MVN - Most Valuable Network

Thoughts From Last Night With Our Own Mike Boehm…

Hello, loyal Oriole Magic readers! I just got home from the 3rd game of the Astros’ series. The sweep!

Those of you who’ve been reading Oriole Magic for a while may remember that I used to pen my thoughts on our birds here regularly. Sadly, when I was the main show here I never had anything good to write about.

That was a large part of the reason that I handed the official Oriole Magic keyboard over to James and Anthony (who have both done a stellar job I might add). I just got tired to complaining about the same old things years after year.

The lousy play on the field. The mismanagement of every aspect of the organization. The horrible marketing. The pitifully dull game day experience. I couldn’t take it anymore. It was causing me heartache to continually write the same negative stuff over and over and over again.

Well today I was finally inspired to author an entirely new outlook on the experience of going to an O’s game.

I haven’t been to a game in about a month, and my god have things ever changed in that short time.

For the first two months of this season, things felt pretty status quo around Oriole Park. It was nice to see the Birds winning, but all in all it still wasn’t a great experience to go down to a game. There weren’t a lot of fans there, and the ones who did show up never seemed to be into things. Like me, everyone just seemed to be waiting for the other shoe to drop and for the season to go into the tank.

So despite the success on the field, nothing in the stands was feeling different than it had felt for the past decade.

Well what a difference a month of Dave Trembley forcing the fundamentals to put a better game on the field, Kevin Millar juicing things up to make the players more fun to watch, and god help us all the Orioles’ game day operations crew for starting to bring back that 1980’s feel to Birdland. That last one is the real difference maker.

Even when the Birds were winning at Oriole Park it felt more like a cocktail party than a ball game. Well no more.

It wasn’t an easy task to get me in a good mood going into this game. Because some moron in some city planning office thought it would be a great idea to take up half the parking lot at the stadium for the Mountain Dew bike rally thing, it took a full hour to get to the stadium from Hamden. A half hour of that was just creeping from the Convention Center to the parking lot. (Yeah that’s about a quarter mile total)

So walking into the game a full at bat late I was in quite a foul mood. I swore that the game had better be particularly awesome to make that traffic hassle worth it or I might just lose my mind.

Well the game was good, but that’s not what turned my mood around.

Immediately upon entering the stadium, it just felt different. It felt different than it’d ever felt at Camden Yards. Ever.

There was something about the feel of the ball park that was familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

It took me until the end of the first half inning to figure it out. Brian Burres had given up a run and wasn’t looking very good in the process. But I knew the Orioles were going to win. I knew it. I was absolutely certain of it.

That was a weird enough feeling on it’s own, but as I started to look around the stadium I realized that everyone there knew we were going to win. It wasn’t just me. That place was full of people who honest to god believed in their team.

And for the first time since Oriole Park opened I didn’t see a hodge podge of hats for other major league teams. I didn’t even see any Ravens jerseys. All I saw were Oriole t shirts, hats, and jerseys. And it was orange stuff no less! Orange! Right here in Baltimore!

I don’t EVER remember seeing and Oriole game covered in so much orange, not even back to the Memorial Stadium days. It was like the sea of purple at a Ravens game, only with the most wonderful color in the entire rainbow….orange!

And it wasn’t just the HAGY 34 shirts that were given away 2 nights ago. Sure, those were there, but so were dozens of other styles of orange O’s clothing from….here’s the best part….previous seasons. It wasn’t a cast of bandwagoners buying up all the brand new O’s stuff with Markakis’ name emblazoned on it.

It was Ripken shirts, Robinson shirts, Chris Ray shirts, Murray jerseys, etc etc etc. I didn’t see a single hat like this in Oriole colors being worn by a bunch of posers who want to pretend like they’ve been a fan for years. All the old shirts I saw tonight looked like they’d be legitimately worn and put through more than a few wash cycles. They were the clothes of real fans.

And the people wearing them were loud. Very loud.

By the 9th inning I could barely hear the public address system. Despite the Astros cutting their 4 run deficit in half thanks to defensive misplays that gave them a solid chance to come back and retake the lead, not a single person in the stadium sounded like they thought losing was an option.

The cheering just kept getting louder. And when the Brim Reeper notched his 23rd save of the year, the place went bonkers.

And then no one left. Everyone stayed to watch the celebration on the field and to watch the Kevin Millar Star Search audition tape where he lip syncs Orioles’ Magic.

It was like a great party at a bar at 2 am. Sure the lights come on and the bartender tries to kick everyone out, but no one wants to go.

For the first time in more than a decade, I felt true Orioles’ Magic. In fact, it might be the first time I’ve really felt it since the team moved downtown 17 years ago.

Oh there’s been a moment or two when the crowd pumped up a player that hit a game winning homer, sure. But tonight it was 9 solid innings of believing in the team.

It didn’t even feel this good in 1997 when the team went wire to wire. That team felt more scripted than fun. But tonight, things felt like 33rd Street again. Tonight was easily the best time I’ve ever had at Oriole Park.

The winning helps. The positive attitudes of the team helps. And the old blue collar feel of the stands that’s been lost since 1991 really helps.

The Orioles probably won’t make the playoffs this year. I accept that. But it’s good to have the great times at the ball park back even if they don’t last through October.

Baseball is fun again around here! So help me god baseball is fun again!

This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 9:46 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.