Day 61: June 8, 1991

Baltimore, MD

Park # 67

What I Remember

I remember coming home, sort of. I was from New Jersey but my mom had driven down and went to this game with us and, since going to ballgames growing up was something I usually did with my father or brothers, it might have been the first baseball game I ever went to with my mother.

It also felt like home because Memorial Stadium in Baltimore had always been a field of dreams for me. I started rooting for the Orioles, something I think I have to thank my brother Cal for, when I was six or seven years old and all through my youth I rooted for the O’s. This wasn’t too tough back in those days, the Baltimore Orioles of the 1970s won a lot more than they lost and I went to a playoff game at Memorial Stadium in 1974 and went back for the World Series in 1979.

The 1991 season, however was the latest in a streak of bad years for the Birds and they lost that night to the eventual division champions, the Toronto Blue Jays. There was an interesting article in the program about the new ballpark the Orioles would open the next season on a site “known as Camden Yards.” I’m guessing most people at this Saturday night game had no idea how much that new ballpark would come to be synonymous with great ballpark architecture for decades to come.

As mentioned last night, Doug Melvin, the Orioles minor league director, brought us up to the owner’s box before the game where we not only had an opportunity to meet Roland Hemond, the team’s GM, but David Lamb who had recently written a book about minor league baseball, Stolen Season, which I admired. We even got a blurb about it in the Baltimore Sun two days later.