The Summer of My Becoming a Seamhead (sort of)
Baseball may no longer be America's national pastime, and it's never been my no. 1, but my beloved Baltimore Orioles are making the summer of '23 one to remember
Major League Baseball has ever had a modest, marginalized claim on my sporting heart. It’s never translated in particularly compelling fashion for me on television, and for much of the past two or three decades, its games often began in evening twilight and, thanks to various plodding progressions of deliberate mound deliveries, innumerable pitching changes, indecipherable strike zones, and batters box shenanigans, often ended around the time of morning newspaper deliveries. I simply could never summon the patience required to follow it all.
I felt further alienated from the sport as analytics seemed to swamp it. The vernacular around the game suddenly seemed a labyrinth of intentionally opaque analytics acronyms. At times when I simply wanted to know if a batter could hit, perhaps with power, or if a pitcher had four reliable pitches and a decent ERA, I was confronted by WHIPs, SLASH lines, OPSes, xFIPs, and WARs. At least with “exit velocity” I could reasonably interpret what a batter had achieved in his at bat.
In many respects I’m a simple man who enjoys a number of simple leisure pursuits. The idea of sipping a cold draft beer or two in a grand old ballpark on a sunny summer weekday while playing hookey from work with a buddy always appealed to me; I never felt like I needed a new lexicon to bolster my enjoyment of it.
My Maryland youth afforded me no small charm from four or five 50-minute pilgrimages by family car from home to grand old creaky Memorial Stadium each summer, home of the Orioles until Camden Yards opened in 1992. My father would take me to actual doubleheaders there (once upon a time Major League Baseball offered two games — played in about the time of the modern game’s one — for the price of a single admission ticket).
The Orioles’ glory years of Frank and Brooks Robinson, Jim Palmer and Dave McNally, Cal Ripken and Eddie Murray, were achieved at Memorial Stadium, and I was fairly swallowed up in their success. On summer Tuesday nights in my adolescence dad and I sat in the upper deck of Memorial Stadium having been admitted for $3 each. A few years earlier, older O’s friends later reported, Baltimore baseball fans could actually walk into the ballpark carrying a case of their favorite beer. (Is there an analytics acronym for that fun?)
And when I wasn’t at Memorial Stadium with dad often I had a portable radio out on the family patio to follow the O’s by the iconic radio calls of Chuck Thompson. Incredibly, with only modest interruptions of service, Thompson’s voice was found on Orioles’ radio and television coverage, full and part time, from 1954 until 2000. His was a richly detailed but efficient narration of O’s action, his diction and its animation rising to meet moments perfectly; his high-pitched “high fly ball” off an Oriole bat you knew was especially high, and deep, and as victory was recorded he told the partisans at home — and quite a few following his calls on hand-held radios in the Memorial Stadium stands — “Ain’t the beer cold now.”
This fit of nostalgia would have remained just that this summer, in all likelihood, a dim and distant memory, were it not for two extraordinary developments. First, acutely aware of dangerous and increasing demographic indifference to its game, Major League Baseball this past offseason acted, belatedly, to speed up the action. Pitchers are now on the clock. And so are batters. And about a month into the 2023 season, MLB had data confirming that nearly half an hour had on average been sheared off its game run times. On April 25, in fact, every one of its games on the East Coast was concluded before 10:00 p.m.
The Orioles among a few other teams also had 6:40 p.m. first pitches early on in the new season — almost as if baseball actually wanted American youth to be able to attend its games again on school nights — and a handful of those games ended before the 9:00 hour! Hello happy beauty sleep! Emphasis on the happy in Birdland.
As a mature man who seldom sees the 11:00 hour awake these days, being able to know the outcome of my O’s before I brush my teeth holds enormous appeal. And knowing I can’t finish James Joyce’s Ulysses during a normal 9-inning affair does as well.
But the real game-changer for my sports-loving heart this summer has been the O’s themselves. To quote the Who, the Kids Are Alright. Actually, they’re a good deal more than alright. Like: First place in the best division in baseball alright. Better: The Orioles are bettering their big market, much bigger salaried division behemoths in a year in which some seamheads are suggesting the AL East is the best division . . . in the history of Major League Baseball. The last-place Yankees own a winning record. The New York Mets tip the top of the salary scales this season at nearly $350 million, but the Yankees ($279 million) come in at no. 2, and the Blue Jays ($213 million) are at no. 9. The Orioles are 28th out of 30 teams in salary, with a total tab of $70 million.
Slowly and steadily the Birds chipped away at a Tampa Rays team that inaugurated the season at 13-0. And chipping away against Tampa is an especially difficult feat for Baltimore. In a remarkable reversal the O’s are 6-3 versus Tampa this season after going 9-10 against them a season ago and . . . 1-18 versus them in 2021.
There’s no true ace on the Orioles’ pitching staff (John Means has been recovering from Tommy John surgery since last summer); it’s success by no-name committee. They do have baseball’s best closer, Felix Bautista, but in a host of intelligible-by- elders statistical categories they’re fairly pedestrian. They’re 16th in batting average and 19th in batting average against; 15th in ERA; 14th in home runs hit and home runs allowed. But like the Orioles of generations ago who played in a very beer friendly ballpark, there’s remarkable cohesion and chemistry, timely hitting, and they play terrific defense.
And then there are the Kids. Catcher Adley Rutschman brings so adept an eye to the plate that on his days off catching he DHes in the leadoff spot. He’s walked a team leading 63 times this season. Manager Brandon Hyde loves a leadoff walk by Adley followed by one of his big young bats up immediately next. It’s a principal reason why the O’s so often seem to lead 2-0 after the first.
Grayson Rodriguez struggled in the first half of the season, as so many young fireballers do, went about a demotion with determination, and now appears poised to deliver on projections that have his ceiling as an ace no. 1 in the rotation. Rodriguez started in the opener of a big series against the Yankees last weekend. He went into the 7th inning and surrendered just three hits, holding the Yanks scoreless. Orioles management considers rookie Gunnar Henderson utterly untouchable, a left side infielder with a power bat whose ceiling, an increasing number of seamheads believe, is Manny Machado plus. How I love having a Hero in Orange named Gunnar.
On Tuesday I did something I’ve never done before in my life. I treated Major League Baseball’s trade deadline day as a quasi-holiday, within which I largely ignored entreaties from family and co-workers. Both my phone and laptop were feverishly refreshed throughout the day. As a thoroughly rejuvenated Birds’ partisan I hyperventilated and dry-heaved some over General Manager Mike Elias acquiring more pitching (which he did, at the last possible minute) but more over his fidelity to protecting our prized jewels on the farm — the one that’s rated no. 1 in baseball (he did that, too). His general manager counterparts weren’t bashful about brazenly seeking to extract Elias’ elite young talent. Even for rental pitchers.
"We might have a couple of players, and I won't name them, that we wouldn't trade for anyone in baseball,” Elias told O’s beat reporter Roch Kubatko as the deadline passed.
It seemed seismic two weeks ago when the Orioles went into Tampa and took three out of four from the Rays. The big series smackdown on the road not only seemed to serve notice of arrival but solidified Baltimore’s new perch atop the American League East standings. Earlier today the O’s beat the Blue Jays 6-1, outhitting the hosts 15-5, winning three of four on the road in that big series as well.
The young arms in the rotation are running up against innings limits, and all these young players up and down the roster haven’t endured a single race for something big like a division title. They may yet fade in the dog days of August. But right now, the beer in Birdland sure is tasting cold.