April 4 vs the Brewers - Opening Day

Opponent: Milwaukee Brewers
Outcome: L
Score: 0-12
Streak: L1
Record: 0-1
Rank: 5th (Tied)
GB: 1.0

This was the first ever Opening Day I attended.  My friend Steve and his mother came with me - originally my co-worker Tony was going to attend but he backed out after discovering that the game was in the afternoon rather than the evening.  It was very festive - they had a crowd of 52,395 for the game - the largest regular season crowd ever at an Orioles game and governor William Donald Schaefer, longtime mayor of Baltimore (we always used to joke he was actually the "governor of Baltimore"), throw out the first pitch.  Everybody was excited.  Then the game started.

To be fair, it wasn't an immediate disaster.  The game was scoreless until the fourth inning before Rob Deer doubled in BJ Surhoff.  The Brewers would score a second run in the inning but the Orioles did pull off a nifty double play - nailing Greg Brock at the plate when he tried to score on a fly ball by Glenn Braggs.  The Brewers put up two more in the sixth - one of them on a steal of home by Paul Molitor - and two more in the seventh (a bizarre inning that featured two more steals by Molitor and a two RBI infield single by Braggs - actually the only hit in the inning).  The wheels completely came off in the eighth when the Brewers doubled their scoring with six more runs - two of which came on a home run by Dale Sveum, another coming on a Dave Schmidt wild pitch.  The final for the game was 12-0 Brewers.  The Orioles only managed five hits in the game off of Teddy Higuera, Mark Clear and Dan Plesac.

We sat in the left field bleachers for the game and the crowd grew increasingly rowdy as the game went on.  I remember beer being thrown and at least one fight breaking out.  But we stayed until the bitter end.  We had some interesting logistics to deal with after the game - Steve had tickets for the Bruce Springsteen concert at the Capital Center in Landover, Maryland that night*.  Steve was living in Delaware at the time and had left his ticket with his housemates (Chris, Tom and Harry) who were also going to the concert.  Steve was planning on meeting up with them before the show but had not taken into consideration the delays he would have both in us getting out of the parking lot at the game (we had parked in the Eastern High School parking lot just across 33rd Street from Memorial Stadium for the game - for a game with this many people we were "sardined" in the lot - all cars were parked bumper to bumper so if the car in front of you hadn't left yet, you weren't going anywhere) and in navigating in rush hour traffic from the middle of Baltimore to my apartment in Silver Spring.  I ended up driving his mother back to her home in Olney, Maryland while Steve headed for the concert.  He met up with Chris outside the arena just a few minutes before Chris was going to give up on him (keep in mind this was in the days before cell phones so Steve had no way of getting hold of Chris while he was on his way).

*The five of us plus my co-worker Tony had spent a night outside the Capital Center a few months earlier waiting in line for Springsteen tickets.  Each person was going to be allowed to buy two tickets.  Only three of us actually got to the ticket window - two of Harry, Tom, Chris and Steve (can't remember which two) and Tony.  Somehow we ended up with only five tickets.  Four for this show on April 4th that the four of them went to and one for April 5th that Tony went to.  Tony claimed that by the time he got to the ticket window he could only buy one.  I've never quite understood how that happened but between that and his backing out of going to Opening Day I kind of stopped inviting him along on things.

Once again I saved the clippings from the Washington Post for the game from the next day:

One thing point out - this was actually the only time all season that the team was not in seventh place.  They were in a three way tie for fifth with the Red Sox and Indians who both also lost on April 4th.  They were a game behind the Blue Jays, Brewers and Tigers who were tied for first and a half game behind the Yankees who would not play their first game until the 5th.