Season Preview

I want to try to put the Orioles' 1988 season in context.  It's hard to believe now but going into the 1988 season the Orioles had been one of the most successful teams over the previous 20 seasons or so.  From 1966 to 1983 the team won three World Championships, six American League pennants and seven AL East titles.  They only finished under .500 once during that stretch (1967) and their lowest finish for the season in the divisional era (1969 and later) was fourth (in 1978).  But after the championship in 1983, things started to fall apart.  The team dropped to fifth in 1984 although they still finished above .500 at 85-77 (the AL West only had one team above .500 that year).  They moved up to fourth in 1985 although their record dropped to 83-78.

1986 looked like it was going to turn the team's fortunes around.  On the morning of August 6th, the Orioles were 59-47 and in second place, 2.5 games behind the Red Sox.  That night they took on the Texas Rangers at home.  The Rangers went out to a 6-0 lead after three innings behind a grand slam by Toby Harrah.  The Orioles came back with a 9 run fourth inning that featured a pair of grand slams of their own - one by Larry Sheets and one by Jim Dwyer.  They added two more runs in the bottom of the sixth to go up 11-6.  The Rangers came storming back with six more runs in the top of the eighth and one more in the top of the ninth to win the game 13-11.  During the Rangers' eighth inning rally play had to be stopped because of a black cat running on to the field.

Following their loss in the "black cat game", the bottom dropped out of the Orioles season.  They went 14-42 the rest of the season, finishing the 1986 season dead last with a record of 73-89.  It was the first time the team had finished last since 1953 when they were still the St. Louis Browns (that was the franchise's final season in St. Louis).

While the team moved up to sixth place in 1987, it really wasn't an improvement.  Their record that year was 67-95 - they only escaped the cellar because the Cleveland Indians (who were picked to win the division by Sports Illustrated that season*) lost over 100 games.  It was the Orioles' worst record since they went 57-97-2 in 1955, their second season in Baltimore.

*It's easy to make fun of Sports Illustrated for that pick but I've always believed there was an unacknowledged factor in their decision making.  From 1981 to 1986 the other six teams in the American League East all finished first once - the Yankees in 1981, the Brewers in 1982, the Orioles in 1983, the Tigers in 1984, the Blue Jays in 1985 and the Red Sox in 1986.  If Cleveland had won the division in 1987, all seven teams would have won in seven year stretch.

The "Baseball Preview" publications in early 1988 weren't very optimistic on the Orioles chances for the coming season.  The 1988 edition of "The Complete Handbook Of Baseball" picked the team for last.  They didn't think much of the team's hitting ("The Orioles, for all their home runs, have trouble scoring runs") or pitching ("This is the Orioles' greatest downfall").  Their team preview ended ominously with "Another disaster lies ahead".  Sports Illustrated picked them seventh as well saying basically it was a shame that manager Cal Ripken Sr. had only had two baseball playing sons - the team would have a better shot if he'd "only fathered a few more players".*  In his Baseball Abstract that year (his last one), Bill James wrote an essay discussing how the Orioles got to this point - after winning the Series in 1983 they basically kept replacing young players in their lineup with older ones - for example in 1985 they replaced 27 year old John Shelby with 33 year old Fred Lynn in center field.  None of these moves paid off, at least not in the long run.  James finishes the first column of his essay with "It has been said that there is no event on record which a competent historian cannot make seem inevitable once it has transpired.  I do not want to argue that the dissolution of the Oriole tradition was an inevitable consequence of these decisions.  It was not inevitable.  It was merely exceedingly probable." 

*Hall Of Famer Cal Jr. was coming into his seventh season in 1988.  Brother Bill had debuted in 1987 and was one of the few highlights of the year for the Orioles.

Going into the 1988 season there really wasn't any reason to be optimistic but a lot of us in the Baltimore area were thinking that there was no way the team could be as bad as the 1986 and 1987 teams were.  As it turns out we were correct but just not in the way we thought.