Oedipus, Odysseus and the Baltimore Orioles

Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash. The Toronto Blue Jays Stadium reminds me of an ancient Greek amphitheater, so it illustrates this post nicely. (Someone will have to explain to me why a Canadian team plays in American major league baseball.)

Dear Readers,

I promise to bring back the dark when I pick up the tale of Sophocles’ Ajax from last week’s post. The story I’m going to tell you now is about my brief life as a sports fan, when I was in graduate school, struggling to get my doctorate in Classics. Even if you’re not interested in sports, or are horrified by the ridiculous sums that top athletes are paid, or a fan of the San Antonio Spurs, stay with me. As you can see by the title of this post, there’s a connection to ancient Greek literature, and not a tenuous one.

I haven’t thought about this story in a while, but we were in New York City yesterday, where seemingly everyone was in orange and bright blue, having pledged allegiance to the Knicks. Every game has been a nail-biter, won by small numbers. We got home in time to watch them play game 5 against the San Antonio Spurs.

To the amazement of everybody, possibly to the team itself, the Knicks won. They are now the National Basketball Association champions. On the OMG/WTF scale, their victory falls somewhere between Sleeping Beauty and Lazarus. The last time they won it was in 1973, when Richard Nixon was president and nobody wore sunscreen.

The unifying feeling of exhilaration in NYC reminded me of my years as the most unlikely of sports fans. In the late 70s and early 80s, the Baltimore Orioles were my heroes when I was struggling against some tough odds. Indeed, I was trying hard not to lose what was most important to me. I wrote an essay about those days, published 20 years ago in Creative Nonfiction. Here it is.

In my next post, I will pick up the story of Ajax, poor fellow, whose team turned against him, and he against them. But for now, let’s go to the old Memorial Stadium in Baltimore, where dramas of a different kind played out.

Oriole Magic

This is a happy story about becoming a fan, although it began unhappily for me, and ended unhappily for my heroes. When I fell for the Baltimore Orioles in the summer of 1979, I was a twenty-three-year-old graduate student. The Birds and I were about the same age, give or take a few years. I, however, lived in books, largely indoors, and almost entirely on nerve; they, in the words of sportswriter Dan Okrent, spent their youth and energy "attempting to touch their feet safely ona pentagonal piece of rubber more times than their opponents."

I'd moved to Baltimore to enter a Ph.D. program in Classics, the study of ancient Greek and Roman culture. From the age of twelve, I had planned to become a professor and stay in school forever. The track of my existence was a narrow one: from my desk at home, to my desk in the basement of the library, to my desk in class, and then back to the library, and eventually back to my desk at home.

Still, there was no way for a sentient, even marginally socialized adult living in Baltimore to remain unaware of the town's beloved O's. That summer, they were winning like crazy and pulling in.record-breaking crowds. I lived not far from Memorial Stadium, close enough to see the klieg lights in the night sky from my bedroom window. But it never occurred to me to actually go watch a game. It wasn't that I considered baseball beneath me. I just didn't do sports. I did school.

Recalling graduate school, for me, is like recalling childbirth or the experience of passing a kidney stone: I can no longer feel what I felt at the time, but I remember it felt very bad. Although I loved Sophocles, Plato, Homer, Virgil, the philosophers, and the historians, I did not love the endless hours of largely solitary work. From nine in the morning until midnight almost every day, I struggled to read the surviving literary masterpieces in their original languages. And literature was only part of what we needed to know: there were the vases, columns, and statuary of two cultures; their wars, laws, and class struggles; dialects, corrupted texts, and the reconstructed protolanguage from which Greek and Latin are said to be descended. I took four classes a semester and wrote long research papers for each.

In my second year, 1979, I did all this and taught a class of my own three times a week, to forty undergraduates all roughly my age, with no guidance from anyone, and without much success. That is to say, I bombed. The kindest of my student evaluations was this: "Ms. Bobrick would be a good teacher if she would prepare." The only good thing about my lack of training and supervision was that, except for my unlucky charges, I had no witnesses.

Except for teaching, everything we graduate students did was a performance for our professors, an attempt to show them how much we knew, how hard we worked, how brilliant and original were our ideas. These men-and they were all men-served as our profession's umpires, coaches, and scouts. Some were kind, some were not, but at any moment, any of them could decide to withdraw his support, and if that happened, there was no court of appeal. My fellow students and I did our best to act as a team: we studied together, complained together, encouraged each other, and threw noisy parties. But we were competing with each other, not just for approval, but, eventually, for real jobs in the big world.

That was school. Not-school was worse. Straight out of college, and against my parents' wishes, I'd married a brilliant and charismatic but only sporadically employed academic who treated me as if I were a freshman in his first-year philosophy seminar. I didn't think to object; I had allotted myself only one identity, that of a student. From one month to the next, my husband and I walked a tightrope of part-time jobs, short-term grants, and high-interest credit. He settled his nerves with expensive aged bourbon, to the extent that our monthly tab at the neighborhood liquor store began to exceed our utility bills. I became expert at begging for a little more time from the nice ladies at C & P phone company and Baltimore Gas and Electric.

All right, big deal, I was young and strong except for one thing. Immediately prior to my first year of graduate school, I’d been diagnosed with epilepsy. The humiliating grand mal seizures could be controlled by medication, but they felt like monsters at my core, straining at their chains. I was afraid above all that I would have one in class, and the illness reduced my already constrained freedoms: I wasn't supposed to drink or drive or get too tired (right) or even too emotional.

My New Year's resolution during these years was always to stop worrying, but I never had any success. Too nervous to eat, I lost twenty pounds during my first semester. I didn't feel sorry for myself (although I admit that I rather do now, looking back), or wonder if this was a good way to live. As silly as it seems, I saw my life as a heroic struggle. For the heroes of ancient epic and tragedy, struggle lent dignity to the mess of human life. Struggle purified a bad situation. Like Oedipus, I was flawed, but my goal, to find truth and self-knowledge, was noble. Like Odysseus, I trusted in my wits to somehow get me out of this mess. Like an idiot, I thought being unhappy would ultimately make me a better person.

Enter the Orioles, by way of what Homer called "winged words."

When I wasn't strong-arming my fears, my perceived failings, or my actual folly; when I wasn't hacking at Aeschylus's thorn-thicket vocabulary, or Thucydides's head-bangingly hard syntax, I tried to relax. I listened to classical music, I read fiction, but mostly I read the papers — read the print off them. We didn't have a television (too tempting a distraction from work), so the papers were my one connection to the world outside school. Mine were the Baltimore Evening Sun, soon to be absorbed into what was then the Morning Sun, and the great Washington Star, now gone for twenty-five years. When I had time, I read the Washington Post as well. I read every section except the sports pages.

The best thing about reading the paper was that it allowed me to procrastinate. Unlike daydreaming about what I would do if I were suddenly, tragically, widowed, and how I would then decorate my single-girl apartment, reading the paper was a justifiable use of time, no less than a citizen's duty.

One beautiful evening in June of 1979, my desire to forestall four more hours at my desk was so strong that I picked up the sports section of the Evening Sun. On its front page was an article by someone named Terry Pluto. I laughed, thinking not of Disney's dog, but of the Greek god of wealth and the underworld, the god who had pulled the shrieking Persephone underground to be his queen.

I learned from Pluto that 1970 had been the last year the Orioles had a championship season, and that their play had been haphazard since then. But this year, apparently, looked promising. The O's had snapped awake from their slumbers. They were riding a winning streak, reminding everyone of what they used to be and raising hopes for another spell of glory.

Pluto had devoted this column to somebody named Jim Palmer, pitcher from the former dynasty, and the only member of the team who was nationally recognized as a star. Palmer, I read, had a chronic problem. He felt unappreciated by his manager, a dyspeptic little man named Earl Weaver. Palmer was given to sulking and saying his arm hurt, when in fact it was his ego that was sore, because Weaver didn't let him pitch as often as he wanted to. As Pluto reported, Palmer was threatening to aggravate management until they got so sick of him that they traded him.

I liked this Palmer: handsome, accomplished, angry, no false modesty. A modern-day Achilles, I thought, a skillful warrior, sick of being bossed around by someone far inferior. No one in Homer's original audience would have had any trouble understanding Palmer's grievance.

The hardworking Pluto had a second piece in the paper that day, this one about the Orioles' recent road trip to Cleveland. A rainstorm had forced the game to be called, and a melee ensued, during which the home fans tore up the stadium while being chased through mud by the police. Both constabulary and quarry slipped and fell a good deal. Pluto said the scene, one "worthy of the Keystone Kops," played out against a dramatic backdrop: "The sky was filled with lightning. The rain came down in torrents and Noah could be heard in the background pounding the last few nails into his ark."

I had never seen reporting like this: a description of the weather apparently lifted from a Gothic novel followed by an allusion to the Book of Genesis, all in order to take a swipe at the Cleveland fans' wild behavior and their police force's ineptitude. I admired the boldness of the mix, and the broad brushstroke delivery.

It seemed the players could sling words, too. Pluto concluded by quoting Orioles outfielder John Lowenstein's analysis of the evening: "Td say that 65 percent of the people living in Cleveland are manic depressives and the game is just an excuse to blow their minds out."Such a statement elsewhere in the paper would have to be balanced by an outraged denial from the mayor of Cleveland. Not in the sports pages, apparently, where the reporters enjoyed true freedom of the press.

I opened the paper a few days later to find the following by guest columnist Edwin Pope of the Miami Herald, who contrasted the workmanlike, unified Orioles to the louder, less cohesive Yankees: "Some who find this type hard to read will remember when the Yankees were merely a baseball team. Now they are a morality play. Except with these hams, it is difficult to tell the heroes from the villains.... Jean-Paul Sartre couldn't have been talking about baseball when he said, 'Words are loaded pistols.' Else there wouldn't be a Yankee alive."

Morality plays? Sartre? In the sports section? How had I not known about this kind of writing-or the appeal of the Birds themselves? They were such an engaging cast of characters. Weaver tore up rulebooks on the field to illustrate for the umpires their willful disregard for the game. He was constantly ejected from the game by these same men, which was in fact his goal, the better to interrupt the other team's momentum. John Lowenstein was articulate, intelligent, and endowed with a strong sense of the absurd. Rick Dempsey, the catcher, led the fans in cheers and entertained them with a vaudeville-style pantomime during rain delays. Doug DeCinces, the third baseman, muscled and mustachioed, looked as if he had stepped out of a team photo from 1897. Outfielder Ken Singleton was mighty at bat, modest and team-minded with reporters, and as serenely handsome as Apollo. The denizens of the bull pen, including Cy Young-winner Palmer, had skill and enough quirky personality to put on a show of their own.

But none of the Birds impressed me so much as first baseman and switch hitter Eddie Murray. With the intuitive grasp of an idiot savant, I was drawn to this future Hall of Famer, a poker-faced man with the wide brown eyes of a boy. I knew from my reading that he was quick as a muscle twitch in the infield, and famously laconic in the presence of reporters. (Evening Sun columnist Kevin Cowherd was later to describe him as someone who "tossed around words like they were $100 bills.") He was my favorite from the start.

As I followed the team more intently, something mysterious happened, something that seems unbelievable to me now even a little nuts. I began to take on the players as role models. They seemed to have exactly the strengths that I lacked, and I was desperate for inspiration and a sense of belonging. The men I read about in the papers somehow provided me with both. What I knew of them through the written word —ever my guide to life — was enough to change my idea of heroism, and of myself.

The advertising jingle for the Birds consisted of five words, repeated over and over: "Oriole Magic, Feel It Happen." I fell under the sway of that magic. The team gave me a new way to think about struggle. So I had epilepsy. Did that have to mean I was an invalid, someone who couldn't do this and couldn't do that? Hell no. I was doing as much as anybody, and I was playing hurt, something all the best guys did, because you do what you set out to do. When a professor was harshly critical of a paper I'd been proud of, I saw it as a temporary setback rather than proof that I was no good at this and never would be. All I had to do was stick it out until I broke my losing streak and come back all the stronger, which I did. It was okay to have fears; the Birds weren't fearless. Gary Roenicke, who had been knocked down by a pitch to the face, wasn't ashamed to admit how much he didn't want to get hit again. He wore a custom-made batting helmet with a face mask. "Baseball is a game of survival," he said, "not macho." So I didn't have to deny my fears, either — just face them, and maybe take a little more joy in my work, as the O's did in theirs.

By August, with the pennant race heating up, the masters of sportswriting weighed in. I read my first Red Smith column that October, when the Birds battled the California Angels. Smith took his inspiration from that team's heavenly name. He wrote that the Orioles’ left-fielder John Lowenstein “…was elected to sainthood by acclamation when he reached out and sliced one of John Montague's forkballs into the seats just inside the foul pole, and 52,108 worshippers cemented his place in the celestial hierarchy the first time he went to bat in the second game yesterday.... Pope John Paul II has not received a more reverent reception in Ireland or the United States than parishioners in Memorial Stadium gave their newly minted godling... not even two strikeouts and an infield grounder stilled the cries of his idolators. “

I remember looking up "godling" to make sure he had not invented the word.

Then there was Tom Callahan of the Washington Star, whose sentence structure reminded me of Cicero's. When the Orioles were one game away from winning the Series, he wrote: "Earl Weaver loudly says he is to be the star of the Baltimore Orioles, a plain fact that amuses the players at the brink of the World Championship; which annoys them occasionally; which hurts their feelings frequently; which helped them to the brink of the championship undeniably." Behold, a one-sentence illustration of what adverbs can do when a professional strikes the keys. (The Orioles ended up losing the World Series to the Pittsburgh Pirates, but you would never have known it in Baltimore, or by me.)

At the end of thät season, that same Lowenstein said something that affected me like nothing else I had read since June. Turning serious, for once, he told Terry Pluto, "People ask if I was afraid that I might do something stupid on national TV, like fall down under a fly ball. That never enters a ballplayer's mind. No one reaches the majors with that type of negative thinking and plays with the fear of embarrassing themselves in the back of their minds."

When I read this, I knew I had received my marching orders. If I was going to reach the majors, I had to start trusting myself. My customary toxic, corroding worry was not going to help me. This was news.

By opening day of the 1980 season, I could recite Earl Weaver's exquisitely machined starting lineup (Palmer, Dempsey, Dauer, DeCinces, Murray, Bumbry, Roenicke, Singleton, and Belanger and Garcia, who took turns at shortstop). I knew the names and faces of his "deep depth" pitching staff (McGregor, Palmer, Flanagan, Stone, Stewart, and an infantry of daredevil relievers). Eddie had become the mentor of a new kid, Cal Ripken, Jr., known to fans as "Little Rip," in deference to his revered father, Cal, Sr., third-base coach and an Orioles veteran.

But I'd still never seen a game at the stadium. I'd been afraid of crowds since my seizures began. After watching the 1979 Series on a borrowed twelve-inch black-and-white TV, however, I thought I might risk it.

I walked to Memorial Stadium with some friends. I sipped at forbidden tubs of National Bohemian beer and did not mention that I hated the official song for the seventh-inning stretch, John Denver's "Thank God I'm a Country Boy." In other words, I became a regular fan, watching a game that was no longer confined to my imagination, and sharing its pleasures with my fellow citizens.

The Birds held steady for three seasons —1980, 1981, 1982 — not making it into the playoffs, but holding second place in their division. That was good enough for me (and the rest of Baltimore). I loved my Birds, I knew them better than ever, and I had faith in them, just as I had more and more faith in myself. My Greek, my Latin, and my teaching were all so much improved that school was almost — almost — a pleasure.

But the summer of 1983 put both the Orioles and me to the test. I was cramming for my last set of exams before the dissertation, the comprehensives, or "comps," as they are known. If I didn't do well on these hours-long tests, my years of graduate school would get me nothing more than ‘the terminal M.A.,’ the consolation prize for getting kicked out of the Ph.D. program. The Birds, meanwhile, were in disarray. Key players were injured or suffering from personal problems that translated into slumps. Palmer had been sent down to the farm team to brush up on his humility (officially, to recover from an injury). The pundits were pessimistic.

Then, in August, the O's were suddenly themselves again. All at once their enemies fell before them. The Birds silenced the bats and the mouths of the hated Yankees. Then they pulled down the White Sox in the playoffs, and sailed into the Series, as they last had in 1979, again vying with a team from Pennsylvania: not the Pittsburgh Pirates this time, but the Philadelphia Phillies.

The Orioles were proud to be winning, and prouder of having maintained their focus and friendship in the bad times. But still they did not brag about themselves or sneer at others at a time when Reggie Jackson had made those dugout diversions into an art form. Nor did they shoulder each other aside for attention. Older players mentored younger ones. Their code of conduct, supported by the new manager, Joe Altobelli, was known as the Oriole Way, and it set them apart from other ball clubs.

So as the O's entered the Series, all was well once again, except for one player: my beloved Eddie Murray. Still mired in his season-long slump, he was consistent only in making completely uncharacteristic errors. His performance in the Series was equally dismal — until the final game, when he scored a base hit and two back-to-back homers. Then, as Kevin Cowherd of the Evening Sun wrote, "With three swings of a bat on a crisp autumn evening, Eddie Murray had ripped the throat out of his slump, ripped a hole in the thinking that says he cannot hit in the pressure games. " We were redeemed — and I passed my comps.

Unexpectedly and unaccountably, the Orioles fell apart after they won the Series. The spirit seemed to go out of the team. In addition, new ownership didn't value the Oriole Way; they didn't understand the importance of growing and tending a team, player by player, as in the old days. The new way of thinking, by now pretty much standard in all the major clubs, was that you could buy a team, position by position.

I went to only one game in 1984. I hadn't made a conscious decision not to go, and of course I still loved my Birds. I didn't abandon them because they were losing. Yet, as quickly and mysteriously as the team had fallen apart, I'd lost interest in baseball. I didn't even enjoy reading the sports pages as much as I used to: the writers had begun to sour on the team. It seemed the Birds had taken me as far as they could.

Just as the Orioles entered another long stretch of bad years, my life was getting better and better. I figured out how to teach, and found that I loved it. I held a demanding administrative job in the university, and began to write my dissertation. Although I wouldn't admit it to myself, I was also taking the first steps away from my marriage. In 1986, I left Baltimore, alone, for the first real teaching job of my career.

After the '83 Series, Eddie Murray had uttered a phrase of Roman simplicity and elegance: "Our strength is just being ourselves." I’d taped that sentence over my desk. I had succeeded in being myself, a self that no longer filled me with the despair I had felt in 1979. The Orioles had been my metaphor for overcoming the bizarre and difficult in my life. I had conjured them from words long before I saw them in the flesh. If the metaphor wasn't accurate, if the pictures the sportswriters had painted were more fantasy than fact, did that mean I'd been deluded? I don't think so. I was under the sway of a story. A story that keeps up your courage can pinch-hit for the truth. Story is the favorable wind that lofts a would-be fly ball into the bleachers. Odysseus got into and out of more trouble than any hero; was it a coincidence that he was famous for his stories? Stories are measured not by their accuracy but by their efficacy.

I haven't lived in Baltimore for more than twenty years, and I've never been even mildly interested in another ball club, in all this time. Yet I've forgotten more about the history of the Roman republic than I have about my Birds. As baseball's Boswell has written, "Football acts can all be repeated. Baseball acts stand forever." Here is one such.

It is October 17, 1983. Eddie Murray, number 33, is coming out of the dugout to do what he has been hoping to do his whole life: win the World Series for his team. He is wearing the club's away game uniform: a homely gray tipped with orange and black. His swooping sideburns are testimony to the barber's art, as is his dark, carefully sculpted hair, hidden now under his batting helmet. In the dugout, Rich Dauer has just asked him, "Kid, can you guarantee it?" He has said he can, but his wrist hurts. He has told no one how much it hurts, but they all know anyway.

He approaches home plate no more quickly than if he were at batting practice. He adjusts his batting gloves. Finally he steps into the box. Suddenly his languor is gone. He crouches tightly in his signature stance, his center of gravity low. He holds his bat almost at a right angle to the ground, as if he is planning to whack a snake on the head rather than a baseball into the stands.

At this moment, the Orioles' magic years are in their final hours. After tonight, this team will fall apart and not come back together. It will be a very long time before the club has another good season, although the new kid, Cal Ripken, Jr., will stay with the team and play in solitary glory. But what is about to happen will remain untouched.

The pitcher throws a fastball down the middle on a 2-0 count. Murray senses the disrespect. He swings. Observe the ball now as it rises like a small swift moon, and falls beyond the edge of the Phillies' universe. Eddie releases his bat, jogs around the diamond, and is welcomed home by his teammates.

How about you? Did you ever have a team that inspired you? I’d love to hear about it.

If you enjoyed this story, please let me know! A click on the heart and/or a restack would mean a lot to me. I’ve stopped putting the ‘subscribe’ buttons in the middle of the text because I find them annoying, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want you to subscribe. If you do, you’ll get about one post a month from me, and I will never put up a paywall.

FN: You can see this story complete with footnotes to the sources at http://elizabethbobrick.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/oriole-magic-sm.pdf. I keep this and all my non-scholarly publications at elizabethbobrick.com. My editor at Creative Nonfiction, Hattie Fletcher, made this story much better than it was before she got to it. Her new publication of flash nonfiction is here on Substack, and I recommend it! Find it at Short Reads.