One of the first things they tell you in journalism school is to avoid sweeping generalizations, since they often prove to be inaccurate at best and patently offensive at worst.
Aw, what the hell ...
Snap profile of an Orioles fan: Spends half the game on his cell phone yakking with his broker. Wine-sipper. Gucci-tassel-loafer-wearer. Doesn't want to get on the opposing team too loudly, lest others in his section put down their Wall Street Journals and turn around and stare.
If he's in a luxury box, he's raking a shrimp the size of your thumb through cocktail sauce while asking his buddies: "Which one's Cal Ripken again?"
Snap profile of a Ravens fan: What's Sunday breakfast without shotgunning a couple of Buds? Likes to be the fat guy with the purple "V" painted on his gut when he and his buddies line up shirtless in 25-degree weather to spell out R-A-V-E-N-S.
Lifelong dream: To own a tank top for every day of the week.
If he's in a luxury box (God forbid), has to be reminded not to relieve himself on the carpet.
Boy, it feels good, stereotyping!
Of course, the truth about the essential nature of Ravens and Orioles fans is another matter altogether, as veteran observers delight in pointing out.
"The fans are incredibly similar," says Ravens vice president for marketing and sales David Cope, who was director of marketing and advertising for the Orioles in the early '90s. "The same people entertaining [clients] for business purposes at Camden Yards are going with their friends to Ravens games Sunday."
Cope appears to be on the mark. On closer examination, this business of bloodless Chardonnay snobs clapping like an opera audience after a towering Rafael Palmeiro homer, or a gritty blue-collar mob howling over a head-snapping Ray Lewis tackle, seems vastly overstated.
In fact, the demographic evidence suggests both Ravens and Orioles fans tend to be:
Upscale -- In a Ravens survey of season-ticket holders, 50 percent of the respondents reported an annual household income of over $75,000. In a survey given to potential corporate partners, 57 percent of Orioles season-ticket holders had an annual household income of $50,000 or more.
Well-educated -- Of Ravens season-ticket holders, 72 percent had a college and/or graduate degree; a 1996 study indicated 70 percent of O's fans had attained a similar education level.
Not exactly party-animal age -- Of Ravens season-ticket holders, 68 percent are ages 35-54; 66 percent of Orioles fans are ages 31-50.
Somewhat fully evolved, gender-wise -- The Ravens report that 45 percent of their in-stadium fans are women; the Orioles say 42 percent of their fans are women.
What it really comes down to is this: The differences between Ravens and Orioles fans have more to do with the sports they follow -- and the way those sports are watched -- than any other factors.
Baseball, with its leisurely, 162-game season, is a game to be savored. Baseball is hot summer nights, peanuts and Crackerjacks, nuance and strategy, no clock, shooting the breeze in the stands with your dad.
"Baseball is the generations looping backward forever with a million apparitions of sticks and balls ... the profound archaic song of birth, growth, age and death," wrote the poet Donald Hall.
Football is 16 games, just eight at home. Football is smash-mouth. Football is war: the ground attack, the blitz, striking through the air, the Red Zone -- you pick the metaphor. Sixty minutes in the killing fields. Every game is Armageddon.
"I'm still getting adjusted to the importance and intensity of one single football game -- it's unbelievable," says Cope, in his third year with the Ravens.
Ravens fan or Orioles fan, each celebrates the game in a unique fashion. Some more, um, unique than others.
Planning is everything
The RV squats on the side of a quiet, tree-lined street in Catonsville, outside a tidy white Cape Cod with green shutters.
You can't miss this RV. If you miss it, you should probably schedule a CAT scan, because this is a 25-foot-long, 1976 Dodge Tioga painted purple, black and gold, with a huge, menacing, black bird clutching a football helmet on two sides.
This -- the Cape Cod, not the RV -- is the home of Paul Adams, 28, a human resources manager for ADT Security Services. Adams, as you may have gathered, is a huge Ravens' fan. The RV belongs to Adams and his buddies, two sets of brothers: Greg Mayer, 27, and Brad Mayer, 23, and Rob Ferrer, 27, and Rick Ferrer, 28.
Hey, you show up at a Ravens game in a tired Jeep Wrangler if you want; Adams and his friends, all season ticket holders, wanted to go in style. So they bought the RV for $1,500, gutted the interior, and put $5,000 worth of renovations into this baby.
Now it has wall-to-wall purple carpeting, black leather couches, two huge Cerwin-Vega speakers, an Onkyo tape deck, and a cab spray-painted a tasteful chrome, for a spaceship-like theme. The bathtub doubles as a beer cooler.
As you can imagine, the RV, nick-named "Bennie" in honor of Ravens' special teams kamikaze Bennie Thompson, makes quite entrance at a tailgate party.
At the Ravens' sold-out home opener against the Steelers, it rumbled into Lot G at 8 a.m. with the Jimi Hendrix' "Purple Haze" blasting from the speakers.
Within minutes, the grill was fired up and a traditional breakfast of pancakes and beer was being readied as other tailgaters gawked and a TV news team recorded the whole scene.
"Tailgating is a culture in football that's not part of baseball," Adams says. "Football fans wait two, three weeks for a game. You prepare for it the whole time."
All five friends are also long-time Orioles fans. But they say Ravens games provide them with something the Orioles, floundering to a fourth-place finish, cannot.
"There's an energy level that the Ravens have that Oriole fans have been missing since they left Memorial Stadium," Adams says. "I think it's the players, like (linebacker) Ray Lewis, dictating the energy. Cal's a great player, but he doesn't have the spunk and fire the team needed."
At least one of the stereotypes about O's fans is true on occasion, says Rob Ferrer.
"The last game I went to, I saw a woman talk on a cell-phone the whole time. She never watched the game at all."
"Baseball's more of a conversational game, football's more of an attentional game," muses Brad Mayer.
Football's more of a what game?
"Attentional. You, um, have to pay attention. Actually, I just made that up."
Back in Catonsville, as the sun goes down, the guys begin throwing around a football. They also begin discussion of their next project: how to weld the grill onto the back of the RV, so they don't have to transport it inside and ruin the carpeting.
Easy rhythm
It's a steamy Friday night at Camden Yards and the Yankees, the New Royalty of baseball, are in town for a three-game series.
Earlier in the season, you would have sold your grandmother to get tickets for this game. But New York ran away with the division title and the Orioles are a bloated corpse, waiting only for that last shovelful of dirt to cover their faces and blot out this miserable year for good.
Nevertheless, a crowd of 48,113 is here, the attendance figure juiced by hundreds of Yankee fans who made the trek south via Amtrak and I-95. The buzz in the stands is palpable, if not electric. In the upper deck in left field, Chris Longley, 27, a local civil engineer, is welcoming the New Yorkers to Baltimore with a T-shirt on which is emblazoned this warm, fuzzy message: Yankees Suck.
"I'm wearing it 'cause of him -- it's a pride thing," says Longley, pointing to his buddy Chris Chubb, 26, a Yankees fan from Rochester, N.Y.
Longley and Chubb, hard-core Gen-X baseball fans, represent the link the poet Hall was talking about, that business of "the generations looping backward."
Chubb watches 140 Yankee games a year on DirecTV. Longley sees a ton of Orioles games. The pace of the game, hitters stepping endlessly in and out of the batter's box, pitchers pacing back and forth on the mound, infielders scratching divots in the dirt between pitches, is perfect for sipping beer and catching up with each other.
Both enjoy the furious, gladiators-vs.-lions atmosphere of pro football -- Longley is also a Ravens season ticket holder. But watching scowling Yankees pitcher David Wells try to muscle a fastball past Cal Ripken seems to be all the drama these two friends need at the moment.
"There's definitely a higher class of people at Orioles games," says Longley. "More drinking at Ravens games. More fights."
David Halberstam, the author of "October 1964," a book about the '64 World Series, recently told Newsday: "[Baseball] get judged, probably unkindly, earlier in the season, because its action seems to be in contrast to sports with greater action per millisecond.
"There was an NBA playoff game where the lead changed four times in 14 seconds. In baseball, a pitcher goes to his groin that many times in 14 seconds without throwing a pitch."
If that's the case, Orioles fans must be supremely comfortable with the game's languid rhythms.
Despite dropping out of the wild-card race with a thud, the Orioles drew 3.7 million fans to Camden Yards this season for the second consecutive year.
And on this night, the cell-phone count seems low, the Gucci-loafer crowd minimal. On this night, at least in the early innings, Orioles fans seem engaged, if not shaking the thunder from the sky.
Blaine Baer, past president of the Oriole Advocates, a philanthropic group of business people, attends 35 games a year and says Orioles fans are "very dedicated. Whether they win or lose."
And yet, when asked if O's fans at Camden Yards seem reserved, especially in contrast to the old days when Wild Bill Hagy was windmilling his arms and summoning thunderous roars from atop the dugout at Memorial Stadium, she says: "It is very quiet. The fans tend to look at the [scoreboard] signs that say 'Pump it up!' and 'Noise!' to cheer.
"They're very knowledgeable ... but very quiet."
The idea of O's fans needing cues to cheer is alarming. On this night, though, there's a reason for the muted emotions, at least in the later innings.
The Orioles get cuffed around badly. The Yanks' Paul O'Neill hits a three-run homer in the sixth inning to make it 8-2 New York. When his teammate, Shane Spencer, blasts a grand slam in the ninth, the stadium empties as if Hurricane Georges reached the Inner Harbor.
Jailbirds
Deep in the lower recesses of the Ravens new stadium, there is a security complex with four holding cells. Each cell holds only one person, and if you're that one person, you'd better not be real fat or they'll have to pour 10W-40 over your head and shoehorn you in. The cells are that tiny.
The floors are linoleum, like your great aunt's old kitchen, and there are drains in each cell, just in case the occupant decides to entertain the guards with some type of bodily secretion.
The walls are concrete, the lighting is interrogation-room-harsh, and an austere wooden bench is nearby. It's not Devil's Island, but it's not a room at the Sheraton, either.
Anyway, when you visit the Ravens jail on a quiet mid-week morning, the first thing you think about is ... beer.
Because for the most part, beer is the reason people end up in these cells. They drink too much beer and then they get stupid, and the next thing you know they're lighting a joint in the stands or pawing somebody's girlfriend or throwing a punch at the other team's fans. But beer is also a common denominator for Ravens and Orioles fans, a barometer for measuring their celebratory habits. And here the news is good.
Well, not bad, anyway.
Fact: Ravens fans drink more beer than Orioles fans do. Ravens fans tailgate. Ravens fans get more jazzed for each of their precious eight home games; the cops assume many fans will have a few beers under their belts before they even set foot in the stadium.
Still, Glenn Preibis, director of guest services for the Ravens, says police at the stadium made only a handful of arrests during each of the team's first three home games.
A lot of people don't know it but Camden Yards, the Sistine Chapel of baseball, has three holding cells within its walls, too. But Lt. Edward Glacken, the Baltimore Police detail commander there, says his men may issue 30 or so warnings during a typical Orioles game, but will average only two arrests.
At Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia, they throw so many drunk fans in the stadium slammer during Eagles games that a judge is actually assigned there to dispense justice.
But not here in Charm City. Here, for the most part, both Ravens fans and Orioles fans can handle their beer, at least until the game is over.
That may not make for a Chamber of Commerce slogan. But it is a demographic of a different kind.
Pub Date: 9/26/98