No one in Baltimore needed an explanation why a teary-eyed and emotional Michael Phelps, who had just won his 20th gold medal, suddenly burst into laughter atop the podium at the 2016 Rio Olympics. But the rest of the world did.

What was so funny? This is how he explained it to NBC afterward: My boys from Baltimore were down on the other end, and back in Maryland, we all say “O!” for the Orioles during that part of the National Anthem. And all of the sudden I hear them roar “O!” and I knew exactly where it came from, and I just lost it…

Anyone who has ever attended Camden Yards or M&T Bank Stadium—or run in the St. Patrick’s Day 5K, for that matter—is familiar with Baltimoreans shouting “O!” at sporting events in tribute to our beloved Birds during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” But most probably do not know the tradition’s origin story.

It dates, not surprisingly, to the rowdy, it’s-not-over-until-it’s-over summer of 1979. Sparked by a league-leading 48 come-from-behind victories, the Orioles topped all of baseball that year with 102 victories. On 11 occasions, they won after trailing by least three runs. Those O’s also delivered five ninth inning rallies, including a special night on June 22 when Doug DeCinces blasted a two-out, two-run, walk-off homer that sent Memorial Stadium into delirium and launched a phenomenon officially coined “Orioles Magic.”

However, the untold story behind shouting “O!” during the National Anthem did not emerge until many years later. Not until Memorial Stadium’s legendary Section 34 diehards gathered for a reunion after superfan Wild Bill Hagy passed away in 2007.

A local reporter began inquiring how it all started and the Section 34ers pointed the finger at a blonde, 5-foot-2, then-24-year-old Northern High School grad who rarely missed a game. Now 70 and still a diehard, Mary Powers spontaneously yelled “O!” during the first word of the second-to-last line—as in, “O! say does that star-spangled banner yet wave”—completely upsetting the normally solemn hush of the moment. And literally upsetting some patriotic fans in the upper deck around her.

“It was warm that night and I’m pretty sure it was a Friday because there was a big crowd,” recalls Powers, a retired financial services assistant. “A lot of people turned and shot me dirty looks, you know, they didn’t think it was appropriate.”

A local reporter began inquiring how it all started, and the Section 34ers pointed the finger at a blonde, 5-foot-2, then-24-year-old Northern High School grad who rarely missed a game.

One person who did not shoot Powers a dirty look was Hagy, the beer-guzzling, cowboy-hatted Dundalk cab driver famous for leading the O-R-I-O-L-E-S cheers from his Section 34 perch. He glanced back at Powers and smiled.

So did a crazy, then-26-year-old fan named Marty Bass, who confirmed this account shortly before retiring last month after a singular 48-year Baltimore broadcasting career.

“Mary was standing right behind me when I heard her scream ‘O!,’” reiterates Bass, who remains friends with Powers to this day and eventually got her on camera a few years ago to recount the saga.

“We knew Marty as the morning TV guy, but nobody ever treated him any differently than anyone else,” Powers says. “Just one of the group.”

She adds that before most games, she, Bass, and much of the Section 34 crew would pregame nearby at Waverly’s Olympic Lounge, which put out a big deli buffet, especially for the late 8:05 Friday starts. As The Washington Post once noted, not only Memorial Stadium but Waverly itself was colorful—“an interesting mix of working-class blacks, aging socialists, artists, retirees and renovating couples”—with not one but two sports bars just north of 33rd Street and Greenmount, the Olympic Lounge and the Stadium Lounge.

Powers explains the inspiration behind her now‑iconic slice of Baltimore history wasn’t anything she’d thought about beforehand. That summer, she and her baseball pals had simply gotten into the habit of accentuating the “O” at the start of all kinds of words— “O”-ver, “O”-nly, “O”-lympic Lounge, etc.—a jokey way of celebrating the team’s rebound from fourth place the year prior.

Hagy picked up on it the next night and slowly but surely it moved from section to section to the point where it could be heard during broadcasts that fall of the World Series (the results of which will not be discussed here).

Of course, it’s coincidental the pronunciation of “O” is a signature feature of Bawlmerese and that “The Star-Spangled Banner” was penned under bombardment in the city’s historic harbor.

Over time, yelling “O!” didn’t merely catch on, it morphed into a uniquely Baltimore statement of hometown pride.

“But don’t overthink it,” Bass says, winkingly. “It was, and is, just a little fun thing we do.”

Clarence Haskett is recognized the minute he walks into the bar. Granted, the bar is Section 771, across the street from Camden Yards, where, during baseball season, he’s usually the most celebrated personality off the field. Wearing his signature Orioles baseball hat with the brim flipped up, he’s not trying to be inconspicuous on this February night. Quite the contrary. Haskett, 67, makes no bones about it—he loves being Fancy Clancy.

Among the most well-known vendors in the country, Fancy Clancy, as he’s universally known, has been a beer-slinging superstar at Orioles games for 52 seasons. During the course of a home game, he’ll pose for some 40 selfies with fans, always with a genuine smile on his face. Some even pass on other vendors so they can buy their $15 brew from him. He’s been featured on NPR and ESPN. A Virginia-based microbrewery makes Fancy Clancy’s Pilsner, with his illustrated likeness on the can, bulging biceps and all.

Last fall, he worked his first wedding, running down the aisle in full vending uniform, slinging cold ones into the crowd of guests. Who knows—bachelor parties and bar mitzvahs could come next. But how did it happen?

It’s a charming Baltimore story of a man with an intense passion—for the work, yes, but more importantly, the people. Clarence Haskett grew up on the city’s west side and started vending at Memorial Stadium as a teenager in 1974. His first assignment was hawking caramel popcorn, sodas, hot dogs, and peanuts in the upper deck. Back then, he was happy making $50, more than enough to buy a sandwich to eat on the bus ride home.

But his hustle got him noticed. Eventually, he was moved to the more lucrative lower level and given any ballpark’s golden goose: beer.

“I started saying, ‘Two cold cans for two thirsty fans, Clancy’s here with more cold beer,’” says Haskett, a natural showman.

“TWO COLD CANS FOR TWO THIRSTY FANS, CLANCY’S HERE WITH MORE COLD BEER…”

His nickname evolved in segments. As a sprinter at Catonsville Community College, his teammates dubbed him Clancy, after another lightning-fast collegiate runner of the day. Fancy grew from his vending antics.

“In the early ’90s, we had to pour a beer out of the can into a cup,” he says. “Then I learned the technique where I was able to pour two beers into a cup at once. And for some reason, I tried to pour the beer behind my back. And that caught on…[Then one time], this guy walked past and said, ‘That’s pretty fancy, Clancy.’”

So are his statistics, printed on the back of his baseball card-style business cards. From 2004 to 2019, Haskett was the top-selling beer vendor at O’s games, also proudly noting that he ranked number one in sales at RFK Stadium in D.C., from 1986 to 1996, and led the vendor standings at University of Maryland football games from 1981 to 2002. He’s worked four Super Bowls, three Kentucky Derbies, and the Preakness a whopping 32 times.

His most memorable game came on Sept. 6, 1995. Turns out there were two epic records set at Camden Yards that night. As Cal Ripken surpassed Lou Gehrig for most consecutive games played, Haskett bested his own record, taking in $960, he says.

Clancy and Cal have something else in common: They’re both iron men. From 2005 to 2019, Haskett missed only seven games. He attributes that durability to his physical fitness, which is evident to anyone who has seen him sprint up and down the ballpark’s lower-level stairs while holding a bin filled with ice and up to 70 beers. He’s not sure how much it weighs.

“All I know is it gets lighter every sale,” he says.

Now retired from his “other” job with the Maryland Department of Transportation after 32 years, Haskett isn’t thinking about hanging up his bin. Fancy Clancy’s here to stay, which means so is his call that echoes throughout his usual Camden Yards real estate, sections 16 to 27.

“You want it fancy, buy it from Clancy!”

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

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. 

In the 1970s, no baseball team in the American League won more games than the Baltimore Orioles. The names of the players from that era—Brooks, Boog, Eddie–still resonate throughout the city today, but one holds a special place in the hearts of fans: Earl.

Although Earl Weaver stood just 5-foot-7, the team’s legendarily mercurial manager was a giant in the game. The foul-mouthed, heavy-drinking, deep-thinking Weaver was an innovator, among the first managers to embrace technology as a precursor to today’s analytics.

Journalist John W. Miller grew up in Belgium, but when he visited relatives in Maryland, they’d take him to O’s games and shower him with stories of the team’s glory days–especially those of its fiery manager.

“I was blown away by the pageantry, the excitement, all the drunk guys yelling,” says Miller, 47, who went on to play baseball at Mount St. Mary’s University and work as a Wall Street Journal reporter. “It was very exciting. I spent 10 months of the year in Belgium speaking French. This was my American side blasting out. I fell in love with baseball.”

When Weaver died in 2013 at 82, Miller wrote his obituary for the Journal. That led to his new book, an  encompassing and enlightening examination of one of baseball’s most successful and colorful managers.

Baltimoreans like to think of Weaver as one of our own. But he was actually from St. Louis. How did it shape him?
Deeply. Pre World War II, it was a culture of taverns, barbershops, and corner stores. Earl would play a high-school game and then walk or take the trolley to Sportsman’s Park and watch afternoon baseball. He was raised in large part by an uncle who was a bookie. Earl was like a street hustler in a way: smart and clever.

Many diehard Oriole fans might not even know that he was a minor-league second baseman. What kind of player was he?
He signed out of high school and he had four really good minor-league seasons. He was on an upward progression and made one major league spring training [with the St. Louis Cardinals] in 1952…Weaver had great hands and a great batting eye. He walked a lot, he didn’t strike out a lot, and he hit the ball hard. I don’t think he would have been a great big leaguer, but he wouldn’t have embarrassed himself.

When he became a minor league manager and then took over the Orioles in 1968, what was his relationship with his Black players?
I know from talking to people in the family that his vocabulary and manner before he got to the Major Leagues was racist. He used the n-word. In the minors, he lived in the South, and he behaved like people around him. When he got to the Major Leagues, he changed.

He really needed to win over Frank Robinson. And he did. He brokered a deal so Robinson could start managing in Puerto Rico in the winter and then campaigned for him to be hired as Major League Baseball’s first Black manager. Ken Singleton told me that he loved [Weaver]. Eddie Murray loved him. He had a way of respecting people for being fully human that touched Black players. The capacity for this guy to change is an incredible part of his story. In his own memoir, he says, “I evolved.”

He was ejected from an average of six to eight games per season. Was this just theatrics, or did he have a real anger management problem?
In the minors, he had such a bad temper that he once charged an entire dugout by himself. The opposing team beat him up and broke his arm. He had a temper that he often couldn’t control. He came to realize that [arguing with the umpires] was a way of applying pressure that was strategic. It pressured the umpires to make calls that favored the Orioles, but it also deflected pressure from his own players.

When they had a losing streak, he would start getting ejected more because it was a way of blowing off steam for the team and of getting the fans’ attention away from the way the Orioles were playing. There’s a third element, which is that he realized the crowds loved it, and it brought people to the ballpark.

You manage a high-school varsity baseball team in Pittsburgh. How much do you channel Earl Weaver when you coach?
I think Earl Weaver’s simple approach to baseball is really helpful for high-school players. He believed in throwing the ball over the plate and winning battles by changing speeds and throwing your best pitch. The way he saw baseball was that there’s a few things you have to do, and everything else is bullshit. Throw strikes. Draw walks. Put pressure on the defense. He saw baseball as common sense. So yeah, I feel like his spirit is whispering in my ear sometimes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

When he was an elementary school student in Baltimore, Orioles broadcaster Brett Hollander was diagnosed with dyslexia. He understands how much of a hurdle the disability can be for kids, particularly those with no access to support systems.

Through “Going to Bat For Dyslexia,” a gala fundraising event he began in 2022, Hollander supports kids who are struggling with dyslexia in Baltimore by providing fully paid scholarships to attend a summer program at The Odyssey School, which serves children with language learning differences.

The goal is to show that, given the right academic resources, kids with dyslexia can thrive.

“The key is to figure out how to get through it academically, so you can get through it in the world,” he says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Afterward, Rodriguez smiled in front of his locker.

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

Cal Ripken Jr. has long been known as the strong, silent type, definitely not an (Iron)man of many words. But that certainly isn’t true of his son, Ryan.

It’s mid-March and the 30-year-old—who resembles a younger version of his famous father—is recording Episode 61 of his eponymous video podcast in a Harbor East studio, and he’s talking (mostly) sports.

Joined by three co-hosts and a producer who form an irreverent millennial crew, Ripken offers insight into the Orioles’ young star Gunnar Henderson and prized rookie prospect Jackson Holliday. But he and his supporting cast also joke about myriad off-field topics, like a viral story from 15 years ago about a supposed leprechaun spotted in a tree in Alabama.

“We’re way off base here,” Ripken says to his listeners, “but we love it.”

This is part of Ripken’s budding career in modern sports media where anything goes and the economics aren’t great. The Ryan Ripken Show podcast is one of Ripken’s three new, part-time endeavors in broadcasting since he retired from playing Minor League Baseball in 2021.

Unsure what to do after seven combined seasons as a 6-foot-3, left-handed first-baseman in the Washington Nationals’ and Orioles’ organizations, Ripken, who lives in D.C., started providing commentary on local radio and television to gauge a future in media. Now, for a second O’s season, he’s an analyst on 105.7 FM and Fox45 TV.

It’s a big change for him. After he chose to follow his father’s path, determined to play in the big leagues, Ripken admittedly became somewhat guarded. He felt the pressure of obvious comparisons, not just to his father but also his Uncle Billy, who played seven seasons with the O’s, and his grandfather, Cal Sr., who spent 36 years with the O’s as a player and coach.

“That weighed on me heavily,” says Ripken, a 2012 Gilman alum. “I never felt like I could express who I really was. That’s what I hope people see in this next chapter.”

On his podcast, Ripken displays a serious strength in analyzing players’ swings and fielding skills. But he also goofs off and invites friends, like Ravens long-snapper Nick Moore, on for interviews. Ripken wants to show his guests’ genuine personalities—and his own (he says much of his sense of humor comes from his mom, Kelly).

And it’s working; when told that more than 1,000 people are watching his podcast live on X (formerly Twitter), Ripken quips, “In this economy? On a Wednesday night? Are you kidding me?”

Nope, it’s true.

“It’s a lot of fun,” he says. “In the blink of an eye, I’m at a place I didn’t think I’d be.”

A week before Adley Rutschman sent a baseball flying into the right-field sky above Camden Yards at 111 miles per hour—his first home run to hit the concrete of Eutaw Street on a fly, 407 feet away—a neighbor of his parents in suburban Oregon returned another home run ball.  But this wasn’t the standard, tiny white baseball you find in the major leagues or even Little League. Instead, it was a 12-inch circumference yellow Jugs ball, a larger, softer kind made for practice.

Years ago, Rutschman’s dad, Randy, a former college catcher and longtime baseball coach, would pitch dozens of them, night after night, in the driveway to young Adley, who’d smack them with a bat into the cul-de-sac in front of their three-bedroom house. Like an archeological artifact, this returned ball had dirt caked on one half of it and the fade of a decade or so of sunlight on the other. It was unearthed in the digging of a landscape renovation project four houses away.

“I’m giggling,” says Carol Rutschman, Adley’s mom, a longtime high school math teacher. “Because everybody finds the balls in their yard. It’s like a coveted thing—here’s another one, you know?”

Adley sent those balls flying everywhere. Only once did the ever-joyful future slugger foul a ball off and break the front door window. Mom often begged him to come in for dinner.

“I think on Adley’s tombstone, it’s going to say, ‘Just one more,’” his mom says. “That’s what he would always say. He would just want to hit ball after ball after ball.”

It’s almost too perfect of a story, an image of stereotypical Americana. The cute kid (in a cul-de-sac, for crying out loud) dreams about playing professional baseball one day, takes batting practice in relative anonymity from an available father while mom prepares supper. You could make this stuff up, but with Adley Rutschman you don’t have to. It’s all true.

Nature met nurture. Coaching and playing sports is in the Rutschman family DNA. Adley’s grandfather, Ad, still spry at age 91, is a legendary college football and baseball coach in Oregon—the only collegiate coach at any level to win national championships in baseball and football. Randy Rutschman was a college catcher and is a noted coach of the position in the Pacific Northwest. He deliberately did not force his son into baseball. It didn’t work. Throughout his childhood, Rutschman and his younger sister, Josie, enjoyed family “vacations” on road trips around Oregon with the George Fox University and semi-pro teams that their dad coached.

“There was an association from a young age: baseball, vacation. Baseball, fun,” Randy says. “Both kids.”

When he was eight, the same age at which he famously won a regional Pitch, Hit & Run competition in Seattle, Rutschman shagged fly balls with the college guys. At every age, he constantly asked his dad to toss him pitches to hit. “Randy always said yes,” Carol says.

By his early years at Sherwood High, Rutschman was throwing faster than 90 miles per hour off a mound. In fact, college coaches initially recruited the wunderkind as a pitcher. Only after Rutschman kept growing, to the 6-foot- 2, 220-pound specimen he is today, did he become a powerful, switch-hitting, and fundamentally-sound everyday-playing catcher. Pro scouts and agents came sniffing, along with college recruiters.

“You start to develop, figure out your body, your swing gets better,” Rutschman says now, “and then they’re like, ‘Oh, this guy can hit a little bit, too.’”

In April, sitting in the Orioles’ dugout a few hours before a game against the Boston Red Sox, Rutschman is about to hit again, in a real professional batting practice, the type kids watch from the bleachers. Given his background, some may argue his success to this point was preordained. But here’s the thing. There are hundreds, even thousands, of would-be Adley Rutschmans out there. Kids who come from an athletic pedigree, who dream of going pro, and are hyped at a young age. But only a tiny percentage come close to attaining what Rutschman has already accomplished.

THERE ARE HUNDREDS, EVEN THOUSANDS, OF WOULD-BE ADLEY RUTSCHMANS OUT THERE…BUT ONLY A TINY PERCENTAGE COME CLOSE TO ATTAINING WHAT HE HAS ALREADY ACCOMPLISHED. 

 

When I ask him how he’s dealt with the expectations, like being the top-ranked pro prospect for years, he explains: “It’s a process. It’s not natural. You have to work on it.”

In 2018, his Oregon State Beavers won the College World Series and by then Rutschman, a sophomore, was so feared a hitter that in one of the games he was intentionally walked with the bases loaded. Two days after winning a national title, he answered a bunch of congratulatory text messages, then asked his dad to throw him batting practice, already looking ahead to the next thing. Then he became the top overall pick by the Orioles in the 2019 MLB Draft after being referred to by analysts as the “perfect prospect,” given his skill behind the plate and leadership abilities.

Somehow, Rutschman has since met and exceeded every expectation others have had for him. So much so that his likeness—light brown hair and sharp blue eyes included—was recently made into thousands of Captain America-themed giveaway bobbleheads for fans at Camden Yards.

“He’s for sure that guy,” Rutschman’s good friend and teammate Terrin Vavra says of the superhero rep. “He’s in the trenches, he’s battle-tested, and he’s got a little bit of that look to him, too.”

The American hero image tracks for many reasons, both superficial and meaningful. Rutschman is a single, fit, 25-year-old man who wears an (orange and black) uniform and plays with joy and effectiveness in the dirt of the great American pastime. He vanquishes enemies (with home runs and throwing runners out at second) and is “driven to be one of the best in the game,” O’s catching coach Tim Cossins says.

But Rutschman also has a boyish lightness about him that’s infectious. He celebrates victory with his signature, genuine bear hug (often around gargantuan closer Félix Bautista), and he meets every pitcher on their way to the dugout after innings to offer encouragement.

“That’s not traditionally a thing that follows the protocol of professional baseball, for whatever reason,” Cossins says, “but it’s part of his leadership skills, and part of who he is, and it’s unbelievable.”

The catcher’s mitt is Rutschman’s shield, the bat his secret weapon, and seemingly everything he does is smooth—walking, talking, swinging, catching, throwing, even chugging. He did that last one, at a fan’s urging, a few days before spring training, while behind the second-floor horseshoe bar at Checkerspot Brewing near Oriole Park. In a team-organized “Birdland Caravan” event designed to build interest for the season, fans screamed across the room: “We love you, Adley!” “MVP!” “Chug a beer!” It had been a long day of glad-handing. So he took one down, without spilling a drop on his orange jersey or the floor.

After being drafted, Rutschman moved as quickly as possible through the O’s minor-league system. The pandemic is the only thing that managed to slow him. He finished second in A.L. Rookie of the Year voting in 2022 and hit .254 with 13 homers and 42 runs batted in.

Broadly speaking, Rutschman’s early-season call-up to the majors was the undeniable catalyst for the Orioles’ unexpected 10-game summer win streak that signaled the end of a moribund stretch of Baltimore baseball. It also marked an acceleration of the years-long organizational rebuild that officially began when the club drafted Rutschman four years ago. That plan, by the way, is in a new phase now, according to him.

“We’re going,” Rutschman says, meaning to better places, like, as of press time, the second-best record in all of baseball. “We’re going right now.”

Rutschman is soft-spoken and tends to lead by example, so when he speaks, you can’t help but listen carefully. This year’s Orioles roster, filled with twentysomethings and other top prospects like infielder Gunnar Henderson, is already getting used to winning in the majors and having Little League-like fun doing it. (See: the water-themed celebrations.) And there’s more young talent coming, like 2022 No. 1 overall pick Jackson Holliday, who’s already making waves in a minor league system that ranks among the best in the sport.

This is everything Rutschman—and Orioles fans—have wanted to see for years, and it’s reminiscent of the magical, glory days of the franchise back in the 1960s, ’70s, and early ’80s when the minors were similarly stacked, Memorial Stadium rocked, and three World Series were won.

When Rutschman talks more about this, and his place in remaking a professional baseball team into a winner, he is profound and revealing.

“When it first started,” he says, meaning the hype, “and you start to feel those expectations creep into your mind—maybe you get some anxiety—for me it was about identifying that those thoughts were there and trying to redirect them: ‘What do I care about? What can I control? And what goals can I make for myself to maximize this day?’”

To Rutschman, that means intense practice and repetition—every day. “This is something I told myself—if I maximize today and I maximize the next day and the next day, regardless of the results, if I’m not the number-one overall pick, if I don’t live up to other people’s expectations, at least I have no regrets because I put in the work, and I can live with that.”

“HE’S IN THE TRENCHES, HE’S BATTLE-TESTED, AND HE’S GOT A LITTLE BIT OF THAT LOOK TO HIM, TOO.”

 

It’s not just his work ethic that makes him feel old school. Rutschman is something of a throwback to the pre-digital days when nobody considered chronicling their every accomplishment in public. As all players do, he typically gets to Camden Yards about five and a half hours before first pitch. He’ll have meetings with coaches to go through the scouting report, talk with the media, have soft toss in the outfield, and hit batting practice, which fans can see.

But perhaps the most important parts of his pregame routine are done in private. In the batting cages, whether beneath the seats at Camden Yards or on the road, Cossins and Rutschman practice various scenarios he could face in the game. Framing pitches. Blocking balls in the dirt. Gripping the ball in the glove in such a way as to maximize throwing accuracy against would-be base stealers. Players all practice to varying degrees, but Rutschman’s focus is “impressive,” Cossins says.

“He’s grading his work, his routines, his performances in the games, and that’s what makes him special. Once you get the gear on him and you get in the cage and you start sweating, that’s when you really get a chance to know him.”

The same goes away from the stadium, at the beach on the Oregon coast. Given the option to do anything during last year’s All-Star break (the last such opportunity he might have for a while), Rutschman didn’t choose to cut loose in a city with bustling nightlife. Instead, he asked a group of close friends from back home if they wanted to meet at his parents’ modest beach home. He was content staring down a Pacific sunset, then building a campfire, a longtime favorite activity. You didn’t see any of this on Instagram.

Rutschman’s had a smartphone since middle school but is mindful of not getting absorbed by it, a common issue among his peers (and everyone).

“It’s so easy to play the comparison game nowadays,” he says. “It makes everything that much harder.”

He’s occasionally appeared in comical TikTok videos with his sister and seems most active around Christmas. But when he posts something on Instagram, it’s usually a re-share from the Orioles’ account showing a final winning score, or a Bible verse of the day. Because Rutschman is genuinely religious. His parents brought him to church as a kid, but he really got personally interested in spirituality at Oregon State, where he visited regularly with a pastor and attended Bible study with teammates. Until now, he’s never talked about his faith in the media because he doesn’t want to force his beliefs on anyone, but when asked, he said it’s “probably the most important thing in my life.” He reads Bible passages for 10 minutes in the locker room before every game and just finished the Book of Psalms, and was starting on Matthew.

“When it comes to things like dealing with expectations, a lot of it stems from my faith and the idea that my purpose is for something bigger than myself,” he says. “Obviously, as humans, we’re not made to be selfless—we’re selfish individuals—but the more I can be focused on my teammates and others around me, that takes a little bit of the pressure off of myself…It’s the backbone of everything, every decision I make.”

On the field, Rutschman is already considered one of the best catchers in Major League Baseball, and he’s not even done with his first full season.

“He makes it look really easy,” says Orioles Manager Brandon Hyde, a former minor-league catcher himself. “There’s not much I don’t admire.”

It’s possible Rutschman ends up in the Hall of Fame with a bird on his hat one day or at least a slew of records, though there’s no guarantee—of anything. Injuries can derail a career at any moment, and business decisions are a reality in pro sports. As of this writing, some fans are clamoring for O’s management to sign Rutschman to a multi-year contract extension before he even thinks about free agency in 2029. To this point, O’s General Manager Mike Elias declined get into specifics but said, “Anybody that sits here and watches Orioles games on a nightly basis can sense the impact he’s having and the value that he’s bringing. He’s 25 and getting better still.”

And Rutschman told us, “I really like Baltimore.”

Yet confidence and good times can be fleeting. Rutschman’s first Eutaw Street homer also busted a 0-for-19 hitting slump, serving as a reminder: While it may look like baseball—and life—comes easily to him, none of it actually is easy.

“Life has a way of creeping in and finding new ways to create a negative self-image, self-talk, self-thoughts,” he says.

Sometimes, the cause of anxiety or stress is obvious. Other times, it’s slippery. Rutschman had just such a moment of uncertainty last May during a road trip to Boston, eight days after he made his major league debut. Everything should have felt great. But something was gnawing at him. Maybe it was the slow start he was having at the plate, maybe it was the pressure.

After a Sunday afternoon game at Fenway Park with time to kill, he went to see a movie alone. (Top Gun: Maverick, if you’re curious.) Afterward, on the 30-minute walk back to the team hotel, Rutschman’s mind was racing. “Where was this overwhelming sense of fulfillment and happiness that I was seeking when I set this goal [of reaching the majors]?” he wondered. And then it occurred to him. He was seeking external answers to an internal problem. “It’s classic, ‘Oh, I thought if I had more recognition or a bigger house, whatever, that I’m going to somehow be happy,’” Rutschman says. “And then you find that does not equate to happiness.”

Thoughts racing, he decided to call one of his best friends, former Oregon State teammate Zak Taylor, now a mental performance coach in Oregon who dealt with extreme anxiety when he played baseball. Rutschman told him everything he was feeling and later shared what he figured out on Taylor’s podcast, “The Perspective Project.”

“For me to get a sense of fulfillment, I need to feel like I’m making a difference in other people’s lives,” Rutschman concluded.

What he maybe didn’t realize at that moment was that he already was, just by being who he is.

Opening day for the Orioles this year—Rutschman’s first—was back in Boston, and he put together an epic, history-making performance in a 10-9 win that set the tone for the entire team and season. He homered (on his first swing) and went 5-for-5, the first major league player to do that since 1937. A week later, before the O’s home opener against the Yankees, Rutschman slowed at the I-95 toll plaza on his drive to Camden Yards. In a car next to him was a group of four fans, including one wearing Rutschman’s No. 35 jersey, who recognized him, waved enthusiastically, and smiled.

“It got me excited too,” he said.

This is the full breadth of the Adley Rutschman Experience. Fans embrace him. He embraces them right back and acknowledges the expectations they might have, but none are more important than his own.

On a Saturday morning in February, at a bowling alley near the campus of the University of Maryland, you would have seen this in action. There, at another stop on the team’s preseason tour, when he walked through the front door of the Bowlero as his name was announced, a female college student wearing his jersey loses her breath when he waves and points at her and her sister. From there, Rutschman visits each of the 40 lanes, poses for pictures with dozens of small groups, throws a few bowling balls, and shakes probably more than 100 hands. A grandma asks for a hug, and Rutschman obliges. A mom gives him her 1-year-old boy in a black Orioles T-shirt to hold for a picture. He hesitantly accepts. A gray-haired fan points toward an O’s pennant on the wall, showing the years of the club’s previous World Series championships, and he insists this team win one.

Rutschman smiles and replies: “We’ll see what we can do.”

On the 40th anniversary of the Orioles’ 1983 World Series championship (check out our full feature on the win in our April 2023 issue,) we queried Eddie Murray—the O’s iconic, switch-hitting slugger, about his memories of that season. The following is a lightly edited version of that email Q&A:

How did you guys feel in spring training and going into Opening Day in 1983? After an epic late-season playoff bid, the team fell just short on the last day of the ’82 season, losing to the Milwaukee Brewers before a packed house at Memorial Stadium. And then of course Earl Weaver retired, and Joe Altobelli was named the new manager in the off-season.
You couldn’t get any more confident than us that year coming in. We lost on the last day of the season in ’82 and I tell you—we really thought we were going to win. To lose that game, we just knew we were winning in ’83, and we actually came out and did exactly that. I think any coach could tell we believed in ourselves, and we did.

Was there also lingering disappointment from 1979, when the team lost the World Series to the Pirates, or from coming so close to the playoffs in ’80 and ’81, as well as ’82?
The ‘82 season gave us all of the fuel we needed. We were really close at the end, and it was really disappointing. To get up 3-1 [in the World Series], and to lose, that was really tough. You just try to keep moving on and dust it off your shoulders.

In those Orioles Magic days, when the club was smashing attendance records at Memorial Stadium, what was the biggest reason for the team’s incredible success?
The reason we won is because we really believed in what we were doing. You have to catch the ball in order to win, and you have to be able to pitch the ball. A lot of people would come in and would play us knowing we weren’t going to give them the game. It was going to be a tough game. We weren’t going to make a lot of errors—it was what Baltimore was known for. Teams had to go out there and play their complete game because we weren’t going to give it to them.

You were in a bit of a World Series slump going into what proved to be the decisive Game 5 in Philadelphia. As any O’s fan of a certain age recalls, you subsequently smashed two home runs to pace the series-clinching, 5-0 win. What were you thinking in the clubhouse beforehand, and what’s your recollection of that game?
[Veteran second baseman] Richie Dauer comes over and says, “How you doing kid? How you doing?” And I say, “What do you mean, ‘How am I doing? I’m doing good.’” Then Richie starts running around the locker room yelling, “The kid’s guaranteed it! The kid’s guaranteed it.”

I start yelling at Richie not to do that. But I go up to bat the first time and I hit a home run. I come in the dugout, shake everybody’s hand, sit down, and then I look at Richie and say, “Richie, that’s not it.” So, I go up to bat the second time, and I think I hit my name on the scoreboard. I come back in the dugout, shake everybody’s hand, and sit down and look down at the end of the bench and say, “Richie, that’s not it.”

You don’t want people to know what’s hurting, but I only actually had one good swing [in me] batting right-handed. I turn to the end of the dugout and, when they bring in a left-handed pitcher, I look down the dugout and I say, “I’ve got one swing.” I get up to bat and I hit it out of the ballpark into the upper deck, but it just misses the foul pole by five feet. [Nearly, a third home run.] Then I say to myself “Oh god, that’s it. Now all I can do is poke the ball to right field.”

With the franchise in decline by the late-’80s, you were eventually traded, playing for the Dodgers, Mets, and Indians before coming home to Baltimore and hitting your 500th home run at Camden Yards in 1996. Did it feel like a full circle moment for you like it did for the fans?
Absolutely, but you’re glad to get it over. You’re just so close and glad to get there. I told Cal as soon as I came in the door that particular day, that I would hit it that day. He asked me why, and I said “Well, nobody had bothered me. Nobody has said anything about it today.” Then we were running our sprints early in the evening after batting practice to get ready for the game. I run my first sprint and I get back and I’m ready to run my second, and I see they’re showing something on the videoboard. I didn’t know it was the same day that Cal broke the record [the year before] for his consecutive games.

I also had to get it in under the 12 a.m. hour because we had rain that day. It was good to get it over with.

So, it’s been 40 years since the last ticker-tape parade for the Orioles, which was just an amazing scene and outpouring of affection for the team. [See photo, above.] We hope there will be another someday, the club finally seems on a solid trajectory, but how well do you remember that experience?
The parade was outstanding. You could play this game a lot of years and not have a parade, so you won’t ever forget it. I can still remember somebody handed me a little kid that was on the car for a little bit with me. The parade is a moment that goes right along with the World Series—you don’t get many of those moments.

“Pretty sure my dad stuffed the ballot box and that’s how I won,” Bonnie Lorber Habyan, voted Miss Oriole 1987, recalls with a smile. “I didn’t know it. I was 22. Years later someone brought it up and I was like, ‘What do you mean?’ And then I heard the stories of him running to the liquor stores on Joppa Road [voting took place wherever Miller Lite, Miss Oriole’s corporate sponsor, was sold]. He just laughed.”

That “Buck” Lorber very much wanted his daughter to win the annual ’80s contest, which came with season tickets, is certain. One indelible childhood memory is her father picking her and her brother up after a day at the pool, her wet back stuck to the vinyl seat of their Chevy Malibu, listening to Chuck Thompson call the action over the car radio.

“Dad thought it was the greatest thing ever when I won.”

Hoping to get a leg up on a career after earning a communications degree, Habyan had entered after winning Miss Harford County the year before. The money was good—$50 a game and $75 per appearance, which included a lot of morning radio plugs—and the perks were nice, such as press box crab cakes and a paid trip to Toronto for a 4-game series. She met Joan Jett and Tom Selleck, among other 1980s royalty.

Although the baseball wasn’t great. The Orioles, unforgettably, started Habyan’s second term in 1988 by dropping their first 21 games. Nonetheless, she developed her public-speaking skills and networked, landing a late-night DJ slot at 106.5 FM, where many of the love-song dedications—Stevie Wonder, Lionel Ritchie, Whitney Houston—came from men serving time at the Maryland Correctional Institution at Jessup.

“We got letters from inmates and phone calls, too, some of which we’d tape while prepping and play over the air at night,” Habyan says. “Some were sweet. Many were sad, of course.”

She left the radio gig for the Big Apple when her boyfriend/future husband got a job in New York—after getting traded to the Yankees.

“I broke the rules,” Lorber admits with a chuckle. “You weren’t allowed to date the ballplayers.”

By his account, then-23-year-old O’s reliever John Habyan first noticed Miss Oriole when she sang the National Anthem before a game. One day while shagging flies as she walked by on her way to a public relations event in the bullpen, O’s outfielder Ken Gerhart asked her if she was seeing anyone, mentioning his buddy’s interest. A South Carolina native with an easy Southern manner, Gerhart convinced her the rule against dating a player was more of a guideline. (In 1984, former Miss Oriole Kathy Lioi had married O’s pitcher Bill Swaggerty.)

Thirty-five years later, the idea of a Miss Oriole contest looks different. Politically incorrect. In fact, Habyan was the last Miss Oriole. (On the other hand, Jim Palmer exposed more skin in those Jockey underwear ads.)

“A team wouldn’t do it today, obviously,” she says, adding the Orioles were a class organization and there were no “Me Too” moments. “Oprah, who did People Are Talking at WJZ, and Jessica Savitch, one of the first female network anchors, were my role models. My father worked at BGE and my mother at Hecht’s, and I didn’t have any contacts. The pageants were a way to help get me into broadcasting. Instead, I learned about marketing with the Orioles and that became my career.”

Habyan is now the chief marketing officer for a New York real estate and financing company. Recently, she penned a memoir, The World According to Bess, about life with her 91-year-old mother, who is struggling with dementia.

“Would I want my daughter to do Miss Oriole today? No. I’m glad she doesn’t have to. When I look at the poster, I don’t think of any of that though. I think of the best summers of my life.”

ven though he’s wearing enemy colors, Ed Soth is greeted the same way he usually is when he walks into Robbie’s First Base—with some good-natured ribbing.

“We’re going to stop letting you in here with that hat,” says Robbie Davis Jr., half of what might be the most well-known Senior-Junior tandem in the world of Baltimore sports . . . memorabilia. “How’d you get to be a Yankees fan?”

The conversation that ensues is similar to ones that take place in bars, at barbershops, and during ballgames every day: a group of old friends shooting the breeze about sports. The fact that it happens to be taking place in what is likely the world’s only sports memorabilia/mail service store just adds to the fun.

When Robbie Davis Sr., 71, opened the store in this small Lutherville strip mall in 1989, he had no idea that one day he’d be working alongside his sons, Robbie Jr., 43, and Matthew, 32. He didn’t know that the business would morph from dealing primarily with FedEx and UPS packages to making deals for Frank Robinson and Johnny Unitas autographs. He certainly couldn’t have imagined that the family would star in an ABC reality series and be featured in a Netflix show scheduled to drop this summer.

The exchange going down is exactly what has attracted television producers, audiences, and, most importantly, regular old customers to Robbie’s.

“I grew up at the old stadium, used to sneak in all the time,” says Soth, who often comes in to send packages and stays to hang out. “Want to hear a funny story?”

It’s a rhetorical question—everyone at Robbie’s is always up for a laugh.

“One day I was there, I’m 11 years old, and I’m sitting in the stands and Mantle is in the field,” Soth says. “Ball is hit, comes right to me, and I reach over and grab [it]. Ball hits me in the hand and falls to the [warning] track. Swear to God, Mantle walks over, picks the ball up, looks at me, and I think he’s gonna toss it up to me. That sonofabitch turned and walked away.”

Sitting at his cluttered desk behind the counter, Senior, as many people call him, lets out a belly laugh. From his slightly less messy desk a few feet away, Junior does the same.

“We have a lot of people who just come in and talk sports,” Junior says. “We get 85-year-old grandmas in here on a Monday morning talking Ravens. They’ll say, ‘Did you see that play that Lamar made?’ I can’t believe my ears. That’s what makes it cool.”

Robbie Davis Sr. grew up in West Baltimore, where, as he likes to remind people, he was a “really good” baseball player at Edmondson-Westside High School.

“I always tell my son that even though he got signed to a pro contract, I was better than him,” he says. “And he can’t refute it, because I’m the only one who’s seen us both play.”

After graduating, he served as a combat medic in the Army before going into the car business. At one point, he co-owned 12 dealerships in Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Among them were All-Star Dodge and All-Star Chevrolet on Route 40. Orioles’ legends Brooks Robinson and Eddie Murray were among the athletes that did commercials for the dealerships, and Davis developed friendships with several guys on the team. When the O’s went on road trips, Davis would occasionally house-sit for Murray.

“Eddie Murray knew me before I knew who he was,” Junior says. “To me he was just a guy who was friends with my dad.”

One of Senior’s partners at the dealership collected baseball cards, and he took note when the man made some money buying and selling them. When he left the car business and opened a postal services store in Catonsville, then another in Lutherville, Senior put out a few boxes of baseball cards on the weekends.

Quickly, he realized that the Topps were topping his sales. He began buying and selling other brands that were hot at the time, like Upper Deck, and closed the Catonsville store to focus on the one in Lutherville.

“. . . THE BEST PART WAS GETTING TO BE AROUND PEOPLE THAT WERE AS PASSIONATE ABOUT COLLECTING MEMORABILIA AS WE ARE.”

“You never have a business where you can make money right away,” he says. “Well, the first month we opened up we were in the black.”

Perhaps his biggest challenge was keeping his sons from playing with his inventory. Where Senior saw an investment, Junior saw a pastime.

“He would buy all these unopened boxes and tell me, ‘Don’t open them,’” Junior recalls. “He would put them in our house in this room, and of course, I’m a little kid, so I’d be in there opening the packs because that’s what kids do. It’s no fun to just sit there and look at a box.”

A baseball addict from a young age, Junior played center field in college and was signed by the Milwaukee Brewers. When his career fizzled out in the minor leagues, he began working with his father in the store. As Robbie’s grew, the Davises began buying and selling all kinds of sports memorabilia: jerseys, autographed baseballs, seats from the old Memorial Stadium and Cole Field House. One of the most expensive items they acquired was a Babe Ruth signed baseball for $20,000. They later sold it for a tidy profit.

As their reputation continued to grow, more and more athletes started stopping by the store. Al Bumbry has been friends with Senior since they met in the mid-’80s. The Orioles Hall of Famer, who was awarded a Bronze Star for his service in the Army during the Vietnam War, still drops in often.

“The store presents a very social, laidback, easygoing atmosphere,” says Bumbry, the 1973 American League Rookie of the Year and a member of Baltimore’s 1983 World Series championship team. “People don’t feel pressured there because Bob’s a people person. Once he connects with you and becomes friends with you, he’s one of those guys that I would take in the foxhole with me.”

Lewis Brown was a 15-year-old kid when he first went to Robbie’s.

“Senior, he likes to take chances on people,” he says. “I didn’t grow up the richest, so sometimes I’d be in there and I’d go, ‘Mom, I want to get this,’ and she’d say, ‘Well I don’t have the money for it.’ There was a Barry Bonds-signed baseball. It was like a hundred and some dollars. He was like, ‘Just take it, and when you get the money just come in and pay for it.’ Ain’t nobody does that.”

It took Brown, now 35, a few weeks to scrape together the money. When he returned to the store, Senior offered him a job. He’s been working there ever since. When he was trying to save $10,000 for a down payment on a house, Senior asked how he was going to do it.

“I was like, ‘I don’t know. I’ll figure it out,’” Brown says. “He goes, ‘I’ll lend you the money and you can just pay me back when you get it.’ That’s the type of guy he is.”

In 2010, the producers of the reality show Pawn Stars contacted the Davises with an idea. They wanted to film a series about the business and its cast of characters. The core four in the show would be Robbie Sr., Robbie Jr., Brown, and Robbie Reier, another longtime employee. There was only one problem: way too many Robbies. Thus, Senior became Senior, Junior became Junior, Brown became “Sweet Lou,” and the then-baby-faced Reier became “Shaggy.”

In 12 episodes of Ball Boys, the guys goofed on each other, debated sports, negotiated with buyers and sellers, and interacted with greats from the sports world. They played basketball with former University of Michigan Fab Fiver Jalen Rose. Hall of Fame quarterback Warren Moon fired footballs at them. The legendary running back Jim Brown came to the store, but of all the sports royalty they met, baseball’s hit king, Pete Rose, was their favorite.

After shooting a segment, Rose asked for a restaurant recommendation for lunch. When Senior told him the production company would only pay a pittance for their food, Rose whipped $10,000 cash out of his pocket.

“He’s the kind of guy that if you go to a bar you want to hang out with,” Senior says.

When Sweet Lou asked for a personalized autograph, Rose wrote, “To Lou, you big fat piece of shit.”

“I loved that,” Brown says.

The show ran for just one season in 2012, but it was rebroadcast for years after that and is still available on ABC’s app. It raised the store’s profile both locally and nationally—they still get customers who say they heard of Robbie’s from Ball Boys.

“It was awesome,” Junior says. “I liked being on TV, but the best part was getting to be around people that were as passionate about collecting memorabilia as we are. We met people from all around the country, and we got to share our stories.”

Bob Windsor, aka Burger King Bob, is milling about the store, going back and forth with Senior about . . .something or other. The two are old friends. They get together on Sundays to watch football at Windsor’s house, where he makes sure Senior always has chips to snack on and Hennessy to wash them down.

An avid collector, he’s bought everything from a Babe Ruth-autographed baseball to Michael Jordan’s shoes at Robbie’s. But the products aren’t what keep him coming back.

“If there was a pot belly stove and an old dog, you’d be there for hours every day,” says Windsor, whose nickname stems from his job as a “financial guy” for several Burger King franchises. “It’s that homey.”

That’s never changed at Robbie’s, but the preferences of memorabilia consumers are ever-evolving. After a down period in the ’90s and 2000s, cards are back in vogue. And not just baseball cards. These days, Pokémon is as popular as Paul Molitor.

“I had a kid buy two $8 packs and he got a $700 card in there,” Junior says. “That’s what these cards are all about now. It’s all about the gamble.”

That being said, there are some athletes whose appeal is timeless in Baltimore. Cal Ripken Jr., Brooks Robinson, Gary Williams, and Ray Lewis items always sell quickly. But there’s one athlete whose popularity Junior says is unprecedented.

“Nothing’s been like Lamar,” he says of the Ravens quarterback. “[Jackson] has been the biggest craze that we’ve seen in this business since we’ve been open. People can’t get enough of him.”

Although the Davises are hometown fans—they live and die with the Orioles and the Ravens—and love sports memorabilia, the business requires a sort of cold lack of sentimentality. Anything they acquire could be gone the next moment.

“People say, ‘Is this for sale?’” Senior says. “I say, ‘Come on, if it’s got a price tag on it, it’s for sale.’”

Still, there are a few items in which they seem to take special pride. Near Senior’s desk hangs a signed photo of Orioles Mike Morgan and Fred Lynn from the mid-’80s. Lynn’s note reads, “To Bob, the second-best ballplayer I know.”

“That’s because I always told him I was as good as him,” Senior says, chuckling.

Above Junior’s desk is another framed photo, this one with Lynn and Eddie Murray standing over Senior, who is sitting in a chair with his then-eight-year-old son, Robbie Jr., on his lap.

Neither of those items have a price tag.

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.

Oh, no. Not again. Light rain sprinkles from the overcast sky above Camden Yards, and Nicole Sherry instinctively unlocks her smartphone to check the weather radar. Because of a series of rain delays during last night’s game, it was nearly 3 a.m. before she got to her Eldersburg home, and now, on this summer afternoon, the 30-person grounds crew that she manages is scattered about the right field grass, once again ready to drag a 170-foot, 2,000-pound tarp across the infield the minute she gives the word. Sherry, the Orioles’ gregarious head groundskeeper, has as many weather apps on her phone as years in her role—15.

“I’m always checking them,” she says, because, well, the digital weathermen can be as unreliable as those on TV. “You have to have a backup for a backup for a backup.”

On this occasion, though, as she sits in the front row behind home plate, four hours before the O’s will play the visiting Houston Astros, one is enough. It’s been raining all morning, but the image on her phone shows a thin line of light blue and green above downtown Baltimore. This spritz is moving east, with nothing else behind it.

“We’re just going to wait it out,” Sherry says softly, looking toward short right field, where one of her full-time assistants is eagerly awaiting orders. Sherry raises her right hand near her neck and makes the universal hand signal for ixnay. “It can take water,” she says of the ballpark’s lush grass. “It took like eight million pounds since last night.”

Sherry, of course, knows Oriole Park, the physical field, better than anyone else alive today. One of only two women in Major League Baseball’s 118-year history to be a head groundskeeper and the first woman to be named professional facilities director for the national Sports Turf Managers Association’s board of directors, she is the keeper of Camden Yards.

It’s not hyperbole to say she knows every patch of grass. Specifically, Kentucky bluegrass, Sherry says, rooted in 12 inches of sand. This time of year, when extreme heat and humidity are the norm in Baltimore, she’s more concerned about the high temperatures causing the grass to dry up than it getting too much water. The grass can drain 16 inches of rain per hour. But the thick infield dirt can’t. That’s why the bulky tarp, and Sherry’s call to use it, is so important.

As a kid growing up in New Castle, Delaware, she never dreamt of monitoring radars and suggesting game delays to umpires. At the age of 9, Sherry was the only girl on her Little League team. Eventually, while pursuing an agriculture degree from Delaware Tech, she visited Camden Yards on an irrigation class field trip and fell in love with the idea of working at the stadium one day.

“I realized I could do this in baseball, my favorite sport,” she says, and the thought of being a woman in a male-dominated profession never crossed her mind. It simply seemed more exciting than working with plants and flowers anywhere else.

Two years after that trip, she cold-called former O’s head groundskeeper Al Capitos and landed an internship with the grounds crew. She was an assistant head groundskeeper for three seasons, then had a three-year run in the minor leagues as the Trenton Thunder’s head groundskeeper in New Jersey. But in November 2006, Capitos left Baltimore for a new job. Shortly after, the head groundskeeper’s office at Camden Yards became hers.

It’s a corner office with a view unlike any other. Beneath the right field seats near the foul pole, a window carved into the wall looks onto the diamond and the westward sky—by design.

“I can actually see the big black clouds coming over the ballpark,” she says, which in the end is way more reliable than some fancy radar.

There aren’t many sounds that tickle Tom Leonard’s ears more in Pickles Pub than the roar of the crowd from across the street at Oriole Park at Camden Yards.

There’s a slight delay on the television feed of the ballgame, so Leonard, who co-owns the bar, knows that, in a matter of seconds, most of his customers (assuming the Yankees or Red Sox aren’t in town) will break into cheers of their own.

Hearing those hoots and hollers on April 8, when the O’s played their first home game in front of fans in 18 months, was like “a large weight coming off my shoulders,” he says. The bar was packed, which in the spring of 2021 means something different than it has for most of Pickles’ more than 30 years as the preeminent before-, during-, and after- the-game watering hole.

Despite coming off a difficult year, business has been booming since this baseball season began.

“It’s like night and day,” says Leonard, who is also the bar’s general manager. “Weather and baseball are huge factors for us. Things look a lot brighter.”

Leonard and his partner never considered closing Pickles permanently, but they made changes to the way they do business in order to mitigate dramatic drops in sales.

Fans who return this season might notice that pizza is no longer available, but staples like the house-made crab pretzel, wings, fries, and tots still are. (Curiously, fried pickles are absent from the Pickles menu.) One of the biggest changes in the kitchen is that meat for burgers is now ground on site daily. Pickles uses a mixture of 40 percent brisket and 60 percent chuck, and the result is a delicious, flavorful, and juicy patty.

At the many picnic tables outside and tables and bar spots in the expansive interior, no shortage of Budweisers, Miller Lites, and Natty Bohs flow. Buckets of 16-ounce domestics go for $17, while premiums, which include Union Duckpin, Flying Dog’s Snake Dog IPA, and Terrapin IPA, are $24.

Don’t sleep on Pickles’ fresh-squeezed crushes. Lemon, lime, and grapefruit are available, but how could an Orioles fan pass on the orange variety, made with Deep Eddy orange vodka, triple sec, and Sierra Mist. A 32-ounce cup of refreshment costs $9.99.

On a Thursday late in April, about an hour before the Orioles went on to beat the Yankees in a glorious Thursday afternoon extra-inning affair, the crowds were back at both Pickles and the ballpark, and all felt right with the world.

“With us, there was never a question of ‘Are we going to make it?’ It was more like, ‘How much of a sacrifice are we going to have to make?’” Leonard says. “My partner and I both realized that we’re where we’re supposed to be, and we’re doing what we want to do.”

Thousands of baseball fans who have flocked back to Pickles this season know exactly what he means.

Steve Dalkowski, who died of COVID-19 last year, is often considered the fastest pitcher in baseball history. Drafted out of high school by the Orioles in 1957, before radar guns, some experts believe the lefthander threw upward of 110 miles per hour.  He also might’ve been the wildest pitcher in history. In one rookie-league game, he struck out 24 batters, walked 18, and threw six wild pitches. Beset by control problems, arm injuries, and alcoholism, Dalkowski never made it to the big leagues, but nonetheless became a legend during his nine years in the minors, partly inspiring the Nuke LaLoosh character in Bull Durham.

This off-season, longtime pitching coach Brian Vikander, with co-writers Alex Thomas and Bill Dembski, wrote Dalko, a biography of the hard-living, hard-throwing fastballer. It’s a one-of-a-kind journey through a bygone era not to be missed by O’s fans.

Steve Dalkowski was a good athlete, but just 5-foot-11, 170 pounds. How did he throw so hard?
There was no wasted energy or effort. Each segment of his pitching motion transitioned to the next. The result was Dalko “cracking the whip.”

Another one of the hardest-throwing pitchers ever, “Sudden” Sam McDowell, wrote a terrific foreword. How do you account for his sharp memory of seeing Dalkowski pitch just once in spring training?
From the time that you are in Little League, every player recognizes and remembers the exceptional players. Finally, someone does something that you did not think possible. That was McDowell’s recollection.

It’s interesting that Earl Weaver, who managed Dalkowski in the minors, was his favorite skipper.
[Former O’s catcher] Andy Etchebarren told me that Earl had a gift in finding ways to “spark” individual players. I would submit that Earl did this for Steve by showing that he had faith in him, that he could trust him, and that fostered a nurturing relationship, which Steve desperately needed. This was the pivotal season in Dalkowski’s career and provided the springboard for his exceptional 1963 spring training, where he made the Orioles roster.

The inconsistency of his performances is incredible. Unhittable one outing, unable to throw a strike the next.
Steve’s difficulties were between the ears. The mind is a dangerous place where too many negatives live rent-free. And the body will go where the mind takes it. As most players are, Steve had been taught to focus on the result—“I am the fastest pitcher of all time, I should strike everyone out, no one should hit me”—not the process.

The most difficult parts of the book revolve around his life-long drinking problem.
A minor leaguer is always on the road. He lacked a foundation and a support group to show him that he was not alone. It was no one’s fault, and certainly drinking was part of the game during this period. It still is. Dalkowski was carrying a lot of baggage. He was billed the hardest thrower of all time, he was expected to produce immediately, and he never made the required introspective journey to find his answers.

All that said, he never quit trying to get better and make it to “The Show.”
He was as an extremely dedicated worker. The question becomes whether or not he was working at the right things. Was he following the right leads? Did he have the right guidance? What if he had thrown strike one and pitched ahead, and then pitched to contact when behind in the count, rather than striking everyone out? The final stop for Steve Dalkowski might have been Cooperstown.

Orioles public address announcer Ryan Wagner kept saying what he always has: “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome…” We couldn’t blame him, or anyone else, for wanting Opening Day to be the same joyful scene it has always has been for so many different people.

But on Wednesday night at Camden Yards, Wagner’s words fell on no ears.

As Orioles manager Brandon Hyde exited the dugout along the first-base line and players followed behind him around 7:22 p.m., the fans that Wagner was addressing weren’t there. Not in the green seats. Not on Eutaw Street grabbing a pre-game Boog’s BBQ sandwich. Not in a downtown parking garage trying to rush to see the first pitch. Not anywhere, except maybe listening on the radio or watching at home.

Officially, it was the Orioles 2020 home opener against the visiting New York Yankees, but the only thing about this one that resembled any of the past openers was the players on both teams wearing fancy pro uniforms—and maybe that those damn Yankees hit a few home runs early and often.

When the Orioles’ Asher Wojciechowski threw the game’s first pitch, it was hard to know anything significant happened. And when, on the second pitch, the Yankees’ second baseman DJ LeMahieu connected for a home run over the right field scoreboard, from the press box, all that was heard were a few echoes of cheers from the visitor’s dugout.

Later, when a lazy foul ball went into the seats, all I heard was the crack of the baseball against the concrete walkway as it landed. We also heard fake crowd noise after the Orioles scored a run, and saw Major League Baseball staff cleaning baseballs. At one point, I realized, shouldn’t the Oriole Bird be here somewhere?

But only the players from the two teams, the umpires, roughly two dozen reporters like me, a handful of photographers and MASN camera operators, and team staff and security guards were actually there. Maybe a few hundred people in all, each having their temperature taken before entering the stadium and wearing masks if they weren’t on the field playing before an empty stadium on a warm summer night.

“It’s just different,” Wojciechowski said of the environment after the Orioles lost 9-3, via a Zoom video call with reporters. “It’s just weird.”

From what we’ve seen from televised games so far, it might have felt less strange watching at home, with announcers talking over the action, ambient crowd noise, and some teams even placing cardboard cutouts of season-ticket holders behind home plate, a very cool idea.

But there’s a hollowness to being there in person. There’s no such thing as home field advantage. You can hear ambulances driving outside. It’s like a vampire sucked the energy from the place. A lot of players have always thanked the fans for being there, and now you can really see why. “There’s no energy,” Hyde said. “You really have to create the energy in your dugout, at a distance.”

Unfortunately, as we know, the fanless scene had happened here before (and will again this year so long as the Orioles play home games this season). The last time was during the height of the unrest following the death of Freddie Gray at the hands of police five years ago, a moment that was revisited during pregame ceremonies, along with a special tribute to team and fan favorite Mo Gaba, who passed away at age 14 after a lifelong battle with cancer on Tuesday.

Today, the backdrop is different. The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown normal life upside down in many ways. Despite that, Major League Baseball and the other major professional sports league are attempting to put on seasons, for entertainment if nothing else. And baseball’s effort—with teams traveling to different cities like everything is normal—has already come with challenges officials hoped wouldn’t arrive this soon.

Originally, the Orioles were supposed to open their abbreviated home season against the Miami Marlins on Wednesday night (after playing them twice in Miami following their season-opening series in Boston), but earlier this week, more than a dozen Marlins players and staff tested positive for COVID-19 after being in Philadelphia, forcing a last-minute scheduling change that put the Yankees in Baltimore for two games.

The Orioles, after flying from Boston to Miami, spent an entire day in the Four Seasons hotel (Hyde recommends the room-service cheeseburger there) while awaiting word on if and when they would play next. They flew back to Baltimore on Monday night and got word Tuesday about playing the Yankees instead. “It’s 2020,” Hyde said. “We’re constantly adjusting.”

Take the story of often-beleaguered slugger Chris Davis, for instance. He spoke to the media on Tuesday about how, despite all the safety protocols—like staying apart in the clubhouse—and just arriving back home after the 24-hour roundtrip to Miami, attempting a season was still worth all the trouble.

“Honestly, the baseball aspect is really what gives you a release,” Davis said. “To be around the guys, to play the game you love, to be out on a baseball field, it takes you a little bit away from everything that’s going on around you—even when you have handwashing stations at the end of dugout and the trainers are spraying hand sanitizer everywhere. There’s enough of a break in between the white lines to give you peace of mind, and allows you to sleep a little better at night, at least there is for me.”

Then the next afternoon, Hyde announced that Davis would be “unavailable” for the home opener, and he hasn’t been around the team the last two days. As per the Orioles policy, you can make your own assumptions on why that is, but a COVID-19 positive test is reasonable. Davis worked out with the team Tuesday night and was penciled in the lineup as designated hitter until sometime Wednesday.

“It’s definitely an unusual year, in every way,” Hyde said. “There’s a lot of things that are really important outside of baseball right now. We’re happy to be playing, but we do know what’s going on outside of our bubble.”

I looked at a picture I took of Opening Day at Camden Yards last year. Fans sat in just about every green seat on a sunny day. The orange carpet lay through centerfield. You could imagine the pomp and circumstance. It felt like I was looking into a time capsule.

It will all come back. We don’t know when, but it will eventually. Until then, though, we’re left with strange scenes that force us to make sense of what we’re seeing.

We think of a few words Hyde uttered the other night from his office at Camden Yards. Someone asked about reports suggesting that Major League Baseball would start playing shorter seven-inning doubleheaders instead of the usual nine-inning game once a day, given the scheduling re-shuffling that was already happening with a COVID-19 outbreak among one team, less than a week into the season.

“This year…” Hyde said, his voice trailing off before he sighed.

And that’s really all that was needed to be said.

There’s a collective sense of heartbreak being felt among players, fans, and the entire city as the Orioles head into their home opener at Camden Yards. Last night, only hours after it was announced that he had been awarded the Wild Bill Hagy Award and elected into the Orioles Hall of Fame, sports superfan Mossila “Mo” Gaba passed away at the age of 14 after his fifth battle with cancer.

Gaba lost his eyesight to a malignant tumor when he was an infant, but his infectious laughter and positive attitude made him a shining light of positivity for sports fans in Baltimore and beyond. He was known for his frequent calls to local sports talk-radio shows and sideline visits with players at the stadiums. He was also honored as the first person to read off an NFL Draft selection from a Braille card in 2019.

Gaba’s outlook on life was perhaps summed up best in a 2018 interview conducted by outfielder Trey Mancini, one of Gaba’s closest friends and supporters: “Every day when I wake up in the morning, I always feel like I’m going to achieve something that’s pretty cool,” Gaba said then, sitting in his wheelchair on the field at Camden Yards. “I just think positive.”

Many local athletes and community members have taken to social media to share tributes to Gaba and send condolences to his mom, Sonsy, and the rest of his family.

While we’re excited the O’s are finally taking the field, it’s hard not to lament the traditions of a typical Opening Day—like seas of fans decked out in orange flocking down Pratt Street to Camden Yards, vendors hawking the requisite peanuts and Natty Bohs, and the scent of greasy ballpark fare wafting throughout the stadium. Though the away opener against the Red Sox on July 24—and the first home game against the Miami Marlins on July 29—will seem surreal with no fans in attendance, local restaurants have us covered with festive food and drink specials to enjoy while watching at home. Here are a few ways to get into the spirit:

The Charmery: It should come as no surprise that master creamer David Alima has dreamed up an orange-inspired ice cream flavor to honor the return of the birds. All Charmery locations in Hampden, Towson, and Federal Hill are now scooping “Squeeze Play,” made with fresh-squeezed orange juice, orange zest, and orang bun(d)t cake.

THB Bagelry & Deli: To celebrate the home opener on Wednesday, July 29, all four THB locations will fill their bins with orange-and-black bagels. Enjoy the one-day-only offering with a classic schmere or your favorite sandwich fillings.

Zeke’s Coffee: Starting with the away opener on July 24, this neighborhood staple on Harford Road will be featuring a special menu of $5 ballpark fare while supplies last. Get your fill of classics like jumbo hot dogs, Pollock Johnny’s, soft pretzels with Zeke’s coffee porter mustard and cheese sauce, and stadium-style nachos with salsa and jalapeños. Round out your pregame platter with $2 Bohs and $3 Brewer’s Art Birdhouse cans.

The Sporty Dog: Nothing says baseball like hotdogs. And this fan-favorite purveyor is ringing in the season by dropping a new menu item. The aptly named “O Dog” is topped with crab meat and mac and cheese made with O-shaped pasta. Order for curbside pickup for the away opener and throughout the weekend.

The Classic Catering People: This Owings Mills-based catering company has crafted an “O”pening Day menu of carryout fare that is meant to make your feel like you’re watching the condiment races and the crab shuffle from the stands. Boxed meal options include fried chicken with macaroni salad and watermelon, crab cakes with coleslaw and Old Bay chips, and a pit beef sandwich pack that feeds four.

Nottingham’s: If you’re backing the birds from Howard County, consider snagging a seat on the patio at this Columbia spot—where the game will be on all screens with sound. Specials for the away opener include $3 draft beers, $6 hot dogs, and $10 burgers served with chips and a Miller Lite or Yuengling.

In the scheme of things, like oh, I don’t know, a global pandemic, tattered economy, eerily empty streets, that sense of “WTF” that’s just hanging in the air like a bad smell, should we even bother to lament the loss of Orioles baseball in Baltimore this spring?

Let’s.

In normal times, even normal hard times, you could count on baseball as a daily distraction this time of year.

But not this year. Oh no. No Opening Day. No daily box scores. No games on TV. No Orioles to fret over, complain about, or see in person at Oriole Park at Camden Yards. Tom Hanks’ character in League of Their Own famously said, “There’s no crying in baseball!” But dare I ask, is there crying when there’s no baseball?

What to do? Like with most things related to the coronavirus crisis, there’s not much we can do but stay home. But since we’re stuck at home, let’s do what baseball fans do best: complain! Without further ado, here’s a list of baseball and Orioles aspects of life I’m missing most right now:

Stolen Memories from Opening Day 2020

The season was set to begin on Thursday, March 25, 2020, with a 3:05 p.m. first pitch against the Yankees. The Yankees! That day was crisp and clear. Sun in the sky and a high of about 60. Every year, I close my office on Opening Day and bring the team down to celebrate the start of the season and the start of spring. Baltimore’s downtown streets and bars would have been packed, full of life, and, dare I suggest, optimism? I know the Orioles weren’t predicted to be very good, but there would have been a sense of hope in the air—along with a whole lot of alcoholic beverages.

The Day-in, Day-out Routine of Following The Orioles

True story: A few years ago, I took a client to an Orioles game. This client, let’s call him, Jason, because that’s his name, was not a big baseball fan. But he was a sports fan, and as we settled into our seats, he asked me, “Greg, do you watch a lot of the Orioles games?” And I said “Jason, I watch all of the Orioles games.”

I’m not completely insane or a masochist. I don’t watch every pitch of every game. I definitely did not follow every game the last two seasons when the Orioles were brutally bad. But I do keep tabs on most games, whether on TV or on the MLB app or the radio. There’s a comfort in having the game on TV as background noise. You don’t have to watch every pitch, but it’s just there, waiting for you.

Going to the Games

Let’s be honest. Baltimore has become much more of a Ravens town throughout the last 20 years. The Orioles own the nostalgia and the history, the Ravens own the passion.

That said, baseball is different in that there’s a game nearly every night. During an Orioles homestand, the downtown area begins to simmer with energy in the late afternoon as the outdoor vendors set up, and the fans start to walk along Conway, Pratt, and Eutaw Streets. Fans from visiting clubs emerge from nearby hotels in their jerseys. The calls of “Five-dollar-hats!—get your five-dollar-hats here!” ring through the air. But not this year. There’s no “cheaper-on-the-outside” hot dogs and icy cold beverages. It’s just quiet.

Obviously, the bars and restaurants around the stadium are hurting—like bars and restaurants everywhere—as are the Orioles’ seasonal employees such as vendors, ushers, and security personnel. As is true for everyone who works in the hospitality industry, these are challenging times. For all of us.

Stadium Food

A subset of missing going to the game is missing the ritual of stadium food. Whether your pleasure is a juicy Boog’s BBQ, funnel cake, Boardwalk fries, a grilled sausage with the works, a crabby mac and cheese dog, tacos, nachos, crab dip-smothered waffle fries, chicken tenders, icy cold draft brews, or flagging down Clancy or Howard the vendor for a canned beer, or cooling off with soft serve in a helmet cup, or… (I could do this for a while)—if you’re anything like me, you miss stadium food.

And it’s not just the food. It’s the planning and talking about what snacks you’re going to get. In my family, if I wasn’t able to tell the 15-year-old (not a huge baseball fan) that he’s getting some tenders and fries and soft serve at the stadium, I’d have a much harder time getting him out of the house.

Bonding Time

All of these experiences—watching on TV, going to the game, talking about the Orioles, texting about them, following them online—create bonds and opportunities for connection with friends and family. Taking my wife and two boys to the game is a good reason to do something together.

Our 12-year-old is a big baseball fan, and the ebb and flow of the season gives us daily opportunities to connect. Last season, for example, we both became big Hanser Alberto fans, as the young infielder found a home with the Orioles and improbably made a run for the batting title. Whenever he came up to hit, one of us would say, “It’s your boy, Hanser Alberto!”

I’ll end with this. Baseball is about family for me. My dad is a huge fan, as was his dad, who left us way back in the mid ’90s. My grandfather took his boys, my father and his brother, to the parade downtown in 1954 to celebrate the Orioles’ arrival from St. Louis. For the last 65 years, Orioles baseball has been a staple of spring in this city. And it will be again, we just have to wait it out, kind of like a very long rain delay.

Greg Abel is the founder and CEO of Abel Communications, a Baltimore public relations firm. He can be reached at greg@abelcommunications.com

What motivated you to write this book?
I felt the conversation about “new school” metrics and numbers in baseball over the last few years got to the point where people were just assuming “old school” guys threw the bats and balls out on the field with no plan. But old school guys have always used numbers and information to come up with a plan to play. I think over these past few years that kind of has either been lost in translation or just assumed it was never the case because there’s so much talk about the new school and all their metrics, information, and numbers.

How much of the inspiration for this book came from how you and Cal grew up learning baseball from your “old-school” dad? Is part of this personal to you, that maybe some of the “old” concepts are being almost forgotten?
Forgotten, overlooked…yeah. First of all, most things that I got in the baseball world kind of went through my father. I’ve been able to take what I did in my career and go up to the MLB Network, where I’ve been for 11 seasons now. I see and do things, but to me it still reverts back to dad. Dad used to say, “You hit it, pitch it, catch it better than the other team and you win.”

When we watch a game today, I don’t think the game has necessarily changed that much. But a lot of the banter surrounding it has changed a lot. I have friends who ask me what a lot the terms they hear on TV mean [like launch angle and spin rate], so that’s why I’ve made a guide. But when you hit it, pitch it, catch it better than the other team, you still win. And that’s held true ever since the game started.

What was your writing process like?
I got an iPad Pro and I just started typing notes. Then I contacted one of my guys up at the network, Moses Messina, who was a researcher and is now a producer, and I started bouncing things off him. I sent notes in an email to him, he sent them back in a chapter format. I’d print the pages and marked in red pen where I needed to make improvements. It was quite the process, but it gave me an awful lot of time to go through things multiple times.

I have to say, to have all the “new school” terms explained in plain English in this book is great. I think a lot of fans hear all these terms like “launch angle” on TV and radio and wonder what they mean.
Babe Ruth had a launch angle. It’s not like this was invented. What was invented was the way to measure it. But when we say launch angle, right away people assume it’s an uppercut swing, which is not the case. Everybody wants to use launch angle as a phrase because it sounds cool, but it’s nothing more than the ball coming off the bat. Anybody who’s ever hit a baseball has a launch angle. It’s contact and what the ball does when it comes off the bat.

The other terminologies that just drive me crazy are when someone on the TV will say, “He worked on his launch angle in the offseason.” Well did he? Because the launch angle is a result. He may have worked on his swing in the offseason, top hand, bottom hand, but you can’t work on a result. You work on your swing, not the launch angle.

Who is the audience for this book? Baseball fans? Youth coaches?
I didn’t really go that far, but I called it the “Old School Guide to New School Baseball” because it is more of a guide. It was my initial thought for anybody watching the game, listening to the game, or anybody who hears a term that might not register. Hopefully I’ve addressed it in the book, and if I can educate a few people along the way as far as what some of these things actually mean and what they do, then I did what I set out to do.

You used the Houston Astros in a few examples in the book, which was obviously written before the sign-stealing scandal broke out. Video sign-stealing is not part of what anybody wants in the new school, right?
I don’t think that belongs anywhere in the old or the new. That was a situation where clearly some people went overboard and crossed the line of what you can and cannot do in sports. The way the conversation has swirled over the past few months, everybody’s on the same page with that. That one doesn’t belong to either school. That was in a situation where somebody or some group decided that they didn’t want to adhere by any rules that were set out there, and they decided to go a little bit rogue.

How do you think the situation ends up? What would you like to see? Baseball seemed like they thought it would kind of pass over, but it seems to not be the case now [in late February].
Over time things go away. I think that’s a realization, but also, we’re still sitting on the back end of the Boston Red Sox investigation going on for what they may or may not have done in 2018. Everything will end up ultimately in a better place for baseball because once these two investigations have concluded and everything’s been talked about, that will give the MLB the area to then rewrite some rules or write some new rules moving forward. And I’m pretty sure they’re going to put things in place that are going to be very detrimental to anybody that wants to overstep the bounds in some of these ways moving forward. Ultimately, I think baseball’s going to be better for this.

About halfway through the book, you write something like, “I’ve been screaming at kids to get off my lawn for the first 14 chapters,” a funny line. I’m bringing it up because you’re an old school person, but are you saying that you’re open-minded to new school ideas?
Here’s what I’m open to: I’m open for information and knowledge. I’m not open for the idea of absolutes and numbers to try to quantify things in certain ways that are being done. If you want to give me all the information you possibly have, I’ll be glad to take that in as a baseball person and a member of the old school and I will use what will make me better. And if I was a manager of a team, I would use what would make my team better. But I would hope on the other side of it, if I was a manager of a team, you would respect the fact that I said, “OK, I don’t want this. I don’t need this because it doesn’t fit in.” I would hope you would respect the fact that I know through my experiences, this is just not going to work.

If you’re outside-of-the-box thinking will make me better with my inside-of-the-box thinking, the inside of my box will grow. I guarantee it. But you have to respect the fact that if I don’t want to use it, I’m not being rigid, I’m not being unable or unwilling to conform to the new thought process. I’m just kind of understanding what these numbers are that you just gave me and they don’t work in my world of baseball so I’m not going to use them.

What percentage of teams would you say have a manager who’s really functioning through the front office during games. In your opinion, is that something that happens too much?
I think, to a degree, all managers should operate through the front office within reason. That should go on. There should be a 50-50 thing going on between manager and front office. Now, where it changes is, I think at 7:05 [the start of a game] the 50 percent that the front office is involved in should go away and the manager takes all 100 percent through the game because he has all the information.

What are your thoughts on the Orioles’ rebuild so far?
I think they’re all smart guys. I think they were a part of a Houston Astros that did some things a little bit different. But I also say throughout the book that the 2017 Astros team, which is a little bit in question as far as what we’ve learned now, they weren’t built anything different than the ‘96 Yankees. Or the Atlanta Braves that made it multiple World Series, or the San Francisco Giants that won a few, or the Boston Red Sox, who went to a couple World Series with their core players.

They were built through the draft and through development of players and I think you could argue that the core of the Astro team was probably better that some of the cores that I just talked about from other teams. And all this is laid out in the book as far as you know, who the players are and what they did.

So when you come here to Baltimore and you’re inheriting a team that’s lost a bunch of games, the first step was last June with the 1-1 [first overall draft pick], Adley Rutschman. You have a pillar there for a possible foundation moving forward. Your other draft picks may set you up to be in that situation to have a core that you can then build around.

A guy like Orioles general manager Mike Elias comes from a scouting background. That’s how he started, and he was a college pitcher. While assistant GM Sig Mejdal is more of the numbers guy. Is that a good way to go about things, blending somebody providing this “new school” information and somebody else from a more traditional scouting background?
Whether it’s the GM and field manager, or GM and the assistant GM and everybody else through the front office, the collaboration has to ring true. I believe Mike Elias was one who was responsible for taking Carlos Correa the draft for the Astros’ if I’m not mistaken. So like I was talking about with Adley Rutschman, that’s your basis to build around. If you can find the dude in the middle of the diamond and you can bring him into an organization, and he’s going to be with you for a while and he’s going to be a pillar. That’s your head start on everything else.