Time of optimism for baseball fans, Baltimore
We love Opening Day. We love it because, even in bad-news Baltimore, it means we get to shake off the grimy, regrettable past and enjoy a moment of blissful optimism about what comes next.
Everyone gets to indulge the fanciful idea that their team — even those that finished at the bottom last season, like the Orioles — will line up for the National Anthem with an equal chance of winning the World Series seven months from now.
That’s the deal with baseball. There is always the possibility of earth-rocking surprise, always the hope that your team, your city, your region will again know the exhilarating madness of an October championship, that beyond-words high that comes with being on top of the world.
For Baltimore, it has been 35 years since the Orioles wore the golden crown, so fans here have learned to keep their expectations in check or risk a broken heart or, worse, the lousy feeling of having been conned.
It’s as if the baseball gods declared those storied Orioles of the past — those gray-and-gone teams the organization keeps commemorating with contrived anniversary celebrations — to be the best Baltimore will ever get, and that we can’t have nice things anymore.
I hear Orioles fans express gratitude that, after 14 losing seasons (1998-2011), we at least have had a team and a manager who, in three of the last six, made things interesting.
But we need better than that. We hope — and on Opening Day, must believe — that
Opening Day
TWINS@ORIOLES Today, 3:05 p.m. TV: MASN, Radio: 105.7 FM
After Orioles fans went into the spring fearing the worst, the additions of pitchers Alex Cobb and Andrew Cashner have optimism on the rise. SPORTS PG1
For Orioles facing contract uncertainty, Opening Day is no time to think about next year’s team. SPORTS PG1 @baltimoresun.com Live blogs from reporters Photo gallery and videos of Opening Day
Post-game coverage
RODRICKS , The past three years have taken a toll. 2018 is the year the Orioles, patched When the latest population numbers were together impressively during spring trainreported, showing another loss, the first ing, could bring a victory parade back to thought was April 2015 and all that flowed Pratt Street. from there — the crime, the civic turmoil. A
It would give Baltimore a huge lift, and Goucher Poll showed that two-thirds of not only because of that 35-year drought of Marylanders no longer consider the city to championships but because of a three-year be the economic engine of the state, and rain of bad news. that’s in part a testimony to the perception
On April 29, 2015, the Orioles and the that Baltimore is helpless. White Sox played an afternoon game at Baltimore is not helpless, but it still needs Camden Yards with no fans present behelp on a grand scale, the visionary kind cause of civil unrest two days earlier, that once made possible the stadiums in following the funeral of Freddie Gray in Camden Yards. Far more than any jurisdicWest Baltimore. “This isn’t the way you tion in the state, Our City of Perpetual want to make history,” first baseman Chris Recovery is still affected by huge social and Davis said that day. economic changes that go back 50 years, to
The vandalism and fires marked the start April 1968, and the time of the riots of three years of almost unmitigated bad — a following the assassination of the Rev. surge in shootings that made our city the Martin Luther King Jr. It is still affected by deadliest, per capita, in the nation; police the riots of just three years ago. corruption, in nature and scale, equal to any But we are still here, most of us, looking of Hollywood’s darkest imaginings; violent Orioles pitchers and catchers work out at Oriole Park at Camden Yards Wednesday, prefor tickets to a kind of Opening Day for crimes in neighborhoods that rarely ever paring for today’s game against the Twins. Baltimore and a new birth of faith in our saw one; and, stirring our worst fears, more city. loss in population. We haven’t given up. We are artists and
Because of all that — the way it burdens innovators, researchers and thinkers, the spirit — it’s hard to remember where we preachers and gardeners, writers and printwere in the year before Freddie Gray’s ers, makers of great events and festivals, death. teachers and musicians, runners and bicy
We savored a vision of the next Balticlists, attorneys and doctors, hotel staff and more. bus drivers, carpenters and roofers, pastry
The population had seemed to stabilize chefs and short-order cooks, bartenders and even grow again. We had a mayor who and waiters, bankers and brokers, security set growth as a goal and made a pitch to guards and mechanics, cops and firefightimmigrant families, in particular, to give ers, social workers and nurses, and I could Baltimore a try. Harbor Point seemed to pop go on, but you get the idea. up overnight, a city within a city. The There is no surviving, much less thriving, downtown population grew with the conwithout the region’s embrace of Baltimore. version of old office buildings to apartWe need you. We need to be all-in. ments. We had a new plan, and capital, to So, those of you who come to Camden improve the public schools. There was hope Yards for Opening Day 2018: Please take — perhaps more hope than reality — that another look at this city where your new investment, with incentives from the grandparents lived, this city your kids find city, would spread to the areas that missed cool, this city of Baltimore-in-the-bones the first Baltimore renaissance along the citizens and vigilant activists, this city of waterfront. Meanwhile, housing vouchers incubated startups and enduring busimade possible the movement of lownesses, of solid neighborhoods and neighincome families with children to better borhoods yearning to be better, this city of neighborhoods and the hope of better lives. old peculiarities and renewed aspirations,
In 2014, the Orioles won the Eastern this city that has suffered, this city that has Division and Buck Showalter was American worn golden crowns, and will again. League Manager of the Year.
Baltimore is not helpless, but it still needs help on a grand scale, the visionary kind that once made possible the stadiums in Camden Yards.
But the disturbances six months later felt like a sudden and shocking stop. Though limited mostly to the west side, the fires, vandalism and looting affected the whole city and region — if not physically, certainly emotionally. The Orioles and White Sox playing in an empty stadium on a perfect spring day, with the smell of smoke and flowers in the air, marked the moment: A city of potential and promise suddenly considered so lawless and dysfunctional that even our great good place was presumed unsafe.
There have been awakenings (for those who needed them) to the hard realities of festering poverty and hopelessness, the toxic relations between police and people in neighborhoods far from the renaissance, the history of racism and segregation at the root of so many of our problems.
There have been strong efforts, led by the Johns Hopkins institutions, to help the “other Baltimore” at the edges of its reach. And the city is lucky to have so many nonprofits and volunteers working on its long-standing problems — drug addiction, homelessness, illiteracy, joblessness, kids at risk, health inequality — and most of those organizations have been doing quiet, steady good for years.
There have been other setbacks since April 2015 — not just the crime surge, but things within the control of people in power. The Red Line light rail project and the State Center redevelopment were two major endeavors that would have helped the city; killing the Red Line and canceling the State Center deal hurt the recovery immeasurably. Attrition in the police ranks, with resignations and accelerated retirements, complicated the efforts to get crime under control.