If you want to talk to Wild Bill Hagy, who was once the most famous baseball fan in America and then dropped out of sight like D. B. Cooper, only without the parachute and all that loot, this is how you go about things:

First you call the Orioles. After all, the man showed up in their nice, new stadium the other night and rocked the joint with his trademark O-R-I-O-L-E-S! cheer, just like the old days. So maybe they have a phone number.

Only the problem here is, the Orioles have no clue as to how to get in touch with this guy. He walked out of their lives nine years ago after launching a picnic cooler from the upper deck at Memorial Stadium, and the truth is, at the time the Orioles were happy to see him go.

So now you go to his last-known place of employment, County Cab in Catonsville, a shabby building tucked behind a guitar shop on the main drag. The woman behind the counter looks at you like you're a fly walking across her baked potato, which sets up the following snappy repartee:

"Bill Hagy around?"

"Nope."

"Doesn't he work here?"

"Not anymore."

"Any idea where I can reach him?"

"Nope."

"Nice talking to you."

So now, this being the '90s and all, you go to the computer. A bright guy in your office punches up Wild Bill Hagy's MVA file and you get an address, which turns out to be in a quiet neighborhood near Loudon Park, hard by the cemetery, which will be convenient since getting this story might very well kill you anyway.

So you find his apartment, the one with the Grateful Dead stickers plastered all over the door. You lean on the doorbell, taking pains to stand off to one side, like they do in the movies, in case it's a shotgun blast that comes through that door and not the man who once symbolized Oriole Magic, the spiritual head of Section 34 in the old ballpark.

But there is no answer. So you leave a sniveling little note, which basically says you're a reporter and would love to talk and will not libel him too badly if he'll only call you at 332-blah, blah, blah, blah.

And here's the kicker: He actually gets back to you. What he does is, he leaves a voice mail message that sounds like someone talking with a mouthful of 10-penny nails: "This is Wild Bill Hagy. I'll be at the game tomorrow. Section 386, row N."

So the next day you go to Camden Yards and take the escalator about 27 stories above left field, which is where Section 386 is located, practically in a bank of cumulus clouds.

And a half-hour before game time you stand there gnawing on a lousy hot dog that costs about 17 bucks and staring at your empty notebook and thinking: This guy is playing games with me.

And then you see him, striding majestically through the crowd. He's built along the lines of a stand-up freezer, 6-foot-2 and wide across. You spot the familiar straw hat first, then the full, Brillo-pad beard.

He's wearing an Orioles All-Star Game T-shirt and khaki shorts. Yeah, he's a little thicker around the waist, maybe, with a little more gray hair, but, heck, aren't we all? Besides, Wild Bill is 55 now.

But, Lord, he can still work a crowd. A young woman rushes up and asks breathlessly: "Mr. Hagy, can my mother-in-law have her picture taken with you? Oh, please?" An older man slaps him on the shoulder and yells: "Wild Bill Hagy, you're a sight for sore eyes!"

And then you sit down with Wild Bill Hagy, who is cordial and contemplative and sipping a beer, the way God intended him to on a gorgeous spring afternoon with the Orioles about to take the field.

And the two of you talk.

The crowd goes wild

This is what happened two weeks ago in Section 12 at Camden Yards, on a Tuesday night, Orioles vs. Angels, as best as can be recalled by the major participants:

Howard the Beer Man was pouring them. Wild Bill Hagy was drinking them. He comes to the ballpark quite a bit these days, just keeps a low profile. That night he drank one beer, and then another and another and, well, you know how these things go.

Pretty soon, the fans around him were saying: "Wild Bill, you oughta lead a few cheers, like the old days." And Wild Bill, pleasantly anesthetized, with half the contents of a brewery sloshing around in his gut, began thinking that was not a bad idea.

"See how easy I am?" he says.

So along about the sixth inning, with Chris Sabo at the plate, Wild Bill lumbered to his feet. He waved his hat and the crowd recognized him instantly and began to cheer.

It started out as a low rumble and grew quickly into an unearthly chorus of 47,000 voices, and maybe it was the most noise the new ballpark had ever heard. Suddenly, if you were of a certain frame of mind, anyway, it was 1979 all over again.

Contorting his beefy, 55-year-old body, Wild Bill raised both arms and encircled them over his head.

"O!" the crowd roared.

Now he lifted his right leg with surprising grace -- you try doing this with half a load on -- and hooked his arm until his fist touched his forehead, like a body-builder striking a pose.

"R!" screamed the crowd.

And by the time he had spelled out O-R-I-O-L-E-S, there was an avalanche of noise gushing from the stands loud enough to curl your hair.

God knows what the wine drinkers and the Washington lawyer crowd thought of all this; you could envision cellular phones snapping shut all over the joint as the yuppies and businessmen stopped to gawk at this crazy, aging hippie.

God knows what Chris Sabo thought, too.

Sabo used to play in Cincinnati, where they wrestle people like Wild Bill into waiting ambulances and shoot them full of %o Thorazine and whisper in their ears: "Shhh, it's OK, we're almost there." But for thousands of the faithful, weaned on mystical late-inning comebacks that came to be known as Oriole Magic in a creaky old stadium that sits like a mausoleum on 33rd Street, it was one blessed moment.

"He woke some people up," PA announcer Rex Barney told a Sun reporter that night.

"It was," Wild Bill says now, "pretty amazing."

In a plush private suite above home plate, the Orioles' new owner, Peter Angelos, stared and then smiled in wonder at this strange drama unfolding in the right-field stands. And in the press box, Orioles PR man Charles Steinberg felt a surge of adrenalin as the pandemonium grew all around him.

"It was wonderful!" said Mr. Steinberg. "Here was the symbolic leader of Oriole fans from their greatest years, '79-'83, and he's up and saying: 'Let's go! We have reason to be excited, reason to have faith in this team!' "

Which, if you get past the role the beers played in all this, was sort of what Wild Bill intended.

"It was kind of impromptu, really," he says of his first cheerleading efforts in a decade. "It was a salute to Angelos for taking the team away from the carpetbaggers and bringing it back to Baltimore.

"Now we've got something to root for. The last 12 or 13 years, you were rooting for the Washington Orioles, who happened to play in Baltimore. Now we've got the Orioles back.

"He [Angelos] took some of the money he made and gave it back to Baltimore."

But when you ask Wild Bill Hagy if he can envision himself regularly leading the cheers again in this wondrous downtown baseball shrine, where vendors actually peddle chardonnay in the stands and players are named Palmeiro and Sabo and Lee Smith, he shakes his head.

"I don't think so," he says softly.

Is it the chardonnay drinkers?

"Oh, it's lots of reasons."

Baseball magic

Maybe you had to be there at Memorial Stadium, during those heady years in the late '70s and early '80s, to understand what Wild Bill Hagy was all about.

If you were a baseball fan, it was the Land of Oz, pure and simple. The Orioles were winning. Earl Weaver was managing. Pitching, defense and three-run homers was the philosophy of ++ the moment.

And there was a newfound sense of excitement rippling through the fans, much of it generated by a bunch of lunatics in Section 34, upper deck, down the right field line.

Understand, this was not exactly the cast of Up With People!

Some major-league beer-swilling took place up there. The foul language drove off many a fan, and not just little old ladies with blue hair.

Still, Section 34 did more than just party. It was hallowed ground for a group of knowledgeable, hard-core fanatics. And Wild Bill was their guru, the emotional epicenter of this new, intense love affair between the Orioles and their fans.

This is how big Wild Bill was: they actually let the guy do his O-R-I-O-L-E-S! cheers from the top of the Orioles dugout.

If some poor, beer-addled loser jumped out of the stands and tried this, the cops would drag him away and toss him in the slammer. But Wild Bill Hagy, they practically escorted him to the dugout roof. The dugout roof was his private stage.

In short order, then, he became a phenomenon.

He signed autographs, hob-nobbed with presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan ("I liked his movies better than his presidency"), was interviewed by out-of-town TV stations. Still, he was a reluctant celebrity in many ways.

The drunks stumbling up to shake his hand, the pain-in-the-neck fans begging for a cheer every five seconds, players demanding to know why he missed a game -- it all became too much for a quiet man who wanted simply to enjoy the game.

"He was an age-old hippie who just couldn't handle the celebrity status," said one former Orioles official.

Then it all came to an end.

No, check that.

First it got ugly.

Then it all came to an end.

By the mid-1980s, a different sensibility was taking hold at Memorial Stadium. The Orioles felt alcohol abuse was becoming a major problem. They instituted a new policy prohibiting fans from bringing containers with alcoholic beverages into the stadium.

Wild Bill Hagy seems a gentle soul, but he did not take this edict gracefully.

He felt the club -- personified by owner Edward Bennett Williams, another hated Washington lawyer -- was simply trying to gouge the fans for even more money at the concession stands. So in 1985, on the last night that fans were allowed to bring coolers of beer into the stadium, Wild Bill stood up (yeah, he'd had a few cocktails) and launched his cooler from the upper deck.

"I drank the nine or 10 beers in the cooler, and then I just didn't have any use for it," he says now. "So it went. Then, so did I.

"Drinking nine or 10 beers, you get a little impulsive."

The Orioles, for some reason, considered this to be bad form. Wild Bill was promptly arrested, although he was hardly apologetic.

"We figured back then it would have cost about $20 to buy the beer [at the concession stands] that I brought into the stadium," he says.

The cooler incident, then, was his own private protest. But the Orioles, they didn't understand protests.

The Boston Tea Party -- that was a protest.

Gandhi marching to the sea after the Salt Acts were passed -- that was a protest.

But Wild Bill Hagy shot-putting his cooler onto the field -- the Orioles didn't know what to make of that.

"After a while, Bill started to become a pain in the rear," Bob Brown says. "He wasn't exactly a role model anymore."

Well, Wild Bill Hagy is no fool. He can take a hint as well as the next guy.

So he went away.

And he didn't come back for a very long time.

Unsuited to his tastes

This is all you need to know about Wild Bill Hagy's relationship with the Orioles: For the past seven years, he would have been the perfect subject for one of those sappy Where Are They Now? pieces that newspapers like so much.

Only his close friends knew what he was up to. He drove his cab and attended very few Oriole games. And when he did make it to a game, no matter how drunk he got, he kept a lower-than-low profile. Low enough for the Federal Witness Protection Program, if you want to know the truth.

In the fall of 1991, the Orioles got in touch with him.

They wanted him to lead one final O-R-I-O-L-E-S! cheer at Memorial Stadium on the last day of the season, before the team abandoned the joint like it was an old bus terminal and split for Camden Yards.

Wild Bill said thanks, but no thanks. There was still too much pain involved, too many unresolved feelings.

Look, if you don't think a baseball team can break your heart, you've never been a real fan, never embraced a team like Wild Bill Hagy did.

"I didn't want anything to do with those guys," Wild Bill says. "It wasn't the Baltimore Orioles. It wasn't the same organization anymore."

But then a funny thing happened to Wild Bill. Not funny as in ha-ha, funny as in weird.

Peter Angelos, a Baltimore guy, bought the Orioles from Eli Jacobs, an owner not exactly beloved by the fans.

Sure, Mr. Angelos was another lawyer, one who made a killing representing clients who said exposure to asbestos had made them sick. But Peter Angelos is a Highlandtown guy and Wild Bill grew up in Sparrow's Point and, well, Wild Bill could get past that business about the owner being a lawyer.

"I think him buying the team is the greatest thing to happen to Baltimore since Mayor Schaefer got elected the first time," he says.

Slowly, Wild Bill's interest in the team rekindled. During the off-season, he watched Mr. Angelos spend money like he had about a week to live, shelling out huge bucks for Rafael Palmeiro and Chris Sabo and Lee Smith.

And that clinched it; Wild Bill began coming back to the ballpark.

Baseball, the team, the fans, the new stadium -- it was all fun again. No-pressure fun.

So when Howard the Beer Man started pouring them two weeks ago and Wild Bill started drinking them and a little voice inside him said: "Go on, give 'em a cheer," it just felt like the right thing to do.

It's like the man said, you get a little impulsive after nine or 10 beers.

"I didn't think it would get that kind of response," Wild Bill says with a soft smile, remembering the ocean of noise that washed over him that night. "It was, um, interesting."

Not that you can expect to see Wild Bill doing that sort of thing on a regular basis, like the old days.

See, there's the little matter of the man being 55 years old and not being able to lead that kind of lifestyle anymore, on account of it would kill him if he did.

Plus there's the other little matter of having to hold down a job, which isn't so little if you're the type of person who has grown accustomed to the idea of three squares a day and a roof over your head with, oh, electricity and running water.

He drives for Jimmy's Cab in Towson now, Wild Bill does. He says he routinely puts in 60-hour work weeks, which tend to cut down on a man's late-night beer-swilling at the ballpark, not to mention any intricate choreography he might attempt atop a dugout roof.

Although every once in a while, a little of that is good for a man's soul.