A Sports Fan's Dilemma

Out of all the major sports, baseball always fell behind basketball and football in terms of the enjoyment I got both from playing them and watching them. I was like the only kid I knew growing up who didn’t play little league or even tee ball. Sure, my brother and I would play pick-up baseball or wiffle ball with the neighborhood kids growing up, and we all had our own gloves and bats, but that was the extent of our baseball careers. Still, I grew up with much of the same overly romanticized views of baseball as any other kid. I checked box scores, stats leaders, and standings in the newspaper. To this day, I have a baseball card collection that numbers into the thousands (probably at least twice as many the number of trading cards I had for every other sport combined). If I got bored during the summer, I had a habit of going outside with my bat and pretending I was a big league slugger. Sometimes I would go into the garage with a tennis ball and pretend I was a pitcher too. Usually, the pitching sessions would be short-lived, as it wouldn’t take long for my Mom to grow tired of the sound of the tennis ball bouncing off the garage wall…and most of the time when I would go into my own little alternate baseball universe, I was either Cal Ripken Jr. or Mike Mussina in Baltimore Oriole white, black, and orange.

When I was younger, Cal could do no wrong in my eyes.

The 1st baseball game I ever went to was with my Dad at Camden Yards (in what was I think the ballpark’s inaugural season). That day, the Orioles fell to a 40-something year old pitcher for the Texas Rangers and a young hitting machine named Nolan Ryan and Juan Gonzalez, respectively. From that day on, the O’s were my team. When I was 11, 12, 13 years old, I could be found on most summer nights lying in bed listening to the AM radio broadcast of the O’s game. While some scrooges in my life have since tried to point out to me that Ripken was an egomaniacal fraud during his career, his consecutive game streak probably “saved” (or at least made the forgive and forget process a little easier for fans) baseball following the strike-shortened ’94 season. In the mid-90’s, the O’s almost always ranged from at least decent to sometimes very good. Between 1992 and 1997, Baltimore only finished below 0.500 once, and they barely missed that mark that 1 season with a 71-73 record. In ’96, the O’s won the Wild Card only to be ousted in the ALCS by the Yankees (thanks in part to a little kid hanging over the right field wall with a glove…the name Jeffrey Maier still makes me cringe to this day). ’97 was 1 of those years that Yankee fans and Laker fans take for granted, but for fans of lesser franchises they might be once or twice in a lifetime occurrences. The O’s led their division wire-to-wire and finished with the best record in the American League…only to get beaten in the ALCS again, this time by the Indians.

The day baseball died for me just a little bit.

Since then, the Baltimore Orioles have been stuck in a cycle of constant stink-itude. They finished above 0.500 while failing to reach the playoffs in 1998, but since then have had a winning record exactly 0 times. Mussina, sensing that the ship was going down, bolted for New York following the 2000 season. Ripken mercifully retired after several hanger-on type seasons in 2001. The O’s that I had officially grown up with were all but gone. Since then, they have suffered through countless managers, GMs, team presidents, and failed free agency signings. Any of these names ring a bell? Albert Belle, Javier Lopez, Miguel Tejada, Sidney Ponson, and on and on and on…

This brings me to something that I’ve been struggling with for a couple of years now. See, when my sports fandom 1st came into existence, there was no Washington professional baseball team, and there was no Baltimore professional football team. However, ever since the Ravens 1st season in ’96 I have watched person after person migrate from being a Redskins fan to a Ravens fan. This was always troubling to me because I lived in an area that was basically equidistant from Baltimore and Washington. Now, when I go back to where I grew up, it seems like purple and black is everywhere during football season. I can sympathize with some Ravens fans. What if you are from Baltimore? What if you were actually a fan of the old Colts teams before they moved to Indianapolis? But everyone else is a ship-jumper as far as I’m concerned. The thing is that the Redskins have given their fans every reason imaginable for their fans to cross over to the team located some 30-plus miles up I-95. They are perpetually stinky. Their owner is a meddler. They haven’t been able to cultivate any real homegrown talent for quite some time. Almost every personnel director, coach, and high-priced free agent they have acquired in recent memory has been a bust…wait, sound familiar O’s fans?

And for me, there’s the dilemma. In a way, my heart is still and always will be with the Orioles I think. They are the team of my youth after all…but I haven’t seen the Orioles live and in person in years. Out of the last 10 baseball games I’ve been to, I would bet that 8 of them were Nationals games, a shocking development considering that they have only been around since 2005. (Strangely, I also have lived somewhat close to Baltimore the last several years, whereas I have never in my life lived farther away from Washington, DC.) Currently, the only baseball apparel that I own is a navy blue cap sporting a curly W. The majority of the games I watch on TV are Nats games. The box scores that I check nowadays are of Strasburg and Zimmerman. The minor league phenom that I’m currently awaiting is Bryce Harper. Crazy I know, but I can’t really explain it…that’s just the way it is.

By the way, Strasburg's numbers so far this year: 3 starts, 1 strikeout per inning, and a 1.42 ERA.

The Orioles are still in my periphery. I will check in on them for a minute or 2 if I’m flipping through channels. It makes me happy that some of their younger players like Adam Jones and Matt Wieters seem to be coming along and that after 10 games they somehow hold a half game lead over Toronto for 1st place in the American League East. (It marks the 6th time since 2004 that the Orioles have been in either 1st or 2nd place in the division by today’s date, April 17th, so fast starts and dismal finishes are nothing new for the O’s either.) But no matter how you slice it, that’s what the Orioles are for me at this point in my life: a team I will root for when they play teams like the Yanks and Sox, but a team I only have a casual interest in at best. This means 2 things…1st, if and when the Orioles ever get good again, I am not really allowed to revel in it. Sure, I will root for them and be quietly happy for them, but it would be in poor taste for me to bask in their successes in the same way that someone who stuck with them through thick and thin would (like I could for the Redskins). 2nd, I guess it’s time for me to bury the hatchet with all the Ravens fans out there who switched allegiances, annoying as a lot of them are…but at least I can honestly say, “I get it.” Go Nats.