Ted Patterson's new book on the Baltimore Orioles arrives in time to save the season. Not the baseball season precisely, but the season of giving and receiving and, not to be minimized, the season of remembering.
The book is called "The Baltimore Orioles: 40 Years of Magic from 33rd Street to Camden Yards." Brooks Robinson's on the cover, in his youth and ours, taking flight from third base all the way to the pitcher's mound where Dave McNally and Andy Etchebarren can't believe what's just happened. It's 1966, which it never will be again, and Baltimore has just beaten Los Angeles four straight times to become champion of the entire baseball world.
It'll never be this way again because baseball keeps getting in the way of its own essentials. Instead of the Robinsons, Frank and Brooks, hitting back-to-back World Series homers off Don Drysdale, we have a poisonous labor strike that threatens never to die. Instead of Paul Blair leaping at the fence to snatch a home run back into the ballpark, we have ticket prices rising to cover games that never were played. Instead of the kid Jim Palmer beating the incomparable Sandy Koufax, we have deadlines on season-ticket deals for games that might never even be played.
Patterson's book is an antidote to the current craziness. To call it a labor of love is to mis-define "labor." Patterson, who's been broadcasting on local radio for the past 21 years while turning baseball packratting into an art, brings back not only yesteryear's ballgames but the half-forgotten characters and the feel of the times. The book's old photographs are a treasure. Plus, Patterson's done some wonderful homework.
Example: Baltimore had to beg and plead for the St. Louis Browns to come here. How popular were the Browns back home? Two years before they left, their entire season attendance was 293,790. One year, it was 80,922. For the season. The current Orioles draw more than that every two games.
Example: In the Orioles' first season, 1954, catcher Clint Courtney struck out only seven times all year. Once, he batted with two out in the bottom of the ninth. The count was 3-and-2. Then a thunderstorm struck, halting play for two hours. When play resumed, Courtney stepped back in and took the very first pitch -- for strike three. "Well," he philosophized, "I always told you I was a tough man to strike out. It took them two hours to do it."
Example: Here's Mike Flanagan, describing his entrance in the ninth inning of the final game played at Memorial Stadium: "I walked in slowly. I didn't want to rush the moment. I got myself together and treated every pitch with great importance. I felt that I wasn't just doing it for me but for all the guys I had played with. I had to back up and pause a couple of times because the moment was getting to me. I had the weight of all the generations who ever walked out the tunnel onto the field. All the guys who went before me. I didn't do it for me. I did it for them." He struck out both batters he faced.
At times like this, it's a comfort to remember our yesterdays. The owners gaze across packed ballparks, augmented by huge television contracts, and it isn't enough. The ballplayers earn seven-figure salaries, and it isn't enough. The two sides stare at each other across bargaining tables, and nobody bends.
The newspapers are filled with negotiation stories, which no one can bear to read. The club owners, as spoiled and stupid a group of rich boys as ever painted themselves into a corner, threaten to put scab teams onto the field, imagining fans spending money at current levels to watch second-raters and imagining television networks not going ballistic over devalued broadcast contracts.
The Orioles owner, Peter Angelos, says he'd forfeit ballgames before putting a scab team onto the field. His entire history ties him to unions. For his posture, his fellow owners turn him into a pariah. The Orioles' fans, loyal as any in baseball, get letters on season tickets that read like ransom notes.
Sorry, the Orioles' brass says, it's just the way things are. But it didn't used to be this way, and Ted Patterson's book is a nice reminder: Of Paul Richards and Earl Weaver, of Bob Boyd hitting frozen ropes through the humid summer nights and Willie Tasby playing in his stocking feet so his spikes wouldn't attract lightning and Rick Dempsey sliding flat on his belly during rain delays, of all those who managed and played over 40 summers and, even when they had their differences, still managed to throw a ball around on schedule.