Ultimate Baseball Road Trip (34 page)
Read Ultimate Baseball Road Trip Online
Authors: Josh Pahigian,Kevin O’Connell
www.baberuthmuseum.com/exhibits/slmacy/
Located inside Camden Station, this wonderfully comprehensive museum opened in 2005 to honor Maryland’s rich sporting history. The Bambino is celebrated here, as well as the Orioles, whose history is traced from 1890 to the present. The 1983 World Championship trophy is a highlight, as are the exhibits remembering Memorial Stadium and Ripken’s streak. Other exhibits put the focus on the state’s minor league and Negro Leagues history. As for football, there are exhibits related to the Colts and Johnny Unitas, and the Ravens. The Baltimore Blast indoor soccer team, college sports heroes, and Maryland’s ballparks and stadiums also receive treatment.
216 Emory St.
Three blocks west of Oriole Park, the old Ruth house is a must-visit for touring fans. It’s open seven days a week year-round. Just follow the painted baseballs on the sidewalk outside the ballpark and you’ll soon find yourself standing at the museum’s front door. There are sixty balls in all, one for each of the homers Ruth smacked in 1927. The Museum is situated in the very house once owned by the Babe’s maternal grandfather, Pius Schamberger. It’s a festive old brownstone decked with bunting, something the Babe rarely did. The highlights include the 500 Home Run Club, a celebration of Ruth’s many pitching and batting records, an exhibit on Ruth’s family life, an exhibit about the portrayals of Ruth in film, and of course, the interior of the historic house itself.
If you only have an hour to spare before the game, you’ll find plenty of chain-type restaurants at Harbor Place, including Hooters, Uno Chicago Grill, the Hard Rock Café, and the Cheesecake Factory. If you have more time, we suggest
shunning the chains and going local. We paid $10 for a water taxi pass then realized the city-sponsored Harbored Connector taxi goes to the same places and is completely free. This is a fun way to explore the harbor. We enjoyed our time in Little Italy and Federal Hill, but Fells Point was our favorite nautical destination, with its cobblestone and aged feel. Oh yeah, and its plethora of pubs! One word to the wise, though: If you leave your car in many of the garages near Camden, you’ll have to settle up at the bar and get back on the water by 11:00 p.m. on weeknights. Otherwise you’ll be left with a long, expensive cab ride, or a cold, difficult swim, to get back to your car.
Fells Point, 737 S. Broadway
Featuring hand-pumped cask ales, a rotating selection of 140 different drafts, and more than twelve hundred bottled beers, Max’s is our favorite Fells Point pub. Pool tables, a lively atmosphere, a huge nacho platter, sports on the tube … what more could you want? Kevin tried the McHenry Lager, which had a good taste and nice finish. Josh tried the Clipper City Pale Ale, which had a light hoppy flavor. Max’s could have kept us happy all day long if not for the grueling research that lay before us (i.e., sampling as many additional Fells Point pubs as possible before the game).
Fells Point, 1720 Thames St.
Yeah, it sounds like a throbbing dance club, but the Grind is actually a coffeehouse. If you’re in Crab City on a Sunday morning, or just in the mood for a quality cup of joe, this is the place to be.
Josh:
Pretty good. But it’s not quite Starbucks….
Kevin:
How can you even compare a place like this to a chain?
Josh:
I thought you’re supposed to be from Seattle.
Kevin:
I
am
from Seattle, but that doesn’t make me a corporate shill.
Josh:
Hey, man, me either. But you can’t beat the Komodo Dragon at Starbucks.
Kevin:
Yes you can. And my beef with Starbucks goes back to their owner Howard Shultz selling the Sonics.
Josh:
Yeah yeah. Heard it all before.
Fells Point, 734 S. Broadway
This is Kevin’s pick for the best Baltimore seafood. He could eat Bertha’s all night long. And that would be fine with Bertha, because she’s got mussels in abundance.
Little Italy, 901 Fawn St.
Having sampled the fare in Boston’s North End and New York’s Little Italy during our travels, we set a pretty high bar when it comes to Italian. Once you’ve had the best, it’s not easy to settle for the rest. And what could hold a candle to Boston or New York, we figured? Well, Baltimore’s Little Italy came pretty darned close thanks to our delicious lunch at Sabatino’s. Josh recommends the meatballs and homemade rigatoni, while Kevin heartily endorses the gnocchi. The marinara was superb.
Josh (channeling Brando):
Look how they massacred my boy.
Kevin:
Sonny was short for Santino. Not Sabatino, you dolt.
Josh:
I will seek no vengeance for my son. For I have reasons that are selfish.
Kevin:
I’m trying to eat here.
520 Washington Blvd.
Located right outside the ballpark, this local tavern’s slogan is “Come get pickled at pickles.” That seems about right. If you’re looking to strap on a quick one before the game, Pickles does the trick. Locals order beer-battered pickles to go with their drafts. We didn’t work up the nerve, so you’ll have to let us know what you think if you try them.
38 S. Eutaw St.
It’s rare to find a seedy strip club so close to a big league park. If you were into this sort of thing, we suppose you’d really enjoy your visit to Goddess. We didn’t particularly enjoy ours, of course, but we had to make the effort to verify for our readers that the advertised nudity was appropriately, umm, nude (it was).
Josh:
I find the word Goddess a bit misleading used in this context. It seems a bit too hyperbolic. Take this woman, for example: Clearly she’s unfit for deification and past the age at which the Greeks and Romans would typically portray …
Kevin:
Whoa. Hold on. You’re going to get us kicked out of another strip club, aren’t you?
Dozens of mom-and-pop vendors set up outside the ballpark. And the competition keeps the prices low. You’ll find peanuts and all-beef dogs much cheaper than inside the
park. So if you’re road tripping on a tight budget, stock up before the game.
Combine shorter than usual power alleys with warm Baltimore nights. Sprinkle in Orioles rosters perennially stocked with burly sluggers and pitchers you wouldn’t be caught dead owning on your fantasy team and the result is a homer-haven. When Camden first opened so many balls flew into the left-field seats and onto the landing strip between the scoreboard and Warehouse in right that management moved home plate back seven feet in 2001. But fans complained that the modified orientation of the seating bowl diminished some of the first-level views and the players complained that the relocation of home plate created a glare off the batter’s eye in center field. So the O’s cut their losses and restored the original field dimensions the next year.
EUTAW STREET
Eutaw Street is inside the turnstiles on game-days but outside them on off-days. Its Gate H opens two hours before first pitch, and, while the ballpark itself doesn’t open for another half hour, the street provides history buffs, ball hawks, and big eaters alike with plenty to keep them occupied.
A nine-foot-high statue of Babe Ruth stands outside Gate H, depicting a teenaged George Herman Ruth. The future icon was born at 216 Emory St., and grew up in his father’s saloon, which once existed where the centerfield seats reside at Oriole Park. This is a nice tribute, but there’s one small problem with it. Well, maybe there is or maybe there isn’t. It portrays Ruth holding a bat in his left hand and holding a right-handed fielding glove in his right hand even though Ruth was a lefty and should have had a left-handed fielding glove.
Shortly after Camden opened, a number of visiting sportswriters pointed out the rendering’s apparent inaccuracy. Historians rebutted that due to the limited resources of St. Mary’s where Ruth played his school ball and the scarcity of lefty gloves, he probably would have had to wear a right-handed one. Others claimed the flexible gloves worn back in the 1910s were suitable for use on either hand.
The truth may remain a mystery, but we found the statue a fitting tribute either way. And here’s what we were able to confirm about the young Babe’s upbringing. He spent his very early years in his father’s rough-and-tumble saloon, learning to cuss, gamble, smoke, and drink. By age seven, he was such a menace that his parents sent him to St. Mary’s, a reform school run by Xaverian Brothers. The X-Men taught Ruth to play ball. Then, in February of 1914, Jack Dunn, owner of the minor league Baltimore Orioles, signed Ruth to a contract. Because he was only nineteen, Dunn had to accept legal guardianship of him. When he arrived at spring training, his veteran teammates called him Dunn’s “Baby.” The nickname eventually became “the Babe.” Five months later, Dunn sold Ruth to the Boston Red Sox (some guardian, eh?), and ten months after leaving reform school, he started his first big league game.
Another Maryland son, Lefty Grove, won 109 games for the International League O’s before embarking on his Hall of Fame career. Though he went on to win exactly three hundred games with the Philadelphia A’s and Red Sox, there’s no statue of Lefty at Camden Yards. We can’t help but think, though, that if there were, Lefty would probably be wearing a glove on his left hand instead of his right. And there just might be a plausible explanation for it.
Rather than displaying statues of their former stars, the Orioles display three-foot-high monuments shaped like the players’ uniform numbers. This weird adaptation of Monument Park exists on Eutaw Street, where it honors Earl Weaver (4), Brooks Robinson (5), Cal Ripken Jr. (8), Frank Robinson (20), Jim Palmer (22), Eddie Murray (33), and Jackie Robinson (42), whose number is universally retired.
The Orioles Hall of Fame, located on Eutaw, is actually a “Wall” of Fame. Bronze plaques honor former favorite Baltimoreans like the Cal Ripkens (Junior and Senior), Murray, the Robinson boys (Brooks and Frank), Boog Powell, Hoyt Wilhelm, Weaver, Davey Johnson, Rick Dempsey, Brady Anderson, Harold Baines, B.J. Surhoff, and Al Bumbry.
Kevin:
They’re not very discriminating.
Josh:
What’s your beef?
Kevin:
There’s a Gregg Olson plaque. And here’s one for Chris Hoiles. Chris “Flippin” Hoiles! These guys weren’t stars.
Josh:
You’re just jealous the O’s have more history to celebrate than your M’s.
Kevin:
No. Hoiles screwed my fantasy team back in ’97.
Josh:
And you say
I
can hold a grudge.
A colorful flag court behind the Eutaw Street seats ranks the teams in each of the American League’s three divisions from first to last. The banner of the first-place team flies closest to center field and the others follow in descending order toward right. This is similar to the system at Wrigley Field, although more elaborate. In Chicago, all of the flags are on a single pole, with the first place team’s flag at the top and the others’ below.
Hang around the flag court with a glove and you might wind up with a souvenir … or a lump on the head. Balls frequently touch down here during batting practice. In between cracks of the bat, check out the balls emblazoned on the brickwork beneath your feet. Each commemorates the landing spot of a homer hit onto Eutaw Street during a game. The hitters’ names are engraved on the balls. Through 2010, Rafael Palmeiro was the brass balls king. No, not because he lied to Congress regarding his steroid use, and not because he did all those erectile dysfunction commercials toward the end of his career, but for his five brass balls on Eutaw Street.
The Warehouse is only 444 feet from home plate, and though the prevailing wind blows off the water toward right field, not a single slugger has reached it during a game. This is because the wind bounces off the Warehouse and blows back into the park, knocking down flies to right. The distance is also deceptive since the playing field is recessed sixteen feet below street level. For the record, Kevin’s hero, Ken Griffey Jr., hit the Warehouse on the fly during the 1993 Home Run Derby. And Kevin Bass once bounced a ball through an open second-story window. Apparently the O’s suspected balls would reach the façade more regularly: Before the stadium opened the windows on the Warehouse’s first three floors were outfitted with shatter-proof glass. And then the one ball that might have made all that fancy glass worth the panes (bad pun intended) the Orioles had taken to install it just happened to find an open window. How ironic.
The “Hit it Here” sign on the fence in right-center features a hand pointing to an “L,” in reference to the Maryland lottery, which helped finance the stadium. Before each game MASN (the local sports network that carries the O’s) announces a fan of the game who wins $100,000 if an Oriole player hits the sign with a long ball.
Josh:
Well, it doesn’t quite have the charm of the old “Hit Sign, Win Suit” sign that once adorned the wall in Brooklyn.