Chapter 22

Some of the old Oriole hands told me, during batting practice before Game Six, how Camden Yards used to be full of fans from visiting clubs when the Orioles played their home games. During the team's long string of lean years, attendance by locals had fallen off, slowly but inexorably as disappointment calcified. The Orioles' ownership had come to depend heavily on the kindness of strangers. Being in the American League East was hard on a mediocre club when it came to winning ballgames, but the AL East was the place to be, if you needed to fill up some empty seats in the stands.

Yankee fans, and Red Sox fans even more, regularly had invaded Baltimore for our home series against their teams. Tickets to home games were much harder to come by in those powerhouse baseball towns. Fenway Park in Boston, particularly, was a tiny venue, with far fewer available seats than potential takers. So, hey, why not just follow their club down I-95 and see them play the Orioles? Pretty little ballpark, Camden Yards. Plenty of good seats available.

To a lesser extent, Red Sox and Yankee fans followed their clubs to Toronto and Tampa Bay, too. But Baltimore was usually the most popular foreign location.

As a result, when New York or Boston was in town, during those lean years for the Birds, it had become hard to tell, listening to fan responses to action on the field, who was the home club and who was the visitor. This was good for revenue, but terrible for morale.

Well, those days were over. On this night, the only Mets fans who could wedge their way into Camden Yards for Game Six either had gotten one of the precious few seats allocated to the visiting club for the Series, or they knew somebody very high up in the world of politics, business, or sport.

The Pope? Maybe he could land you a seat. The Governor? Possibly. The Governor of Maryland might have been able to get you a sad-sack seat in the upper deck in right, closer to The Warehouse than to home plate.

The Governor of New York? Forget about it!

The place was full of Oriole fans for Game Six. Probably, many of the folks who'd stuck with us, through all those dismal seasons in fourth place, had experienced their own problems, landing tickets to this game. After all, not everybody is a season-ticket holder, guaranteed a shot at witnessing post-season glory.

That's OK. Maybe next year, those fans could follow us up to Yankee Stadium, watch us play a game or two up there. Nice park, Yankee Stadium. Good, solid third-place club, those Yanks.

It would have been kind of neat if Game Six had turned out to be a masterpiece. I'd like to have felt the tension while Sam Bailey worked into the seventh inning without having given up a hit. Or I would have enjoyed a nice, 9-8 slugfest -- with us pulling it out with a walk-off homer in -- say -- the eleventh inning. Something like that would have been pretty cool. Some of the sportswriters already had been complaining that our World Series with the Mets had lacked drama. They'd said that the games (outside of the tension-filled 1-0 Mets victory in Game Two) had been pretty prosaic affairs.

With all these home fans screaming for us -- many of them not even yet born when Baltimore had last won a World Series -- high drama would have been something to remember.

Well, it started out dramatically enough. After four innings, neither club had gotten a base runner, much less a hit. Mutual perfect games going. Now, that would have satisfied even the most jaded baseball writer, looking for a lead for tomorrow's story.

But a ballgame goes nine innings -- at least. In the fifth, we pushed across a run on a Melvin Mora triple and Tough Shit Williams' ground ball single through the hole between first and second.

Sam Bailey gave that one-run lead back to them in the sixth, on a homer by Mets outfielder Alberto Juarez. It was hit directly over my head, and I had brief visions of making a circus catch and pulling it back into the park.

Nope. No such heroics for me. It wasn't even close to being within my reach.

We scratched out another run in the eighth, taking a 2-1 lead. The Mets suddenly found themselves with only one inning left to get back into the ballgame. For us, it was Freddie Gonzalez time. Freddie was our closer. And, man, ol' Freddie could really close! He was our Mr. Reliability. The best!

Or else Paul could decide to stick with Sam Bailey. After all, Sam had only given up the one run, and three scattered hits. Sam seldom went nine innings, but that was mostly because using a closer to mop-up in the ninth had become an ingrained baseball tradition. Often a manager called in his closer for the final inning, even when things were going well. Even Paul Warren had been known to do that.

But, this time, Paul decided to stick with Sam. That made me nervous, way out there in centerfield.