or horse racing making a major comeback from its fall from grace during our lifetime.
But baseball’s arrogance is mind-blowing and out of control and they don’t even see what’s happening because they clearly don’t spend enough time around the NFL.
My wife’s experiences are the best example. She’s from New Hampshire, she absolutely adores the Red Sox (she’s a just fan, not a fanatic). She doesn’t KNOW baseball, but she LIKES baseball and does her best to catch the team as much as she can. She even gets those crazy updates on her cell phone every evening, 20 times a night with Red Sox news flashes.
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Taking a slight break — given our abstinence from all things Oriole — she does go to Camden Yards once a year with her sister to see the Red Sox. She wears a totally obnoxious gray BOSTON — that’s B-O-S-T-O-N on their road jerseys if Drew or anyone else is keeping score here — with an APARICIO and an 11 on the back (I always tell her that I got her jersey No. 11, because unlike Bo Derek, she’s a perfect 11…but then she realized Luis actually WORE No. 11 and it’s now HER name too!).
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But, just like the sign at Comiskey Park it says: 11 Aparicio. Just like the actual 1973 Red Sox jersey I got rid of last year (except this one fits). It has the 2004 World Series championship patch on the shoulder, and overall it’s a pretty snazzy piece. And she loves it and loves baseball!
Sometimes, over the past 28 months, she’s literally gotten emotional looking into the stadium and accepting that we’re not going anytime soon.
We live three blocks from Camden Yards and we don’t go to the games and won’t be spending money going until the team is sold. For the record, we moved where we moved SPECIFICALLY to GO to baseball games!
8But the reasons we don’t go would have to be in another book. There are more than I can list besides any one “incident.” And most of it is honestly, at this point, related to stuff they’ve done to other people more than anything that’s happened with me.
Everyone, it seems, has their favorite Angelos horror moment or something that has happened to them at a game, or their frustrations about time, expense, or maybe it’s just the losing and all of the hair-brained things this ownership group has done over 13 years to chase away hundreds of thousands of people.
I my house, we’ve gone from being paralyzed to stunned to angry, to deprived to sad to FINALLY, on a mission to change things.
I live downtown. I see the empty nights in and around the stadium. I feel the economic impact in my own neighborhood. I hear the stories everywhere I go. People want these memories back, these lost experiences back with their kids and family. They’re craving it and they aren’t going to crave it for much longer, until like we did when the Colts left town, we just more onto other things in our lives.
Believe me, I can sit here and pine away about baseball and the Orioles, but I’ve had plenty of “other” fun over the past 28 months. We’ve traveled, found different hobbies, had evenings free more often and it’s been a lot of fun.
But — I do miss my Orioles and my summer nights at the ballpark.
Badly!
8But if we wait five more years to do anything about it then 1983 starts to sound more like 1978.
Let’s play it out for five more years ahead…and then five more!
And all of sudden the Orioles moving from a 25-year-old Camden Yards to Albuquerque or wherever doesn’t sound so crazy.
Hey, they imploded most of the concrete bowls from the 1960’s inside of 30 years in Philadelphia and Cincinnati!
Who knows what Baltimore will look like 10 years from now? And who knows what will happen with MLB 10 years from now, especially with the dangerous path it’s heading on with kids not learning and playing and loving their game in this country.
I’ll be honest with you. We’re a sports family and always will be. We love sports and spend (and owe) literally every good thing in our lives to sports, and more specifically, baseball, because it was my first love. Baseball was the “gateway” drug for my sports addiction in the same way the Gateway Arch was my “gateway” city for a lifetime of mixing travel (my other passion) with sports and baseball and music.
And I want baseball — and those great conversations and those stories I used to have about it — back.
I want those friendships and those connections and those magic moments and evenings back!
And that’s what this Thursday and The Rally are all about.
