The Baltimore Angels
THERE ARE HEROES AT EVERY major-league baseball game—the guy who makes a diving catch or drives home the game-winning run. But at Baltimore’s Oriole Park, the heroes frequently don’t even play baseball. One day, it was a school bus driver who risked her life to save 20 students after the bus caught fire. On another, there were three men who fought floodwaters to rescue trapped motorists. On April 9, 2017, the hero was an 11-year-old boy who had let his hair grow for two and a half years so he could cut it off and have it made into wigs for children who had gone bald while being treated for cancer.
They are all honorees in a remarkable program called Birdland Community Heroes. After the fifth inning of every Orioles weekend home game, the stadium announcer asks the crowd to look toward the scoreboard and listen to the story of the hero in its midst, located (thanks to free VIP seats) right behind home plate. Invariably, the crowd goes wild. “I was very surprised. I just thought I got invited to an Orioles game,” says Thomas Moore, the boy who cut his hair for kids with cancer. Moore—who actually grew enough hair to make three wigs, all for people he’d never met— received perhaps the loudest applause since the Heroes program began last year. “I felt even more proud of myself. And I was already proud,” he says.
Since it was built 25 years ago adjacent to the former B&O Warehouse, a place where the railroad company stored freight downtown, Oriole Park has