Dem O’s
Dem O’s
By Charles Rammelkamp
The Ultimate Penultimate
My friend from work, Terry,
likewise a technical writer,
went with me to the penultimate
Orioles baseball game at Memorial Stadium,
October 5, 1991.
The company’d laid me off
four months before,
the documentation department slimming down
for budgetary reasons.
But I’d found a new job
writing computer procedures
at a local insurance company.
A crisp Indian summer day,
blue skies, autumnal shirtsleeve weather,
we sat in centerfield seats,
plastic cups of draft beer in hand,
watched the final Orioles victory
at the old stadium where they’d played
since moving to town from St. Louis in 1954.
They’d already lost 94 games that season,
would lose to Detroit again the next day.
We also saw the last home run there,
Chito Martinez’ two-run shot in the sixth
to give Baltimore the lead they wouldn’t lose.
The next day would also be full of lasts:
“I Was There” pennants on sale,
a parade of heroes from the past,
Mike Flanagan pitching the ninth inning,
Baltimore’s last Cy Young Award winner (1979).
But Terry and I saw the good parts.
It was also the last time I ever saw Terry,
he and his family leaving Baltimore the next year
for another job in St. Louis.
Can’t You See It?
I couldn’t get a ticket that night –
sold out long ago –
and besides, I had to go to work next day,
drive my kids to their grade school,
the new academic year having just begun.
A hot summer day, the temperature topping 90,
barely cooling when the sun went down,
a festive gaiety filled the city.
The O’s hadn’t been a contender for years,
the glory days of the 1970’s
a quarter century in the rearview mirror.
But tonight the city would celebrate:
Cal Ripken, the Iron Man,
would play his 2,131st consecutive game,
passing Lou Gehrig on the all-time list.
The Orioles beat the Angels 4-2,
behind Mike Mussina’s pitching,
Ripken going two for four with an RBI.
But best of all?
Joan Jett sang the National Anthem,
the Camden Yards crowd heaving up
a thunderous “Oh!”
when Joan got to “Oh, say can you see…”
Like the kids who claimed
they’d gone to Woodstock,
I’d always boast I’d seen the game,
telling the lie and feeling no shame.
Through with Love
Like a fickle lover,
I switched my loyalty
from the Tigers to the Red Sox
the year I moved to Boston
for graduate school,
a centerfield bleacher rat
that whole summer
I lived in Kenmore Square.
But just as easily,
having broken up once,
I became an Orioles fan
when my wife and I moved to Baltimore.
Didn’t hurt that they won the World Series –
and haven’t since then –
our first summer in Charm City.
How I loved bucolic Memorial Stadium,
just up Thirty-third Street from Johns Hopkins,
in the sketchy Waverly neighborhood,
neighborhood homes visible beyond the fences.
But then in the 1990’s
Baltimore joined the stampede
to faux glamorous downtown mega-stadiums,
the scoreboard screaming commands
like a domineering slavedriver,
commanding the crowd to do the wave –
stand up, sit down, stand up, sit down! –
shining the spotlight of the Kiss Cam
on unsuspecting couples,
promoting the marriage proposals
of grandstanding couples seeking attention.
The romance was gone.
After a game between the Yankees and the O’s,
Mike Mussina still a Baltimore pitcher then,
I never went back.
As Marilyn Monroe sang in Some Like It Hot,
I’m through with love.
Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. Two full-length collections were published in 2020, Catastroika, from Apprentice House, and Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books. A poetry chapbook, Mortal Coil, has just been published by Clare Songbirds Publishing.