As many of you know, I worked as a sports writer and agate clerk at The Baltimore Evening Sun from 1986 through 1992. In my second year on Calvert Street, WJZ-TV 13 held an open competition to become the weekend sports anchor. My experience at the newspaper helped me “get a read” — as you’ll read my humorous take on below. This was from the fall of 1988 and I was encouraged by my girlfriend to send a postcard in and most of the rest is in the story below.

If you’re interested in becoming a Baltimore Sports Media Superstar, please read all of the details here. WNST is hosting all candidates during July and doing on-air tryouts with a $1,000 prize and a weekend show at WNST.net & AM 1570.

In the meantime, enjoy what my boss Jack Gibbons published as my editor when he asked me to write about my experience back in November 1988.

I had just turned 20 years old.

One day, I’m going to bust out the videotape and get it to the WNSTV channel on YouTube.

But for now, enjoy some tales from the Nasty crypt…

Feel free to click on the pictures. It’ll make it easier to read in this format…

The post I once dreamed of being a Baltimore Sports Media personality… appeared first on We Never Stop Talking Baltimore Sports.

It has always been our premise that the fans of the Baltimore Orioles will eventually be a part of curing what ails the team.

The fans here have tired of the losing, the lying and patent abandonment of the franchise attempting to win and create pride for the fans of the Baltimore Orioles.

The fans have been abandoned. We’re all in agreement on that.

But what more can Baltimore Orioles fans do?

While the focus is on the Orioles and baseball for one day — Opening Day — we’d like to encourage you to participate in a civic awakening to what’s happened to the businesses, families and proud local people who made Camden Yards a reality 20 years ago.

We are announcing three events that we’re requesting your participation and support in via social media and your circle of similarly disheartening Baltimore Orioles fans:

TONIGHT – WNST is encouraging all Baltimore Orioles fans to attend a candlelight vigil at the Brooks Robinson statue for the team at sundown (6-8pm). We’ve decided praying is a relevant option at this point and we’ll surround this event at the bar at Frank & Nic’s just around the corner from the monument and celebrate why we all love baseball in Baltimore. We are inviting priests, rabbis and all people who want to pray for a better day for Baltimore baseball. You can bring real candles or use your mobile device to download a free app called “Color Flashlight HD,” which provides an orange candlelight image for your phone. We will be using Twitter and Facebook to share our message throughout the proceedings.

Friday, April 6th – Opening Day. WNST will be handing out signs at Luna del Sea on Pratt Street beginning at 10 a.m. that will voice our displeasure at having Opening Day become an annual drudgery knowing that the Baltimore Orioles won’t compete this year in the AL East. Yes, we’d like for you to consider walking with informational picket signs prior to the game to be heard by team management on the eve of another lost season of local baseball. And, of course, we’d love to encourage you to bring a sign with your own message for Peter Angelos.

Sunday, May 20th – WNST and our @FreeTheBirds12 campaign will sponsor a road trip when the Orioles visit the Washington Nationals, who Angelos also greatly profits off of via his MASN television empire.

Please follow us at WNST.net all week as we present lots of facts, information and a compelling argument about the significance of the Baltimore Orioles to our community and some thought-provoking discussion about the franchise’s role and responsibility to baseball fans in our region.

You can also join us on Facebook here for Free The Birds 12 to continue to get more information regarding these events this spring.

Our Twitter page for Free The Birds 12 is here as well for constant updates regarding events.

The post Free The Birds Candlelight vigil is tonight at sundown at Brooks Robinson statue appeared first on We Never Stop Talking Baltimore Sports.

The opening of Camden Yards, about to celebrate its 17th anniversary, has been tainted by the stain of being a place where a LOT of bad baseball has been played over these years.

The numbers are the numbers: Since OPACY’s opening, the team’s overall record has been 1285-1399 (.478 overall). At Memorial, they were 3202-2812 from 1954 through 1991 (.532).

The actual “homefield advantage” that the Orioles boasted at Memorial was 1686-1310, a whopping .562 percentage of victories.

Camden Yards, meanwhile, has found the Orioles with an overall 1285-1399 record over 17 years (.479 percentage). But the record since 2000, when Angelos’ regime had finally purged remaining remnants of previous ownership like Cal Ripken, Mike Mussina and 50 years of community goodwill plus the most beautiful stadium on earth:

634-822 or a .434 winning percentage since the turn of the century.
Despite the Orioles robust .532 winning percentage through 1991, the realities of leaving Memorial Stadium were unquestioned.

All you need to do is go back to that final day, on Oct. 6, 1991. You KNOW you didn’t want to see 33rd Street go. But there was a part that was ready to welcome in the fresh new downtown feeling of baseball.

And as bad as it hurt that October, it felt that good to be in that new ballpark six months later.

Matter of fact it felt DAMN good to be from Baltimore on April 6, 1992.

Put yourself in that place and let your mind go back there to that day.

Smell the smells, hear the sounds and remember seeing the city and the Inner Harbor come to life in such a “big league” way.

We went from cow town to becoming Las Vegas for baseball literally overnight.

As my Pop would’ve put it, in slight Eckman-ese: “That place put Baltimore on the map!”
It wasn’t just about the stadium or the location. It was the psychology of how it made you feel this: “WOW…we’ve REALLY arrived as a COOL city” kinda feeling.

Baltimore always had that gritty, blue-collar workaday quality and now people could actually come into this city on a summer weekend and enjoy boating, the harbor, the Aquarium, the restaurants and the nightlife.

Many cool things to do and an image that FAR surpassed whatever preconceptions about Baltimore that the world might have had before The Warehouse was erected as the summer home for Major League Baseball.

And people from all over the country could wrap it around a weekend trip that included something for everyone. All that Baltimore had to offer was alive and well and visible on ESPN “SportsCenter” 81 nights each summer.

“Look at the BBQ from Boog’s, see the Holiday Inn sign, look at the majesty of The Warehouse and the Inner Harbor just two blocks away and the crab cakes and the Aquarium and the blah, blah, blah.”

I don’t think I need to tell you how cool I think Baltimore STILL is: I live two blocks from Camden Yards and two blocks from Hooters and two blocks from Federal Hill. NO ONE, and I MEAN NO ONE, LOVES THIS CITY MORE THAN ME!

But they sold this place — and I’m NOT saying they’re wrong, but it WAS a sell job on TV and in magazines and in newspapers and pretty much everywhere — as THE PLACE TO BE to watch a baseball game.

If someone could do Cooperstown OR baseball at Camden Yards (in what was before thought to be “dumpy-old-Baltimore”) they’d probably opt to see Cal Ripken here. And when you could do BOTH via driving for a few hours, NOW you’ve got magic.

How many people who consider themselves baseball fans around the country can say they’ve been to Camden Yards

The post Chapter 14: Camden Yards and Peter Angelos’ “black cat” — downtown comes to a halt! appeared first on We Never Stop Talking Baltimore Sports.

There is very little question that Camden Yards only holds a handful of good memories for most of the “old school” Orioles fans who lived through the glorious Memorial Stadium days.

Maybe you consider the Bill Hasselman vs. Mike Mussina brawl in 1993 memorable. Or perhaps that Brad Pennington head-jerking launch toward The Warehouse by Ken Griffey Jr. on that Sunday afternoon in that pretty teal jersey jogs your memory a bit.

Opening Day and Sutcliffe in 1992 was also pretty outstanding.

The night Mussina almost threw that perfect game was memorable. And how about the night he took a liner off of his face?

And the ALCS games at Camden Yards in 1996 and 1997, while not victorious, were at least memorable.

The Marquis Grissom home run. The Todd Zeile incident. The Cecil Fielder home run. The Tony Fernandez home run. Darryl Strawberry, of all people, coming back to haunt the Orioles with home run after home run in October 1996.

Our community stole the Browns from Cleveland so we might have had karma working against us for that 1997 ALCS disappointment coming to us as fans — especially after that Robbie Alomar blast at The Jake the previous fall — but the Yankees thing in 1996 was just insufferable.

On second thought, maybe we CHOOSE to not remember some of the stuff during those two WINNING seasons because we got stuck watching the World Series on TV. And there’s very little doubt that the BALTIMORE Orioles were the best overall team in baseball throughout that ’97 season.

My feelings about those years are probably the same way my Pop would’ve felt about 1973 and 1974. He never talked about those years as particularly good (although he loved Rich Coggins) because 1966 and 1970 and, even 1969 and 1971, were so much better and more memorable for him.

Yeah, we were good in ’96 and ’97, and we had some big wins, but when it really mattered the most, in October — the big at-bats, the big pitches, the big plays, and in the case of Jeffrey Maier in 1996, the big calls — all were tilted mightily in the other direction when all was said and done and World Championship trophies were handed out.

Honestly, as close as we were, we CLEARLY weren’t very close at all when you saw how those games played out in October. And other than Mussina, Brady Anderson and Cal Ripken, none of those players made a dent in the heart of Orioles’ fans.

In his most recent public appearance/infomercial this past spring, Peter Angelos informed WJZ’s Denise Koch that “we were one pitch away from the World Series — you must remember that!”

The seats in the owner’s box must’ve shown a different set of games or “time” must’ve illuminated “the glory of their deeds.”

Because from where I sat, it looked like the better team won both years — with or without Jeffrey Maier —

The post Unlucky Chapter 13: ‘The Magic’ and ‘The Oriole Way’ got stranded on 33rd Street… appeared first on We Never Stop Talking Baltimore Sports.

There’s nothing like the first time you do anything in life, and that goes without saying.

That 1993 World Series experience in the streets of Toronto was super cool and hard to compare with anything that would follow.

So I suppose I could bore you with war stories about my night in the Atlanta Braves clubhouse when Ryan Klesko soaked me with champagne in the celebration, or I could tell you how cold it was in Cleveland before Game 4 of the World Series in 1995.
I could tell you that I was in the upper deck of Yankee Stadium when Wade Boggs rode the white horse and the Yankees won their first championship in 18 years on that night in 1996.

In 1997 the hangover from the Tony Fernandez made me not want to go to the World Series, but I went to Cleveland for Games 3, 4 and 5. The Series went 7 games. I only went to the middle three games because the Ravens existed at that point and I had football duty on the weekends in October.

It was during this time in my life that I discovered that seeing a city win a World Series and being in the middle of it was always a lot of fun, even in New York. I also found out during the falls and ACLS of 1996 and 1997, coming to close to winning a World Series really sucks.

And it kinda makes you not even wanna go, or even watch, the World Series at all.

For you other purple folks, imagine how hard it would be to watch the Super Bowl this February in Miami if the Ravens lost the AFC Championship Game in Baltimore to the Steelers, 20-19, on a 56-yard field goal as time expires.

Would you really want to watch the Steelers play the Redskins two weeks later?

I didn’t think so.

The World Series thing would never really be the same for me after that Tony Fernandez homer off Armando Benitez.

Because when you feel your team can’t win, you don’t really want to play. Or even pay attention to baseball at all, really.

And for a lot of others around town, and now for me as well, October is 100 percent football season — not Oriole baseball playoff season.

And that’s really a shame, because one of the greatest sports days of this generation’s Baltimore sports fandom came because they both had clout on October 5, 1997.

That was a day to remember.

The Ravens were lining up to play the Pittsburgh Steelers at Memorial Stadium (they blew a huge halftime lead and lost as Kordell Stewart went nuts) and later in the day, the Orioles would clinch a berth in the ALCS by beating Randy Johnson and the Seattle Mariners, 3-1, behind ace Mike Mussina’s two-hitter less than four miles away at Oriole Park at Camden Yards. This pic of me congratulating Alan Mills (and Jeffrey Hammonds) in the Camden Yards clubhouse.

Ten days later the Orioles lost Game 6 to the Tribe downtown, and they haven’t played in a meaningful game since.

These nine years have been long and hard on anyone who ever loved Brooks and Frank and Cal and Eddie.

We want to send a message on September 21st that we’ve had enough. That’s what The Rally is all about!

When a poor kid from Dundalk doesn’t even want to go the World Series on a press pass junket anymore, something’s very wrong.

My World Series memories are all very vivid and cool to me, but 1998 was definitely my favorite.

In 1998, I finally got tickets to a World Series I could get excited about and actually root FOR a team a instead of against one.

San Diego has always been a special place in my life. Since that first trip to California in 1985 with my family, I’ve been back more times than I can honestly count — maybe 50 times, I dunno. But enough that I never need a map!

My favorite relative of all time, my Aunt Jane (she was my Pop’s sister from Scranton, Pa.) lived there high on a hill overlooking San Diego State University and Interstate 8 off College Avenue. She was an over-the-top “Reagan Republican” and had passion about two things in life: “saving” America in that Rush Limbaugh kinda way and the San Diego Padres.

She also paid attention to the Chargers and went to games, she had a cool garden and a really cool white dove that lived in a cage in her kitchen, but the Padres were right up there. She, like my Pop, had been to Yankee Stadium. She, like my Pop, absolutely LOVED baseball.

She was so involved at one point that she joined the “Madres,” which was the local community

The post Chapter 12: A Dundalk guy becomes a San Diego dude appeared first on We Never Stop Talking Baltimore Sports.

Reggie Jackson was left-handed, which I always thought was cool because I wasn’t! ALL of my Pop’s favorite guys were left-handed, so I assume mine became that way too. I just loved to watch Fred Lynn and George Brett swing the bat, kinda like he liked Ted Williams and Stan Musial.

C’mon, pick a switch hitter, any switch hitter? Eddie Murray, Mickey Mantle, Pete Rose — any of the great ones! And I bet you enjoy watching them bat left-handed more.
I dunno, one of life’s mysteries when you’re a kid.

Reggie wore those white shoes and had those big 70′s fab shades and that ‘fro, and cool poses on his baseball cards (go ahead and look at those early 70′s Topps Reggie cards and just tell me that he doesn’t look like a ballplayer). He took that long, majestic swing and he did it with ferociousness. And, when the game was on the line, when the light was shining the brightest, Reggie Jackson came up big every time. Again, and again, and again.

It wasn’t October if “Mr. October” wasn’t involved, even if it came at the expense of the Orioles. And it almost always did!

Reggie played in the postseason every year from 1971 to 1982, except for two seasons and both of them were the Orioles’ fault. He missed the playoffs in 1976 because he WAS an Oriole and he missed in 1979 because he WASN’T. And that was WAY before the wildcard crap.

From the time I was 5 until I was 10 (and I assure you that baseball was the ABSOLUTE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN MY LIFE during those years), he was in the World Series four out of six years. He WAS the World Series in many ways.

When I played in the Berkshire Little League, I wanted No. 9 or No. 44, just like Ahmed wanted to pay tribute to Hank Aaron in the “Bad News Bears,” I wanted to pay tribute to Reggie — worship at his temple.

I thought his number would rub off on me and I could be the Venezuelan right-handed, slow and white Reggie Jackson of my neighborhood. Maybe I’d start winning the big one instead of striking out like I did against Rich Pfaff at Eastwood!

And, once I found out that he had a Baltimore connection through Johnny’s and local baseball, I was convinced Reggie was the real-life baseball Superman.

You wanted to hate, but you just couldn’t! He was, well, in a word: GREAT, at least with the bat!

So, I liked him and wanted to be him, even if I never really became a “fan” of his in the way of collecting his baseball cards or his posters or whatever.

And my Pop just thought I was a communist for even considering buying a “Reggie” candy bar. But I did.

Lemme bust up my little fantasy meets reality story with one tale of childhood vs. adulthood reality.

I met Reggie Jackson one time. I’ve been in his presence many, especially at Yankee Stadium because they’ve been good over the last decade and he hangs around.

I was in the 33rd Street press box in 1986 and the Angels were in town (no doubt, a younger-and-more slender and handsome Peter Schmuck was within 20 feet of me) and Reggie was a late-inning entry into a tight ballgame and was facing former Angel Don Aase, who was brought in a year earlier as one of three saviors (along with Lee Lacy and Fred Lynn) who were signed to revitalize that 1983 magic.

On the whole, those seasons were the setup for 1988′s 0-21 meltdown for the Birds, but on this day Aase had his good stuff.

He had runners on, a tight situation and a classic Reggie at-bat and potential game-altering home run could be on tap. So the old girl on 33rd was buzzing on a Saturday afternoon because the game was also nationally televised on NBC. Tony Kubek and those cats were around the ballpark.

Aase threw his heat and got Reggie Jackson to pop out to shallow center on a high fastball.

In the press box that day Ted Patterson, another guy I idolized in the Baltimore media while growing up, was seated next to me and I was soaking up his knowledge

The post Chapter 11: When childhood heroes turn into real-life villains before your very eyes appeared first on We Never Stop Talking Baltimore Sports.

Mike Flanagan is as close to an Orioles’ kindred spirit as I have in the world. Maybe Jim Palmer and Elrod Hendricks and Jimmy Tyler could be thrown in there as well, because they’ve seemed as omnipresent as my fandom of the Orioles.

But, Flanagan is really ” The One,” because in real terms, he’s been with the Orioles as long as I’ve been with the Orioles. And no one else I know, other than my Mom, has stayed in my life all of these years and still keeps popping up.

He came up in 1975, and I really started regularly going to games around that time, when I was 6.

I remember when he first came up, the expectations, the rotation — with Jim Palmer, Scott McGregor and Dennis Martinez, every night was trouble for some AL team — and I probably spent 80 nights of my life inside Memorial Stadium watching Mike Flanagan pitch.

From 1977 to 1984 he never had a sub-par season, only many very good ones and a couple of great ones. He left the Orioles just once — for two-plus years, pitching for the Blue Jays after a trade deadline deal in 1987.

In 1979, he won 23 games and led that magical team every time Earl Weaver threw him out there. It was his best year in baseball. It was mine too!

In 1992, he began his broadcasting career. That’s the same year I left The Evening Sun and went on the radio.

In 2003, he became part of “management”. In early 2005, I did the same thing.

But, even though we’ve gotten to know each other over the years — with him at one point walking up to me (when I didn’t even know he knew I existed) in the late 1990′s and admitting that he was a fan of MINE and addicted to “Nasty Nationwide” and listened every day with his daughter — on that last game at Memorial Stadium on Oct. 6, 1991, Mike Flanagan was just a childhood hero to me. He was, in some ways, larger than life because when I was 10 years old, he took the hill every couple of nights for the centerpiece of my life, the Baltimore Orioles.

Mike Flanagan was one of MY guys! My mood hung on every pitch he threw!
So on that sad-yet-uplifting and chilly October afternoon in 1991 — surrounded by a disgusting Redskins fan actually watching a football game on her laptop TV in Sect. 34 — it was me, Mike Flanagan, my memories of my youth and my best friend Kevin Eck (he keeps popping up doesn’t he!), along with 54,000 others just like us gathering for one of the biggest public tearjerkers in the history of this city.

If you didn’t spend your childhood at Memorial Stadium, you can probably stop reading or listening right around now.

Because you just won’t understand it. You couldn’t possibly think it is anything beyond silly.

It is truly a “Ball’mer thing.”

But EVERYONE who has ever loved the Orioles remembers

The post Chapter 10: Imagine a Baltimore without the Orioles appeared first on We Never Stop Talking Baltimore Sports.

When I wasn’t at Merriweather Post Pavilion chasing INXS or Howard Jones or Duran Duran, I was perched high above home plate and ducking past the low ceilings of that tiny little cubicle on 33rd Street.

My boss Jack Gibbons, who I really owe a debt of gratitude to for being the first guy to really stick his neck out for me by hiring me as a 17-year old (and I STILL don’t know how in the world he ever convinced his bosses to hire me!), made another bold move later that year, hiring a hotshot young sportswriter from New York who had been working in Philadelphia with an Ivy league education.

Ken Rosenthal took over the Orioles beat from long-time curmudgeon Jim Henneman, and things changed quickly around our desk in the evenings.

Keep in mind — the Blast were stumbling a bit, the Colts were gone and Baltimore was a one-bird town. The Orioles were EVERYTHING to the sports section and the newspaper.

And Rosenthal couldn’t have been 25 at the time. He worked harder than anybody I’d ever seen and was an inspiration to me, being so young and on the move to all of these exotic locales I’ve never been. Sexy places like Cleveland and Milwaukee and Detroit (hey, I would’ve picked Cleveland over Jamaica at the time because they had a stadium and played baseball in Cleveland!)

And the coolest part of the whole deal for him?

Rosenthal got a press pass to the World Series, the playoffs and the All-Star Game every year, with flight, hotel and room service included.

AND THEY PAID HIM FOR THIS??? WOW!!!

I’d take dictation from him at 3 in the morning when his crappy Radio Shack TRS-80 computer wasn’t working to send his stories. He went to war with Eddie Murray. He questioned Edward Bennett Williams at every turn. He pissed off the Orioles “establishment” almost every day.

And, even though I haven’t always agreed with him or seen eye to eye with his views, he was beyond super cool to me when I was 19 years old and I was his “assistant” at The Evening Sun.

Rosenthal always remembered to thank me for my extra efforts by grabbing me a program or a cool souvenir on the road. Even though I loved when he got me World Series programs or “officially” licensed shirts or hats, my favorite Rosenthal roadie gift came straight from the street and from his heart to mine.

Kenny was covering the 1988 NLCS in Los Angeles where the Dodgers were playing the Mets in a classic seven-game series and he came back from the parking lot of Chavez Ravine with a “F— NEW YORK” shirt.

I treasured that thing and wore it every time the Orioles played the Yankees for a decade. I had it on UNDER my shirt in 1996 when the Orioles played the Yankees in the ALCS (which wouldn’t have EVER been possible in my childhood, by the way, without wild card matchups!)

The memories of that romantic baseball trip to St. Louis and Kansas City in 1983 coupled with Rosenthal’s road stories and watching it all on TV each night from these exotic ballparks whet my appetite for more memories, more baseball and, ultimately, more fun. I did the California trip with my

The post Chapter 9: My life on Calvert Street at The Baltimore Sun and hitting the road appeared first on We Never Stop Talking Baltimore Sports.

It’d be nice to say that having the last name “Aparicio” would’ve opened some doors for me in the sports media business over the past 22 years.

There aren’t a whole lot of names in the world that are so unique in our culture that there’s only been one really famous person who’s ever had it.

If my name would have been Smith or Jones, things might have been different, who knows?

But clearly, APARICIO is synonymous with one thing: BASEBALL!

And the truth in the real world is this: no one hires incompetent people based on their last name. Sure, it’s nice to have a door opened if your last name is Buck or Albert or Carey, but if you stink at doing your job, it’ll be the only job you’ll ever get.

Most of those “prodigy” guys are VERY, VERY good at what they do and the bar was set so high by their fathers that it’s hard to achieve anything that surpasses what their last name already represents.

I know because the reason I went into this radio business was because of an invitation from Kenny Albert — son of the great Marv Albert — who I knew from covering the Baltimore Skipjacks of the American Hockey League in 1990 and 1991 for The Evening Sun.

The first time I met Kenny was at the NHL All-Star Game in Pittsburgh in 1989. He doesn’t remember that league party at a downtown hotel, but I do. We were both born in 1968, both absolutely loved sports but we had completely different paths to finding each other.

I was just an East Baltimore kid who was a fan of sports — a major sports fan whose Pop would run around with me on MTA buses to go to games downtown at the Civic Center and out on 33rd Street.

Kenny Albert was the son of one of the most famous broadcasters in sports. Marv Albert had taken Kenny to games almost since berth. Kenny had been not only to most major sporting events in New York — his Dad was the voice of the Rangers AND the Knicks — but his Dad also did NBA playoff games, NFL games and the MLB Game of the Week each Saturday on NBC.

In the broadcasting business, unless your name was Cosell or

The post Chapter 8: Catching a break with John Steadman at The News American appeared first on We Never Stop Talking Baltimore Sports.

Life was percolating along very nicely for me at the end of the summer of 1983.

There was that awesome trip to St. Louis, the Orioles were doing extremely well, the Phillies (again, I was an idiot!) were busting up Montreal in the NL East, I had a new girlfriend and my junior year at Dundalk High was coming.

Despite this “long distance” romance I was having with the Phillies, I was still VERY involved in going to Orioles games. I didn’t get to as many as I had before (again, once girls came along, it was all downhill for sports!), but I still did about 20 games on 33rd Street in 1983. And, like 1979, all in Sect. 10 General Admission seats, some with my Pop and some with my pals. All of those nights on those long, gold, aluminum benches, complete with the jar-rattling volume when banged on.

And the Phillies and Orioles, it would later be proved, were on a destiny’s collision course for the World Series in October.

But en route there was the AL Championship Series against the vaunted Chicago White Sox, led by Lamar Hoyt.

My Pop landed some right field seats for Games 1 and 2 of the ALCS at Memorial Stadium and we were all set. Right before the series my Dundalk buddy John Rafalides (at whose wedding I would later be the best man) gave me a buzz and told me his Dad, Pete, had an extra seat in Sect 39, Row 19 right behind home plate upstairs and asked if I wanted it since I was such an Orioles nut.

So, my Pop actually took my Mom to Game 2 and I went with Mr. Pete Rafalides, who was just a super cool guy. He was a realtor and connected with the Greek community. He loved talking sports with me and would always feed me cool munchies when I came to his home. And I mean he FED me! He always had the coolest snacks — Doritos, Dolly Madison cakes, Tastykakes, those chocolate malt balls, all sorts of great stuff!

I caught on quickly and made sure I got to go there every year for Thanksgiving! And later in life, when John became my roommate, I got the residual effect — the baklava, pastitsio, spanakopita, the grape leaves — from every Greek holiday!

But, for whatever reason, John’s dad liked me and off went we to Game 2 — me, Mr. Pete and two of his work friends. And we hung on every pitch! And Mike Boddicker pitched his ass off, a five-hit shuout over the White Sox, and we had a paaaaaah-tttaaaay in Sect. 39 that night. “Wild” Bill Hagy was going nuts over in Sect. 34. We had binoculars and I could see my folks over in right field having fun, too. That was just one of the greatest nights, even 23 years later.
I remember the smell of the air that night, the lights in the sky, how bright the field looked from up in that perch in Sect. 39. The steepness of the seats, the people crowded into that cozy ballpark and trees lined up in the outfield.

I can’t imagine my life without that night.

It was just a beautiful thing, that night. Life was perfect!

Two afternoons later Tito Landrum hit a 3-run homer off of Britt Burns that sent me and my 64-year old Mom onto Bank Street banging pots and pans with the shot heard ’round the beltway, a blast at Comiskey Park that sent the Orioles back into the World Series for the second time in four years and the sixth time in 17 years. I’ll say that again: the Orioles were in the World Series SIX times

The post Chapter 7: Finally, a 1983 World Series crown for Baltimore appeared first on We Never Stop Talking Baltimore Sports.