When the Baltimore Orioles swept the Detroit Tigers this weekend, they earned their first trip to the ALCS since 1997. This feat is overwhelmingly difficult to wrap my head around, as I was just 12 years old last time this happened.
That was the era of starting pitchers Scott Erickson and Mike Mussina, and 100 MPH fastballs from Armando Benitez. Cal’s streak was still alive. Harold Baines, Brady Anderson, and B.J. Surhoff were in the outfield.
That was a time when cell phones looked like this and you only owned one if you had a really nice car or worked on Wall Street. The most popular songs were “Candle in the Wind” and “Barbie Girl.” That was the year of Dolly the cloned sheep. Television duos included Lois and Clark and Beavis and Butthead. We surfed the web with dial-up, Netscape Navigator, and CompuServe.
Suffice it to say, 1997 was a long time ago.
We didn’t know it then, but that was the start of 14 bleak seasons of Baltimore baseball. We would go through eight different managers in that span of time. We would painfully lose 1,276 games (that’s an average of 91 a season) and Camden Yards’ average attendance dwindled from 45,816 to 21,395. The stadium maddeningly filled up with Red Sox and Yankees fans. Saying you were an Orioles fan became synonymous with masochism and, more often than not, would garner sympathetic head tilts and condescending apologies.
But true Orioles fans never gave up on the team—retaining season-ticket plans like my dad has done, having faith in players like Miguel Tejada and Sammy Sosa, and certainly never moving over to the Washington Nationals bandwagon. We held out hope as we watched other beleaguered teams, like the Boston Red Sox, go all the way. I remember a particularly desperate time when I named my goldfish in college “Javy” just to try to keep the Orioles Magic alive (we went 71-91 that year).
But then, slowly but surely, some things started going our way. I’d point to to the 2008 Bedard-Jones trade as one of the first glimmers of hope. And then there was the late 2010 hiring of Buck Showalter, who looked and acted awfully familiar, to really catalyze a new era in Baltimore. Though we faltered in 2011, we still managed to keep the Red Sox out of the playoffs, bringing excitement back to a Yard that had felt dormant for years.
And of course, you know the rest. Two playoff runs in two years, leading the majors in home runs, and battling back from injuries to secure our trip to the ALCS. I have had the privilege of seeing some exciting games in Camden Yards over the years (namely Cal’s 2131 game and our playoff win over the Yankees in 2012), but nothing compared to the electricity and roar when Delmon Young cleared the bases on Friday afternoon. It was a moment I had been waiting for my entire life.
The Orioles are back, they are talented, and they are ready to take the baseball world by storm.