Michael Olesker, The Examiner
2008-03-31 08:00:00.0
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BALTIMORE -

As the Baltimore Orioles commence their 2008 season at Camden Yards today, here is a suggestion for all fans who face the new year with the anxiety and numbness that can come only from a quarter-century in the baseball wilderness: Party like it’s 1954.

“Uh, 1954?” I hear you ask.

Yes, 1954.

For that was the year this entire history of modern Orioles baseball began, and within whose entrails maybe we can read the future.

“But that 1954 team won only 54 games,” I hear you cry.

Yes. And lost 100.

“They only hit 56 home runs.”

Yes. All year.

“Their top home run hitter was the big third baseman, Vern Stephens, wasn’t it?”

Yes. He hit eight.

Their promising young pitcher, Don Larsen, who would hurl history’s only World Series perfect game just two years later, won three games in all of 1954.

And lost 21.

So why mention all of this now?

Because 1954 was the beginning of all things promising, and so is 2008.

The years of kidding ourselves are over. The years of patching up things with a fading name — Albert Belle, Sammy Sosa — have been discredited.

The new Orioles are starting fresh with kids, and we can watch them grow, across multiple summers, as we get to know them as part of a team instead of merely itinerant, soldier-for-hire athletes roaming the landscape, here and quickly gone.

The whole shebang started in the comic awfulness of ‘54, but by ‘55 there was a crew-cut kid at third base, and his name was Brooks Robinson, and all he did was stick around for the next 22 years.

And soon came a Kiddie Korps of young pitchers named Pappas and Walker and Estrada and Fisher, and a skinny shortstop named Hansen and a slugging first baseman named Gentile.

The Orioles were building something, piece by piece, partly by trade, partly by developing kids out of a farm system, until the arrival of those named Powell and Palmer and Blair and McNally.

Who was putting together those teams? Some guy named Lee MacPhail, who was president and general manager. His son Andy is the guy putting together today’s Orioles. Let’s hear it for genetics.

We watched Lee MacPhail’s prospects grow over a decade and more, as they became not just major-league ballplayers but parts of our local folklore.

And they were followed by the guy who made it even better, named Frank Robinson, and during two decades those Orioles ballclubs put together the best record in all of major-league baseball.

It’s more than a quarter-century since any of these guys played baseball here, and yet we remember them still.

Why is that?

Not only because they won a lot of baseball games. It’s because they were ours, like kids we’d watched as they grew up on the neighborhood playground.

The last time the Orioles won a division title, in the mid-’90s, they were a team consisting of rent-a-players. They were here, and then they weren’t. They followed the trail of the money, and when they left it was the same pursuit.

Hello, Randy Myers, and goodbye.

And Roberto Alomar, who looked like the spitting image of somebody but left town before we could figure out who.

And Bobby Bonilla and David Wells and Todd Zeile and Rafael Palmeiro, too. They were stars, and they had two winning seasons in which we filled Oriole Park to watch them play.

But there was something funny about the whole business, something hollow at the core. It said Orioles on their uniforms — but, who, exactly, were these guys? Most of them left before we could find out.

Sports, at its best, is an affair of the heart. For the heart to be engaged, there has to be a story line, there has to be identification with the characters.

Beginning today, there are new characters in town. Some of them, we’re still learning their names. Some of them, like Nick Markakis and Adam Jones, look like the stuff of a promising future.

The future’s not here yet, any more than it was in 1954.

But the journey’s part of the fun: Seeing all these new kids develop, deciphering their personalities, watching them become part of Baltimore.

There won’t be any pennants flying over Oriole Park this year.

But that doesn’t mean the stories won’t be interesting, and the characters compelling.

In time, pennants will come.

In the meantime, party like it’s 1954.

Please send news tips to Michael Olesker at olesker@baltimoreexaminer.com.