Published: April 09, 2008 10:49 am         

See you at the Yard ... eventually

BALTIMORE

It is where the T-shirts read, “Fear the Purple,” “771 ft. from home plate,” and “No fastballs, No curveballs, Just Sliders.”

It’s 4:45 p.m. on a Saturday, two hours and 20 minutes before game time. Classic rock blares from the compact speakers in the compact bar and grill, drowning out the strands of a street guitarist, bringing to wonderful mind the scene from “Animal House” in which Bluto mashes the folk singer’s guitar against the wall in the stairwell and into bits.

The peanuts are cracking. The crab cake platter works just fine. The beer is flowing; it is ice cold and tastes of crisp perfection.

The women in Baltimore, wearing their pony tails through the openings in the back of their baseball caps, are beautiful. Every woman, after all, is beautiful when she’s having a cold one and is on her way to a baseball game.

It is now less than two hours until game time.

Is this heaven?

It’s Sliders, and “Sweet Home Alabama” is rolling out of the sound system.

The bartender, wearing an orange, white and black wristband and a shirt that says, “Can I buy you a drink ... Or do you just want money?” is everywhere. He can’t stop, and makes you want to not stop. He predicts a UCLA-North Carolina final.

One server snaps photos for groups of friends huddled around the grill’s tall tables. The staff at Sliders can’t do enough for their customers.

O’s fans of varying size, shape, age and sex are in Sliders before the game. Life is good in the Land of Pleasant Living ... beyond left field of Camden Yards, 771 feet from home plate.

Inside the beautiful Camden green ballpark, fans lean against the wall in the right-field flag court to watch batting practice. The rhythm of each B.P. pitch, the crack of the bat, then the very next pitch and the crack of the bat is precise. Over and over again. It can hypnotize you if you allow it to.

At the foot of the B&O warehouse, fans wear their gloves waiting for a souvenir to come their way. Families, friends, couples and children take pictures of each other and have pictures taken of themselves with their favorite Oriole Park landmark in the background ... the warehouse, the centerfield scoreboard, the home-to-leftfield views, with the stands wrapping all the way around to center field.

“It’s the best ballpark in the world,” said Gary Thorne, television voice of the Orioles, “and you can see that with each new park that has been built since.”

When it is suggested to Thorne that those newer ballparks are merely caricatures of Camden Yards, he says, “And not very good ones.”

It is 6:32 p.m., 33 minutes until game time. It is a pleasant Saturday evening at Oriole Park, yet nobody is in the stands. The Final Four’s keeping them home? They didn’t just start playing the Final Four five years ago, so that doesn’t wash. It was alive and strong when this ballpark drew sellouts on the same night. Besides, the Terps weren’t in it this year, were they?

Three nuns walk through a concession area of the ballpark, dressed in full habit.

“Thank you for coming Sisters,” says one wiseguy, “I’m afraid you’re about 11 years too late.”

Maybe not. The Orioles, who haven’t had a winning season since 1997, are in the process of sweeping a four-game series from the Seattle Mariners, picked to be one of the better teams in the American League this season. The Orioles, picked by everybody to finish last, do this with solid wins on Friday and Saturday, an old “Orioles Magic”-style ninth-inning comeback win on Sunday afternoon, and with an eighth-inning comeback win on Monday afternoon.

After Monday’s win, members of the media are castigated by the Orioles players, who find themselves leaving town for a six-game road trip with one of the two best records in baseball and a five-game winning streak. Anybody who picked this team to finish last obviously doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

We shall see ... 156 games from now.

Other than an Opening Day clunker, after which even more last-place told-ya-sos were issued, the Orioles have, in fact, played fine baseball, although it seemingly is one of the best-kept secrets in Baltimore. Twice during the season-opening homestand, the club played to the smallest crowds in the 16-plus-year history of the ballpark. As Yogi Berra said, “If the fans don’t come out to the ballpark, you can’t stop them,” and right now there’s nothing stopping Baltimore fans.

Ten straight losing seasons can do that. Another team and a new ballpark just down the road can do that, too. The weather in Baltimore is not yet ideal for baseball, as it was cold, rainy and windy for much of the just-completed homestand.

Still, the fans who did manage to come to the park the past week were a hearty, throaty lot, which, despite the empty seats, has been one of the major benefits of the exodus of the D.C. Suit. Though there haven’t been too many of them out there yet, they are true baseball fans, and true Orioles fans, who have been there.

Orioles fans have been beaten up like no other fans in baseball since 1997, but those beatings haven’t come from stupid baseball luck or circumstances. The beatings have been self-inflicted organizational beatings, and while all Orioles fans are happy with this team’s start, the majority of them are still likely to take a while longer to let some people know they are still smarting from those beatings.

Fans eventually forgive. They never forget.

Mike Burke is sports editor of the Cumberland Times-News. Write to him at mburke@times-news.com.