Occasionally over the years, a reader has innocently asked me if I was there at Camden Yards on the night Cal Ripken Jr. set baseball’s all-time Ironman record.
For a long time, my stock reply was kind of smart-alecky. But I couldn’t help it.
Yes, I would say, I was there. And I also witnessed Cal’s four hundredth career home run. And his three thousandth career hit. And his two thousandth straight game, a few months before he passed Lou Gehrig.
I was also there the night in Kansas City when he broke the world Ironman record, previously held by a Japanese baseball star. I was there the night at Memorial Stadium when he got tossed out of a game in the bottom of the first inning for barking at the umpire, a narrow escape for his streak.
I wasn’t there in Toronto on the night in 1987 when his consecutive-innings streak ended. But I wrote about it.
My point to the reader who’d innocently asked a simple question: I was there for pretty much every touchstone moment in Ripken’s career, not just the big one in 1995. That was my job for the 23 years I wrote columns for the Baltimore Sun. If something big happened in Baltimore sports, I was on hand. And on deadline. My job was to say something about what I’d witnessed.
For the first half of my time at the paper, the Orioles were the only game in town. The Colts had departed for Indianapolis. The Ravens hadn't arrived from Cleveland. The Orioles were always Topic A. Whatever I wrote about them was certain to be read more than anything I wrote about anything else. So I wrote about them. A lot.
By the time I left the paper in 2007, I’d written at least several thousand columns about the Orioles, frequently on deadline in a press box after a night game.
With this post, I’m introducing a new Bird Tapes content series in which I read what I wrote on some famous (and infamous) occasions in Oriole history. The posts are available to all subscribers, and as part of the Bird Tapes Podcast stream, the audio files can be downloaded to a device or consumed on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also listen in Substack by hitting the play button.
I’m inaugurating the series with a reading of what I wrote on one of the most infamous nights in Oriole history. They were in New York for Game 1 of the 1996 American League Championship Series against the Yankees. They’d come in hot, making the playoffs after a late-season surge, and they held a 4-3 lead going into the bottom of the eighth inning. Leading off for the Yankees, Derek Jeter hit a fly ball to deep right field. The Orioles’ Tony Tarasco retreated to the wall and appeared camped under the ball as it descended. Then a young fan reached out. The ball wound up in the seats. The Yankees eventually won the game.
Sorry, you know the story.
I wrote about the umpire who missed a call that surely would’ve been overturned had replay existed back then.
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