For the latter half of the 20th century, the Baltimore Orioles were among the elite in the sport. Almost from the time that the team moved to Baltimore from St. Louis before the 1954 season, it became one of the signature teams in the major leagues. It wasn’t the most dominant nor was it the most gaudy, but it was almost always a force to be reckoned with, showing up with the metronomic consistency of the team’s best-known player, Cal Ripken Jr. Then things changed. But even now, after years of being a punch line in the sport, or, even worse, an afterthought, there still is the expectation somehow of being something more. It’s a fan base with tradition and pride.
Every time that a third baseman misses a scorching line drive or misplays a ground ball taking a bewilderingly bad hop, a low grumble is heard from the stands at Oriole Park at Camden Yards. “Brooks would have had it,” a reference to the late and legendary Brooks Robinson, a defensive virtuoso who is still spoken of in the same tones in Baltimore that Ludwig van Beethoven is discussed in Viennese concert halls.
The sport that Brooks Robinson played is not quite the one on the field today, though. There are still four bases and nine innings. The pitcher’s mound is still 60 feet, 6 inches from home plate. But the underlying economics are different. Players can now make a living based, at least in part, on the fair market price of their skills. And even with a new billionaire owner, a city like Baltimore will be at some disadvantage compared to places with better climates or more potential for major endorsements. But those are worries for the offseason, when the sky is gray and the weather is cold.
In the meantime, the fans who have waited and suffered and endured for years can enjoy their team. There are no guarantees of pennants, let alone World Series trophies. But, at least for now, my fellow dedicated Orioles fans can know that their team is back.
That hasn’t been true for a while. For most of the 21st century, the Baltimore Orioles have been a terrible baseball team. From 2000-2021, the team lost 400 more games than it won, a stretch that culminated in seasons so historically bad that it left them comparable to teams like the Cleveland Spiders and the Louisville Colonels: so appalling that they were folded at the turn of the 20th century.
It’s not that every year has been bad. There was a brief renaissance in the mid-2010s that included three playoff appearances and one division title. But even that team fell apart in the most dreadful way possible with a heartbreaking playoff loss followed by a historic implosion. This was followed by a conscious decision to tank — to deliberately field awful teams in order to receive high draft picks in hopes of eventually turning them into good players. In the meantime, any player with any value on the roster would be traded away for prospects. The result was simply bad baseball. Throughout the long years of mediocrity, one could always come up with a long-shot scenario or hold on to a sliver of hope. But nothing good came to pass for a long, seemingly unrelenting fallow period in a city with a long and proud baseball history.
Then, it all changed. In the past two years, the Orioles have become one of the best teams in baseball. It’s not just that they are winning games, it’s that they are doing so with fun and flair. The high draft picks acquired through years of deliberate losing have paid off in superstars like Adley Rutschman and Gunnar Henderson. A ballpark that was once almost laughably empty is now jam-packed with fans. And a city that has suffered a decade of bad luck and bad governance has been given an extra swagger at a moment when it is desperately needed.
Yet, for all of those fair-weather fans returning to the Orioles, those who became too discouraged by the years of losing or even those in the Washington, D.C., suburbs who hopped on the bandwagon of the Washington Nationals in the aftermath of that team being cruelly uprooted from Montreal, there are the loyalists. The sickos who watched the decade and a half of disappointing mediocre baseball before the mid-2010s renaissance and continued even after the Orioles’ collapse. The people who can reminisce about Daniel Cabrera’s 16th-inning save in 2004 or gripe about the misbegotten effort to turn Rio Ruiz into a second baseman in 2021.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
These are the fans for whom this transformation has been most rewarding. For those of us who sweat it out during the bad times, watching the transformation of the Orioles back into something capable of victories and even championships hasn’t been like watching a miracle. It’s been a grind. I am not transfixed by joy at every moment — after all, even a historically great team would lose 50 games in a season. In group text chats with other similar obsessives, we all pop off with criticisms of our Orioles even at the best times. (In one, a participant has an unrelenting grudge against Ramon Urias, an entirely respectable and serviceable utility infielder.) This is not the griping of the bandwagon fans of teams like the New York Yankees, who have the facile expectation of greatness, fueled by unfathomable financial resources.
But, now at least, it’s also not the fatalism of fans of teams like the Mets that seem almost perpetually cursed. Instead, it’s a peculiar mix of gratitude and impatience. There’s a sense of relief and a hope that, after years and years of agony, something good will happen — the expectation that this should be the way things normally are and that the years of sloppy play and poor results were somehow an aberration.
Ben Jacobs is a political reporter in Washington, D.C.
