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Mister Baltimore Goes to the Ballgame
 | | Mark Noone | | Mr. Baltimore Calls in Sick to Work from a payphone at Camden Yards. |
In the geography of Oriole baseball, the No. 6 line
stops at the corner of Belair and Moravia . . .
Is baseball dying in the United States?
Right now, as entire cul-de-sacs of adolescent boys in America's suburbs are jumping drain pipes with skateboards, some malnourished kid in the Dominican Republic is whacking a ball made of duct tape with a stick.
Why , just the other night I ducked Mr. Baltimore for a blessed evening away from his relentless charm and cruised out to Arbutus - hometown of Maryland Governor Bob Ehrlich and former Talking Head David Byrne - for a big ole pizza pie at a joint called "Mike's" on Linden Avenue.
I settle in at the counter - there are no tables at Mike's, just an oven that takes up half the room and a half-dozen stools that spin around - and order a 16-inch pepperoni and onion.
Looking up at the small TV near the front window, hoping to catch Australian-born pitcher Damian Moss in his first Oriole appearance after heading east in the trade that sent Sidney Ponson to San Francisco, what do I see but a pre-season NFL game between a couple of out-of-town teams.
Because second-generation owner Mike Tiso, Jr. is a nice guy - the kind of guy who catches rockfish in the Chesapeake Bay and throws them into the pizza oven for an end-of-the-night treat - he switched the channel to the Orioles' game for a paying customer.
But only because Mike is a nice guy. He could not have cared less about the exciting, fourth-place Birds and kept switching channels during commercials to check the football score.
Baseball dying?
Keep that disturbing thought on deck for a moment. I want to go back to a time when the Baltimore Orioles were in the World Series nearly every year and all the kids I knew played ball.
Especially Mr. Baltimore.
And me.
"Even the nuns would let us watch the game," remembered Mr. B, who graduated 8th grade from Our Lady of Pompei before conning his way through Transfiguration High. "Every October, the Baltimore catechism made way for the Baltimore Orioles."
I played a lot of baseball growing up: pick-up games in school yards, Catholic Little League and stick ball against the side of a Lehigh Street rowhouse down where Foster Avenue dead ends into the railroad tracks near the old Crown, Cork and Seal factory on The Hill in Highlandtown.
But my favorite baseball memories of the game are more social than competitive.
They endure from the games of catch I played with Mr. Baltimore outside of the Hitch Apartments when we were on vacation with our families in Ocean City.
We were kids - is it possible to become a true fan anywhere but childhood? - and these were the glory years of the Orioles: 1969, 1970, 1971, when the Birds were in the World Series every year.
In the words of Roger Angell - who just released a new collection of baseball essays called "Game Time: A Baseball Companion," these were the years of "Earl Weaver's Orioles" and it was a thing of discipline and beauty.
Which is not exactly the best description of what went on between me and Mr. Baltimore and the flying horsehide out on the parking lot. Is it hard to believe that it was more fun playing catch than playing a game?
Perhaps it's because neither of us were true ballplayers.
You can talk about everything under-the-I-lost-it-in-the-sun playing catch; toss pop flies, skip grounders, hurl strikes and escape into make-believe ballgames in which you are the star. Mr. Baltimore was a genius at all of this down at the other end of the street riot and centerfielder Paul Blair - even among the likes of Brooks and Frank and Boog - was our favorite.
Paul Blair, full of grace . . .
 | | Paul Blair, Baltimore Oriole from 1964 to 1976. |
Playing shallow center field because he could cover ground quickly, Blair roamed the Memorial Stadium outfield like a gazelle; the symmetry of the No. 6 on the back of his jersey as he turned to rob the likes of Carl Yastrzemski and Al Kaline of home runs.
One of the reasons we liked Blair so much: In 1966, he was a key player in the Frank Robinson-led drive to the O's first World Championship, hitting a solo home-run in game three of the series against the Dodgers for a 1-to-o win in a stunning four-game sweep of Los Angeles.
And Paul Blair was wild about taking tugboat rides down at the foot of Broadway.
Some waterfront character our fathers knew had a connection to the team - I still have the signatures of the entire 1968 team, including the bat boy and trainer Ralph Salvon - and the guy would bring players down for cold beer and boat rides. Blair always came down, getting a thrill from churning past the Domino Sugars sign on a tugboat on a par with the thrills he gave us on 33rd Street.
Bill Burgee, a Baltimorean to the core, remembers this treasure from the 1966 World Championship season, when he was a high school kid.
"One hot Friday night between illegal beers, I caught the old No. 3 transit bus to the Orchard Swim Club out near Catonsville to practice getting lucky," said Burgee, noting that the No. 3 rolled past Memorial Stadium. "On the way out, a guy was listening to the game on the radio and Blair jacked one out of the park.
"And then on the way back, the bus driver had the ballgame on a transistor radio and Blair made a stunning catch to save the game," said Burgee.
Our fathers were crabbers, not sports fans, so we were more likely to be dipping crustaceans out of the Chesapeake Bay and drinking with men named Moonshot than going to the ballpark to drink with Wild Bill Hagy.
 | | The Orioles, National Beer and steamed crabs were a staple of a Baltimore summer. Of the three, only the O’s are still around in the same abundance. |
To follow our heroes, Mr. Baltimore and I scan the sports page of the old News-American together, turn the game up loud from a radio on the porch while we played catch or watch Blair and the Birds on a black-and-white Zenith television - the room cooled by a window fan - while the other kids went up to the Boardwalk to play Skee-Ball.
In any given game, Paul Blair came close to greatness.
Nineteen hundred and sixty -nine was the year of Woodstock, the moon walk and an unsinkable destroyer known as the Baltimore Orioles hitting a ridiculous iceberg in the World Series called the New York Mets.
In '69, Blair had his best year, hitting .285 with 26 home runs, 76 runs-batted in and winning one of his eight Golden Gloves for defense.
But in his 16 years in the major leagues [1964-to-1980, the first 12 with Baltimore] Blair wasn't good enough long enough for his No. 6 to join the sculpture garden of retired Oriole numbers outside of Camden Yards.
 | | A steel replica of Brooks Robinson’s No. 5 is in foreground of sculpture garden that includes No. 33 of the Orioles’ most recent Hall-of-Famer, Eddie Murray. |
Getting hit in the face with a fastball had a lot to do with it.
In 1970, the second of three consecutive World Series years for the Birds of our youth, Blair was carried off the field with a broken nose and serious eye and face injuries after being hit by Angels' reliever Ken Tatum. He was never quite the same. Even the services of a hypnotist and trying to switch-hit didn't help.
The beaning didn't end Blair's career, he would play for another decade and could still make games exciting.
In a 10-to-1 win over Kansas City in 1973, he hit an inside-the-park grand slam as the O's cruised to their 13th straight win during the white-shoes and handlebar moustache era of the Oakland Athletics.
By 1977, Paul Blair was gone from Crabtown, traded to the hated New York Yankees, with whom he would appear in the World Series in '77 and '78.
By then, Mr. Baltimore and I had begun drifting along our separate ways.
The year Paul Blair donned pin-stripes, I get my first by-line in the Baltimore City Paper with an article about a longshoremen's strike and was more interested in the Ramones than baseball.
Following in our fathers' footsteps, Mr. Baltimore went to sea for the first time, sailing as an ordinary seaman and writing me letters from the deck of the Overseas Alice, begging for news in those pre-Internet days about his beloved Baltimore Orioles.
I was too busy learning to write a clean sentence to write him back and after awhile, his postcards from around the world stopped arriving and we lost touch.
Down the road somewhere, I'll tell you how we crossed paths again and how baseball - specifically the demolition of Memorial Stadium - renewed the old friendship.
Because Blair's No. 6 was never retired, it is now worn by my new favorite Oriole, all-around utility man and outfielder Melvin Mora, a first-time All-Star in 2003.
 | | Mora, a native of Agua Negra, Venezuela, is the father of quintuplets. |
Mora got O's fans all worked up in the first-half of the season, leading the American League in hitting for most of June and July with an average that hovered above .350.
Like Blair, he was hit by a pitch in the face by an Angels' pitcher and then took a shot to the right hand from Atlanta's Greg Maddux on June 20, which eventually put him M.M. on the disabled list with a strained ligament. By mid-August, he still wasn't playing.
What a shame.
When Melvin was hot - hitting in 23 straight games early on, banging late-inning home runs in close games and scoring for the American League in the All-Star game at Chicago's new Comiskey Park - it was a gas.
Like Blair, Mora is quick and slender with great speed. And, with a twist of the baffling local dialect, both can claim Baltimore street names in their honor: Belair Road for Paul and Moravia Road for Melvin.
Fittingly, the two arteries near Holy Redeemer Cemetery in Northeast Baltimore intersect.
[Note to Orioles' owner Peter Angelos: Please put the name BALTIMORE back on the Orioles' away jerseys the way every other team in baseball has the name of their HOMETOWN on their away jerseys. Thank you.]
While me and Mr. Baltimore were having the time of our lives following one of the great teams of all time, future rock-and-roll star Mark Noone was rooting for the hapless Washington Senators a half-hour down the B-W Parkway in suburban D.C.
 | | Rafael Alvarez | | Former Slickee Boy Mark Noone and Mr. Baltimore between beers at Camden Yards. |
"The Senators left Washington twice in my childhood," said Noone on a recent Sunday afternoon at Camden Yards as the Birds played the Toronto Blue Jays. "Once for Minnesota in 1961 when I was seven and again in 1972 when politico Bob Short [the Robert Irsay of the nation's capitol] took them to Texas."
Noone, whose Washington roots have not prevented him from becoming - as Little Steven say s on his Underground Garage radio show - "one of the coolest guys in the world" - did not grow up to play center field but to play front and center with the legendary D.C. rockers, the Slickee Boys.
"The thing I love about baseball is the pageantry. It's so summer and my favorite feeling in the world is summer," said Noone, who now sings and plays bass with a band called the Rhodes Tavern Troubadours.
The Troubadours have a new album out called "On The Red Line," and it features a tribute to legendary O's manager Earl Weaver - a.k.a. "The Feisty Bantam" - that is often played over the loudspeakers at Camden Yards.
"It's a rockin' song," says Noone of the Jake Flack composition honoring a guy who grew tomatoes in the bullpen and got thrown out of 91 games for arguing. "Everybody loves it."
 | | The Earl of Baltimore |
Flack, supported by Bill Kirchen and Too Much Fun, also recorded the song for an anthology of baseball tunes called Diamond Cuts: Grand Slam at hungryformusic.com.
But back in Washington in the late 1960s - those years of turbulence equal to the pot of water that was always boiling in Earl Weaver's gray head - Mark Noone only cared for one ballplayer.
"Frank Howard was my favorite Senator, he was my hero," said Noone. "He was big and he was a big hitter. When I was playing baseball as a kid I campaigned to get No. 33 cuz that's what Hondo wore. And he used to wear these aviator glasses and I got a pair just like'em. I called them my Frank Howard glasses."
Noonie Boy now favors glasses tinted sky blue, also liked catcher Paul Casanova - "When they put me behind the plate I put my leg out like he did" - and he followed the tail end of Denny McLain's career as a bad actor when McLain joined the Senators a year or so before the team moved to Texas.
He also saw Red Sox hitting legend Ted Williams take over the Senators as manager and had an autographed photo of the Splendid Splinter that his Dad brought home from work one day.
When the Noone family traveled to Baltimore, however, it was not for baseball games but trips to places that Washington did not have.
"We used to come to Lexington Market a couple times a year when I was a kid," said Noone. "I remember big old black men in heavy boots and piles of dead fish. I came from sort of an upper class family, my family were educators and they sent me to military school when I started getting into trouble.
"Once I asked my mother, 'Where's that market we used to go to?' and she said 'Baltimore.' She referred to it as a place where people had to work for a living."
So, is baseball dying?
If there's a God it isn't.
Is there a God, Mr. Baltimore?
"The nuns said there was," he replied, talking with his mouth full of a barbecue sandwich from Boog Powell's open pit. "But they also said I'd be in prison by now."
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Visit other Baltimore neighborhoods: AlvarezFiction.com
Other Stories by Rafael Alvarez
Mister Baltimore Goes to the Movies
Mr. Baltimore's Night on the Town
A Hometown Boy Celebrates The Less-Traveled Baltimore
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