcast team).
We don’t need to get into the Ravens depleted roster and injuries woes (see: Joe Flacco’s back). But at least they are adding healthy bodies to their radio squad. The team and 98 Rock/WBAL NewsRadio 1090 announced this week that former tight ends Todd Heap and Dennis Pitta, and former running back Justin Forsett and linebacker Jarrett Johnson—popular, accomplished players one and all—will each join Ravens radio broadcasts for four games this season. They will work alongside play-by-play man Gerry Sandusky and former Baltimore Colt linebacker Stan White this year.

Paddle it forward.
Breast cancer survivor and Havre de Grace-native Carolyn Choate, 59, and her daughter Sydney, 27, left New York in kayaks two weeks ago, expecting to reach the Inner Harbor this Sunday. Their goal along the way is to raise $500,000 in honor of the late Dr. Angela Brodie, a world-renowned researcher at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

Brodie, who passed away this June at 82, developed the new class of drugs that Choate credits with saving her life. Choate, who lives in New Hampshire, was initially given three years to live after her diagnosis 14 years ago. She became to determined to find the researcher who had saved her life, finally meeting Brodie in 2014 at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, receiving a tour of the laboratory where Brodie did her groundbreaking work.

You can follow the kayaking journey here.

Fifty years ago this month, the Baltimore Orioles swept the defending champion Los Angeles Dodgers to win the 1966 World Series. Beloved first baseman (and BBQ master) Boog Powell reflects on that remarkable moment.

After 50 years, you reunited with your 1966 teammates at Camden Yards earlier this season. How was the reunion?
It was everything I expected and more. I was really looking forward to seeing some of my old teammates. Of course, you know, we’ve lost so many, and it just made it that much more special to visit with the ones who were coming back. I was just hoping I could remember what everybody looked like because I hadn’t seen them in so damn long.

It seems like you guys genuinely got along well.
You know, we hung around a lot with each other. It wasn’t like we’d rush off after the game. We had a lot of discussion about what happened that night and learned a lot about our teammates. There was very little animosity between anybody on that team. We didn’t have any fistfights. There was no downright, mean-spirited, “I-hate-you” kind of thing. We all just had one goal in mind, and whatever it took to get it was what we’d do. We just went out and did our job. We just played ball. And there’s the key word right there: play.

That camaraderie must have been pivotal in what happened that season.
Not only that, but we had Frank Robinson, who won the Triple Crown, and Brooks Robinson, Paul Blair, Curt Blefary, Luis Aparicio. You go right down the list and you can’t take anybody out of that equation. We were all a part of it. It was a lifetime experience and the single biggest thrill I ever had as a teammate. I’ve had some good personal moments as far as swinging the bat, but as a team . . . I still get goose bumps when I think about it.

The stars aligned.
Exactly. We had this thing called Kangaroo Court after every game we won. It was a little court session for about five minutes after the game with just the players and coaches. No press was invited. If you thought you had a case, against one of your teammates or some trivial thing as silly as saying hello to somebody in the stands, we talked it out. Frank Robinson was the judge, and he wore an old mop on his head and had a gavel and brought the court to order. It was mock seriousness, and we just had a ball with that. It was something we looked forward to every night, because we only had it when we won, and we didn’t want to lose! Of course, when we lost, we just got dressed and went home.

What was the Kangaroo Court like after you won the World Series?
Well, we didn’t have it! That was the only time we didn’t have it, because we were too busy accepting the trophy from the commissioner of baseball. We had a great celebration, and the city of Baltimore joined right in with us. Everywhere we went, it was like, come on in, dinner’s on us. That wasn’t the idea, you know, but everybody wanted to be a part of it.

We still celebrate it to this day.
You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff I hear when I’m at the ballpark doing my pit beef. Five or six people a night come up and say, ‘Hey man, we really appreciated you guys in ’66. You were special. We’ll never forget you.’ And I just say, ‘Thank you for remembering, because if you didn’t remember, it wouldn’t count.’ It wouldn’t be nearly as special. Those are my exact words, and I really do mean it—I mean it from my heart.

Even with that iconic lineup, you guys were considered the underdogs against the Dodgers. How did it feel leading up to the series? Were you nervous?
We weren’t nervous at all. We considered them a good team—we knew they were a good team. They had the two greatest pitchers of all time: Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale. But that was the question of the day: How are you guys going to deal with it? And I said, I don’t know but we’re going to deal with it! And that was it. We were not intimidated, and we were not afraid. And they were a good team! We beat a damn good team, but we were a damn good team, too.

What was your favorite moment?
When Paul Blair caught the last out. They flied it out to center field and he caught that ball, it was like—wow! This is really something.

There’s that famous moment, now photograph, of Brooks leaping into the air.
Trick photography. Gotta be trick photography. I joke with Brooksy all the time about that. To this day, some 50 year later, it still gives us a good laugh. There’s also a great picture of me holding a Colt 45 with Brooksy standing in the back and Gene Brabender standing on the other side, and that pretty much explains it all. We were feeling really good.

You eventually went off to play with Cleveland, and even Los Angeles, too. What was it about Baltimore that brought you back to Maryland?
Well, my heart never left. I grew up here—I signed with the organization when I was 17, played three years in the minor leagues, and then finally got to Baltimore when I was 20. I did a lot of growing up in this town. All three of my children were born at Union Memorial. We lived right down the street and I felt like we were part of the community. Back in the day, none of us were making enough money to take the winter off so we all had jobs here. I think Jim Palmer worked for a clothing company. Steve Barber worked at a jewelry place. Dave McNally worked at a bank. I worked for a wholesale liquor company, and I had the time of my life working in the wintertime, just going around to different places. I had a family to take care of, and a son, and then in ’66, my wife, Jan, got pregnant with my daughter. She went to L.A. with us, and she was in her eighth month!

Oh my gosh—what a year.
That’s what we were saying! Worrying about how any minute now we’re going to get a call that she’s going to the hospital. But Jan wouldn’t hear it. She wanted to go, she wasn’t going to miss any of the fun, and that’s all there was to it.

What day was your daughter born?
November 3.

That’s pretty close!
She could’ve come at any time.

This year’s team—in first place for a while, now a close second. A lot of people have been comparing your lineups.
It’s kind of hard to compare one team to another just because of the time that’s passed, but they’re awfully good. There’s no doubt about that. But we stack right up. We had Davey Johnson at second base; they’ve got Jonathan Schoop and he’s a hell of a ball player. Then myself and Chris Davis at first base. Of course Luis Aparicio at short, who stacks up pretty good with J.J. Hardy. And then Brooksy at third with Manny Machado. Brooksy is still the greatest third baseman I ever saw. I have a lot of respect for Manny and I might say that about him someday, but not right now though. And of course the outfielders.

What do you think about the prospects of them making the playoffs?
You know, baseball was played a little different back then. Now the pitcher pitches five innings—five and fly, we call it—and then the relievers come in. Back then, you had to get a wrecker to go out and get Jim Palmer out of the game. None of the guys wanted to come out. And I appreciated that and I liked that. It was a different time and a different ballpark. We played in Memorial Stadium. The field was rock hard. This field is like playing on a billiard table. There aren’t any bad hops.

But I think we all had the same thing in mind, and just like these guys, it’s obvious that they’ve got team chemistry. I’m not sure if Buck [Showalter]’s responsible for that or not, but whoever is, it’s working.