It was on Sunday, July 5, the last day of play before the
All-Star break, that the Orioles' season hit rock bottom. With a
1-0 loss to the Yankees, Baltimore had dropped 11 of its last 12
games and fallen 15 1/2 games behind the Red Sox in the
wild-card race. Three hours later the Orioles' team plane sat on
the runway with mechanical troubles, forcing the players to take
a four-hour bus ride back to Baltimore. Says manager Ray Miller,
whose club was 38-50 at the break, "It was a fitting end to a
nightmarish first half."
With six homers since the break, Eric Davis is
one reason for Baltimore's rise.
(Ronald C. Modra)
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Miller spent the three days off at home in rural New Athens,
Ohio, sitting on the porch clearing his head, his solitude broken
only when he decided to watch the All-Star Game. He was struck by
the unfamiliar smiles on the faces of his players—Roberto Alomar,
Rafael Palmeiro and Cal Ripken Jr.—as they ignited the American
League's 13-8 victory with some timely hits and daring
baserunning at Coors Field. Before Baltimore's second-half
opener, Miller met with his club and said, "We've had to swallow
a lot of pride around here lately and haven't had much fun. So
let's start playing aggressively, like our guys did at the
All-Star Game, and have some fun for a change."
It wasn't exactly the Gipper speech, but the Orioles did win
their first nine games after the break, the team's longest
victory streak in five seasons. Through Sunday they were 14-3 in
the second half, leaving them a game below .500 and within nine
games of Boston in the wild-card chase. In those 17 games
Baltimore batted .310 as a team and scored more than six runs a
game, while the pitchers had a 3.43 ERA. "We always knew we had
good players," says Palmeiro, who hit seven homers during that
hot streak, "but in the first half we'd sit around wondering,
What's going wrong? Now we're thinking, What else can go right?"
There are plenty of reasons for optimism. Lefthanded starter
Jimmy Key, who missed much of the first half with an inflamed
rotator cuff, is almost ready to return. The Orioles are in the
midst of a stretch of 20 straight games against teams under .500,
while the Red Sox embark this week on a perilous West Coast road
trip. Baltimore is 5-1 against Boston this season and will face
the Red Sox six more times, including the final four games of the
season at Fenway Park. The Orioles also have recent history on
their side, having crawled back from a five-game deficit in the
wild-card standings in August '96 to reach the playoffs.
Baltimore rallied that season after general manager Pat Gillick
tried unsuccessfully to get the O.K. from owner Peter Angelos to
unload outfielder Bobby Bonilla and lefthander David Wells for
prospects. Fearing a similar inclination to surrender this
season, Ripken and ace Mike Mussina lobbied recently to keep this
year's team together. Reliever Jesse Orosco spoke for many of his
teammates when he said, "We're the ones who created this mess,
let us try to clean it up."
Baltimore brass met on July 21 and decided not to give up, though
Gillick admits, "We still have a huge mountain to climb." He is
afraid that the Orioles' winning streak could be fool's gold,
perhaps the worst thing that could have happened to an
organization in dire need of an infusion of young talent. In
recent seasons Baltimore has continually reloaded the roster with
pricey free agents, while forsaking the farm system. Due to the
second-half revival, baseball's oldest (average age on Opening
Day: 34 years) and highest-paid team ($70.4 million payroll)
might be missing a precious chance to get younger and less
expensive before the July 31 trade deadline. Even some Orioles
fans recognize the wisdom of longterm planning; one sign at
Camden Yards last week read: IF YOU REBUILD, THEY WILL COME. JULY
31ST YARD SALE. DO THE RIGHT THING. Instead, Gillick is hedging
his bets, willing to trade what he calls "peripheral players" to
improve the team either this season or in the future, which
explains why he dealt veteran Joe Carter to the Giants last
Thursday for 23-year-old pitching prospect Darin Blood.
The odds on a Baltimore comeback depend upon how you do the math.
No team in this century has been 15 1/2 games out of a playoff
berth and reached the postseason. Then again, the Orioles had cut
8 1/2 games from that deficit in 16 days before losing two in a
row to the Mariners last weekend. Miller, however, had to put
Alomar on the 15-day disabled list last Saturday with a sprained
right pinkie. "Most of the season we've been playing a game of
Solitaire with 47 cards," Miller says. "It doesn't matter how
many times you play that way, you'll never finish, especially
with a bunch of your kings missing. If we ever have all of our
cards, I still believe we've got a chance to finish this game."
Issue date: August 3, 1998
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