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From the SI Vault: biting Frank Deford profile of the city of Baltimore, blended with an admiring profile of the Baltimore Orioles, from 1971. Featuring Frank Cashen as the kind of GM the Mets might want to hire somewhere down the road.
Walking-around money is so tight in Baltimore that the fact that the Colts played two extra playoff games at home is a direct reason why, months later, Oriole ticket sales for '71 were still lagging behind the not exactly torrid pace of 1970. Yet, if limited finances help account for poor attendance, Baltimoreans have picked up the cry as a convenient cop-out. The citizens there are proficient at inertia. They have backup reasons for not doing things they never intended to do anyway. Complaints about traffic, parking and Memorial Stadium (there is little cover, many concrete poles, few chair-back seats, and not a single toilet seat in the place) are repeated ad infinitum. Crabtowners have the nerve to call up the Orioles, and for some slight—a favorite player farmed out, perhaps—threaten that they will stop listening to the games on the radio.
Everybody in Baltimore excuses Oriole attendance because the community is so mad for the beach (or "shore," as it is known in those precincts, as in "C'mon down the shore next Chuesday, and we'll tip a coupla Bohs"). To hear Oriole officials tell it, it would seem as if Baltimore is the only city in the country where swimming and summer vacations are in vogue. Says a local reporter: "It was sad to hear Cashen and Dalton explaining how come we didn't even come close to selling out for the last game of the World Series. They were going on all about the weather, TV, the entertainment dollar—all like it was a bad gate with the Indians in the middle of July, not the final game of the World Series." |
https://vault.si.com/vault/1971/04/12/best-damn-team-in-baseball
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