7.15.02 BALTIMORE ORIOLES vs SEATTLE MARINERS
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Both of these trips, yesterday’s to Toronto and today’s to Baltimore, were
born of a sort of mid-summer crisis: the realization that, shit, it’s the
middle of July already, baseball season is half over, and there’s so much
left to be done! The added urgency of a looming work stoppage combined with
my wife’s being gone on a two-week business trip sealed the deal. I cleared
my work schedule, made some phone calls, and hit the road.
Toronto was a chance to see my friends Liz and Steve and Pedro Martinez too,
and to run my total of nations I’ve watched baseball in this season to an
unprecedented three. What can I say about SkyDome? It could have been worse,
I guess. It was a brilliant day and the roof was open, and our seats high
up in the left field nosebleeds provided impressive views of the ghastly green
carpet below and the CN Tower rising majestically into a cerulean sky. There
weren’t a hell of a lot of people there, and judging by the fact that ushers
were quite literally giving away free tickets to upcoming games as people
made their way through the turnstiles, it seemed like this might be par for
the course here. There were cheerleaders on the dugouts, there was the aforementioned
awful seventh-inning-stretch song, all the food prices were weird, unround
numbers, like $3.37 for a hot dog or $2.43 for some peanuts, and the walk
to our seats felt more the set of a Heaven 17 video than a ballpark, but whatever.
Even in the twilight zone, it turns out, baseball is still baseball.
The game itself merits some mention, too. The Sox, in the midst of a post-All
Star Break swoon, fell behind early and found themselves trailing 5–3
in the top of the ninth. That was when Kelvim Escobar entered the game for
the Jays and gave up a lead-off single to Jason Varitek, and, two batters
later, a two-run homer into the right field seats off the bat of Trot Nixon.
Tie game.
Evidently caught off guard by the fact that his team now had to play the
bottom of the ninth, Red Sox manager Grady Little sent Tim Wakefield out to
pitch his third inning of relief, only to pull him when the suddenly hot again
Eric Hinske, who’d homered off Wakefield in his last at-bat, stepped to the
plate to lead off. In came Ugueth Urbina, whose name I found myself repeating
in my head for an entire summer two years ago, like a mantra, or the chorus
of a Hanson song. Ugueth Urbina. Ugueth Urbina. Every year there’s some player
whose name gets stuck in my head like that. Ugueth Urbina came in, warmed
up, and delivered a fastball which Hinske belted over the wall in center.
One pitch. Game over.
Home then, and a few hours of work, and to bed late, and up early to drive
to Baltimore, where my friend Theo would be living only two weeks longer,
having landed a job in the commonwealth of Massachusetts’ halls of academe.
“It’s a little mallish,” Theo warned me of the atmosphere
at Camden, which, after my experience last year at Jacobs Field, that other
model for the neo-retro-ballpark-as-urban-renewal-project phenomenon, I admit
I was pretty well prepared to hate. To my surprise, I didn’t, so much.
I mean, there were things about it I hated. I hated that the music and commercials
(commercials! Isn’t that why we go to the game, so we don’t have
to watch the commercials?) between innings were so goddamned loud that you
couldn’t hear yourself think, and that it felt like being at the kind
of party where some asshole insists on playing the stereo at full blast, thereby
guaranteeing that the chances of any type of actual social interaction occurring
are effectively reduced to zero. I hate parties like that. Usually I’d
just say hey, you wanna go outside or something? We already were outside,
though. There was no place else to go.
I probably would’ve hated the gigantic scoreboard and all the ridiculous
stuff going on upon it between innings too, but we skirted the issue by sitting
in the bleachers right in front of it, the one spot in the park where the
scoreboard doesn’t occupy its requisite full forty percent of one’s
field of view. Oh, and I hated the wave, too. Sorry, Baltimore, but you just
forfeited any claim you ever had to being taken seriously as a sports town.
I mean, the wave? Jesus, where do you think you are, L.A.?
Still, Camden itself struck me as neither excessively kitsch nor overly contrived
in its avowed “retro”-ness. It’s a pretty park. As much as
I rail against the corporatization of the major league baseball experience,
I can’t say that I wholeheartedly embrace the standard critique of the
retro ballpark as Disneyfied simulacrum either. So they built it out of bricks.
What the hell else do you want ’em to build it out of? Who doesn’t
like bricks?
With all the shuttling of players between Baltimore and Rochester this season,
I was looking forward to seeing some familiar Red Wings faces in big league
uniforms; unfortunately, Brian Roberts had been sent back down a couple days
ago, Ryan McGuire just got himself designated for assignment, and Jose Leon’s
slight contribution tonight consisted of a couple quiet innings filling in
at first base. Oh well. At least I got to see Geronimo Gil, who at starting
catcher in Baltimore this year has fulfilled the promise he showed in the
Red Wings’ waning months last season. Gil singled and scored in one of his
three at-bats, and smoothly gunned down both of the baserunners who tried
stealing on his watch, one of them a guy by the name of Ichiro.
Mike Bordick staked the O’s to a 6–4 lead with a three-run homer in the fourth, and after a Jerry Hairston error in the fifth allowed Ichiro to score, that was it. It fell to Baltimore rookie closer Jorge Julio to collect the save. I saw Julio probably a dozen times last year at Frontier Field, and he was an effective if occasionally unfocused reliever who consistently threw in the neighborhood of 94, 95 mph. Tonight he notched a perfect ninth, which included striking out Desi Relaford on consecutive pitches of 98, 99, and 100 miles per freaking hour. Hmmm. I mean, damn. Nice work, Jorge (I think).
FINAL SCORE: ORIOLES 6, MARINERS 5
LIFE DURING WARTIME: Here’s something you’ll learn if you ever go to a ballgame in Baltimore. During the national anthem, when it gets to the line about “Oh say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,” everybody shouts the “oh.” Like, O, get it? The O’s? The Orioles? I don’t know why they don’t do the same thing at the beginning of the song, too, but they don’t. It startled the shit out of me, though, everyone screaming at once, apropos of absolutely nothing. Struck me as kinda dumb afterwards, too. At least there were no actual glaring red rockets and bombs bursting in air, like in Anaheim. I never got used to that.