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.”

This year we celebrate our 50th Best of Baltimore issue—our biggest and boldest yet. Subscribe before 6/20 to guarantee your copy commemorating this milestone anniversary. 

“Memorial Stadium? Oh my God. I’m not sure how I would put it. I loved that place. It was home.”

From 1968 to 1974, Linda Warehime Butcher was a Memorial Stadium fixture along with Brooks and Boog, American League pennants, Earl Weaver’s tantrums, and PA announcer Rex Barney calling out, “Give that fan a contract.”

As authentically Bawlmer as Esskay hot dogs and Natty Boh—National Brewing Company president Jerold Hoffberger owned the team in those days—she landed a “job” at 11 years old sweeping off the bases between innings with a big straw broom.

“I was so nervous that first day,” recalls the now-68-year-old lifelong O’s fan. “I don’t know how many people were there, maybe 30,000. I was shy and pretty introverted, and afraid I was going to trip over a base or something.”

Instead, the blonde schoolgirl discovered a previously unknown gift for hijinks. Running from base to base in reverse order—starting at third, closest to the Orioles’ dugout, then to home, the pitcher’s mound, first, second, and back to third—she didn’t just sweep the bases, but began sweeping the dirt from the O’s cleats as she scampered past them in the middle of the fifth inning, drawing cheers.

Pretty soon, she started swatting opposing third-base coaches as she ran back to her seat down the left-field line, where the self-described tomboy scooped up foul balls during play as Major League Baseball’s first ball girl.

Sensing which coaches and umpires were game, she coaxed more than a few into playing along. A Red Sox coach pulled out a water pistol and squirted her one game. She soaked him back the next night. A Cleveland coach once sneakily planted a fake mouse on third base, causing Butcher to scream when she came by and knock it halfway home. She kissed an Angel’s coach on the cheek, who promptly fell flat on his backside. A Royals coach once greeted her by doffing his cap and offering a bouquet of flowers that he’d hidden behind his back.

“Jay Mazzone [the O’s batboy who had lost both his hands in a fire at two years old and famously did his job with metal hooks] was in on it,” she notes. “I was in shock. It was touching.”

When Butcher describes the “Old Grey Lady,” as Memorial Stadium was affectionately known, as home, she means it (almost) literally. Her father, a Baltimore police lieutenant, directed traffic. Her three brothers were all on the grounds crew. Her mother came to every game

The gig lasted until she graduated from Overlea High in 1974 and needed a full-time job. Along the way, she landed in Sports Illustrated and the 1970 World Series program—a series during which she smacked umpire Emmett Ashford on the rear before a nationally televised audience. She attended team parades and functions and made appearances on two of television’s most popular shows, To Tell the Truth and What’s My Line?

Today, a bat autographed by the 1970 championship club and a World Series ring that her parents purchased for her 13th birthday  remain cherished mementos—as do so many photographs.

“I went to Opening Day a few years ago and Boog Powell remembered me—it’d been nearly 50 years—and he signed an old photograph of us that I had,” Butcher recalls. “He seemed like a giant, a gentle giant, when I was a girl. But other than [former ace and longtime O’s color man] Jim Palmer, there aren’t many links left between Camden Yards and Memorial Stadium.

“Well, except for Clancy,” the O’s beer vendor who started when he was 15 and is now in his 50th year, she adds. “He was there.”

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.

Sports tend to be a great outlet for a city to express its collective id. And while Baltimore has had plenty of modest, lunch-pail, grind-it-out sports heroes (Johnny Unitas and Cal Ripken, Jr. being the obvious examples), it’s also had more than its fair share of larger-than-life characters.

One of our first great sports celebrities was the Colts’ Artie Donovan, a funny, irreverent raconteur who was as comfortable on The Tonight Show couch as he was on the gridiron. We also had the Orioles’ famously pugnacious Earl Weaver, whose nose-to-nose, spittle-flying, profanity-laced confrontations with umpires, pictured, were the stuff of legends. Weaver often clashed with his gifted right-handed pitcher Jim Palmer, who with his perfect teeth and off-field polish made him a perfect foil to his manager.

The rowdiness of Weaver extended to the fans in the stands, who exuberantly took it upon themselves to improve the National Anthem by inserting a raucous “O!” before “Does that Star-Spangled Banner yet wave?”—a tradition that continues to this day. Meanwhile, at Memorial Stadium, Wild Bill Hagy became an icon for donning that ubiquitous cowboy hat and leading the cheap seats in a pantomimed chant of O-R-I-O-L-E-S. (We also like to think that Hagy is the one responsible for “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” emerging as the official song of the seventh-inning stretch.)

Our tradition of eccentric athletes continues into the 21st century with the preacher-warrior linebacker Ray Lewis and his unforgettable “Hot in Herre” pre-game dance; our delightfully geeky, opera-singing, Royal-Farms-pitching kicker Justin Tucker; and the bubble-blowing, food-loving, do-gooding Adam Jones.

Each of our sports heroes tell us a little something about ourselves—what we value, what makes us laugh and cheer, how we choose to be perceived by the rest of the country. And while there will never be another Donovan, Hagy, or Jones, we’ll undoubtedly find another endearingly oddball athlete to idolize. It’s what we do.

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.

Blast From the Past

May 8, 2016
33rd Street

Fifty years ago today, Frank Robinson launched a home run off Luis Tiant that not only cleared the left field wall but 50 rows of seats, landing in Memorial Stadium’s parking lot. The only HR ever knocked completely out of the park in the Orioles’ history on 33rd Street, the titanic shot was considered such a momentous feat that Robinson received a minute-long standing ovation, and a week later, a flag reading “HERE” was placed atop the bleachers to mark the spot where the ball sailed from the park.

Memorial Stadium, of course, was torn down after the team moved to Camden Yards. However, a popular rec field has since replaced it, with home plate and left field closely aligned to the old diamond’s configurations. So, on this windy afternoon, local resident Mark Melonas is hosting a second flag raising to commemorate the golden anniversary of Robinson’s epic blast. The replica “HERE” flag that Melonas commissioned is even made by the same company that produced the original.

“I wasn’t born yet in 1966, which was also Frank’s first year with the Orioles. But my dad, who was 17 then, told me how much he meant to Baltimore,” says Melonas, 41, a furniture maker. Robinson, later Major League Baseball’s first black manager, led the O’s to their first World Series title that same year, delivering a 410-foot homer in the series-clinching 1-0 win at Memorial Stadium.

“I was sitting in left field that day,” recalls Mark’s dad, Jim Melonas, now 67. “It flew two rows over my head.”

Love of Country

May 15, 2016
Beason Street

The wooden trunk on the floor of this three-story, red-brick boarding house—once a way station for turn-of-the-century newcomers to America known as the Immigration House—reveals much of the building’s history.

Gold lettering on the trunk—one of the artifacts on exhibit at the new Baltimore Immigration Museum, which is hosting an open house this afternoon—reads “Bremen-Baltimore Sept. 25 Dampfer [steamship] Rhein.” It’s a telling inscription pointing to the historic Atlantic route that carried 1.2 million German and Eastern European immigrants to Locust Point between the Civil War and World War I.

Above the trunk, a black and white photograph shows a young man with a bushy mustache, a cap, and an overcoat sitting amid baggage shortly after arrival.

The culmination of years of work by Nicholas Fessenden, a former Friends School history teacher, and his wife, Brigitte, a German-born preservation expert, the budding museum documents Baltimore’s immigration saga, which has been largely overshadowed by New York’s Ellis Island. On this day, a steady stream of Locust Point residents stop by, as well as others interested in learning more about their city and possibly their family’s back-story.

“I’m German on my mother’s side,” says Frank Tewey, whose ancestors lived nearby. “My great-grandmother’s family told her, ‘Never marry a sailor, they all leave.’” But she did—another German immigrant named Gerhardt—and, indeed, he left, heading home to Deutschland to claim a small inheritance. He returned, however.

“My great-grandfather joined the German navy in order to come back and then jumped ship to be with my great-grandmother,” Tewey continues. “Good thing he did. One of their future children, my grandmother, had 63 grandkids when she died.”

Love Shack

June 3, 2016
Hollins Street

Behind the DJ booth, a pair of turntables, and stacks of metal record suitcases, Fred Schneider digs through his 45-rpm collection, handing old-school vinyl selections to host Rob Macy. It’s cramped and hot, and the packed house inside the Lithuanian Hall is twisting and shouting to some of the best—and rarest—greasy rock and roll, Motown, R&B, funk, and soul ever made.

Macy concentrates momentarily as he lowers the needle onto “You’ve Got My Soul on Fire,” and then nods and grins as he lifts off his headphones. “This is sick,” he says, referring to Edwin Starr’s 1973 single.

By midnight, the air is so heavy with perspiration that women are lifting the matted hair from their necks and pinning it atop their head even as they keep moving. It’s mostly twenty- and thirtysomethings, but more than a few Gen Xers have come to see Schneider, the famous party-chasing frontman for the new wave B-52s, who broke out in the late ’70s and early ’80s with hits like “Rock Lobster” and “Private Idaho.”

The vintage recordings behind the first-Friday-of-every-month Save Your Soul dance party—launched two decades ago—are both an homage to the music Schneider loved as a teenager and the organizing principle behind his retro, bouffant-sporting band.

“Word apparently got to Fred that Baltimore had one of the top soul dance parties on the East Coast,” Macy says. “So we invited him and he was game. He’d bought some records and he wanted a place to play ’em.”

As the evening turned to the wee hours of the morning, the 65-year-old singer, who doesn’t appear to have slowed much, hit the dance floor more and more.

“I was showing them all how to boogaloo and shing-a-ling,” says Schneider, who still manages to convey a certain intoxicating blend of Southern-influenced civility and randy mischievousness when he smiles.

“It helped that I was a little bit tipsy.”

Football Stadiums

Today, ESPN ranks M&T Bank Stadium, opened in 1996, as the No. 1 NFL stadium for home-field advantage. Still, we sometimes miss watching Lydell Mitchell et al. scamper across the infield dirt of Memorial Stadium (pictured above).

Memorial Stadium on 33rd Street was tagged “the World’s Loudest Outdoor Insane Asylum” when the Colts played and was known for the antics of O’s cheerleader Wild Bill Hagy.

M+T Bank Stadium, 2007 -Courtesy of The Baltimore Ravens/Shawn Hubbard

Baseball

Oriole Park at Camden Yards takes its name from old Oriole Park, situated on East 29th and Barclay streets.

That was then, this is now

The Glory Days of The Civic Center

From 1962 until its 1986 name change, the Baltimore Arena was known to us as the Civic Center. The facility hosted a number of teams, including the NBA Bullets of Wes Unseld, Gus Johnson, and Earl “the Pearl” Monroe”; the American Hockey League Baltimore Clippers and Skipjacks; and the indoor-soccer team Baltimore Blast. More than a few bands have played here, too, including the Beatles in 1964.

Negro League Baseball, 1941

The Baltimore Elite Giants started in Nashville, arriving in 1938 and staying until 1950, winning two Negro National League titles in that time.

The team (pronounced “EE-lite”) played in the now dismantled Bugle Field on Edison Avenue and Federal Street in East Baltimore.

(Photo reprinted with permission of The Baltimore Sun Media Group. All Rights Reserved.)

Pimlico

Horse Racing

The second oldest racetrack in the country, Pimlico hosted its first races in 1870. Two years before, after a dinner party in Saratoga, NY, Gov. Oden Bowie and prominent racing friends had agreed to hold races featuring horses—then just yearlings—in two years time to commemorate their evening. Bowie pledged to build a model track if the event was held in Baltimore.

Kathy Conrad, retired Baltimore police officer: “Memorial Stadium—when working-class people could afford a baseball or football game.”

Mark Niewiadomski, Hertz Equipment Rental: “The price of crabs is rising as fast as fuel. I miss the old days when I could afford the gas and crabs in a single sitting.”

Pam Ruff, executive director, Maryland Economic Development Association: “I miss the MN sign on the Maryland National Bank building—it used to light up white for snow, red for hot, and blue for cold weather. Also miss the McCormick spice smells when it was downtown.”

LTJG Douglas Piper, U.S. Coast Guard commanding officer: “Lawn chairs saving parking spots during the winter, and summer walks to get snowballs with marshmallow.”

Valerie Kent, marketing manager: “Haussner’s—the art collection, career waitresses, and strawberry pie.”

›› Do you have a question you want answered? E-mail us at mjess@baltimoremagazine.net and your question may be published in an upcoming issue!