Jenny and I went to our first O's game of the season last night, a 3-0 win against the Twins. How is it that we have a first-place team in Baltimore for the first time in 8 years, and I don't get to Camden Yards until May? Good question. It's because I was in no hurry to fork over my money to Peter Angelos this year, after the morons in the 'customer service' department wouldn't return my calls when all I wanted to do was upgrade the seats in my ticket package. No wonder he was so scared about a Washington team.
We had marvelous seats, good enough that you could recognize the players without reading the jerseys or knowing their uniform numbers. But there wasn't much of a crowd there. I suppose it's because it was a Monday, but the weather was perfect, and the Twins are a good team; they've been to the playoffs the last few years. The fans down in section 14 aren't too vocal either, which is too bad. I always suspected that once D.C. got a team, the long-time Orioles fans would finally be in the majority at Camden Yards, displacing the cell-phone-chatting casual fans from the D.C. area. I guess I was wrong - the $40 seats are apparently still full of those people, using their company's season tickets, chatting on the phone, leaving early during a great game on a beautiful evening. Could it kill them to make some noise, other than when the scoreboards instruct them to?
There was a 5-6 year old kid sitting behind us who started asking in the fifth inning if they could leave. Thank God for short attention spans, which led to the kid's discerning observation in the seventh: "Whoever cut that grass did a pretty good job." Yeah kid, they sure did.
On to the game! A dominating pitching performance by Daniel Cabrera, shutting out a team that hadn't been shut out since July of last season, and striking out a career-high 11 in 8 innings (B.J. Ryan pitched the ninth to complete the shutout). And Cabrera is a BIG guy. He's listed at 6' 7", and used all of that leverage last night -he was hitting 99 mph on the radar gun on more than one occasion, with most pitches above 95. Miguel Tejada also hit his 10th home run (and 200th of his career), a line-drive that cleared then left field wall in a hurry.
Hopefully this is a defining moment in Cabrera's young career - he's got the stuff to be a frighteningly good, intimidating pitcher. Baltimore pitching coach Ray Miller supposedly compared his mound presence (and fastball) to that of J.R. Richard, a similarly-proportioned pitcher who had some great years with Houston back in the 70s. That's good news for the Orioles, if Cabrera can have a career similar to that of Richard.
One last item: now that Washington has a team, would it kill the Orioles to put Baltimore back on their uniforms? Their road uniforms used to include 'BALTIMORE' in big block letters. We looked around the ballpark last night, and couldn't see one sign, uniform, or advertisement that included the name of the city in which the game was being played. That's just sad. In all fairness, this can't be blamed on Angelos (see link to Sun article), but he has the power to rectify it. Time to stop pretending that this is a huge regional team, because it isn't anymore (if it ever was in the first place). I know that Baltimore has its problems, but there's something wrong when a team purposefully dissociates itself from its own city.
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