Old Time Family Baseball

Born less than a mile away from old Memorial Stadium, I haven’t seen too many baseball victories in my lifetime. The Orioles haven’t had a winning season since I was in middle school. That made me old enough to know what was going on yet not really old enough to appreciate it. Since that time it has been one kick in teeth after another. Albert Belle, Sidney Ponson, Sammy Sosa and Peter Angelos. And yet, none of these follies stung worse than Mike Mussina.

I was crushed when the Orioles let Moose walk away. He stayed in the AL East and went to the hated Yankees. Let me explain a little something about Baltimore. My beloved city has a bit of an inferiority complex. Stuck in the middle of D.C. and Philly, not big enough to matter. We like to pretend we’re a big deal and insert ourselves into rivalries. The Yankees don’t care about the Orioles, we’re not even on their radar. So it might not have seemed like a big deal when Mussina left for New York but to the O’s fans it was paralyzing.

Mike Mussina, a Yankee. The same Mike Mussina I would watch run around Camden Yard’s warning track before starts. Like Baltimore, he was a little bit undersized. But he had an attitude, like when he decided to tell himself to warm up during an All-Star game. Heck, he’s the reason I learned “K’s” stood for strikes. When Mussina started, you wanted to watch. What other recent Baltimore pitcher can you say that about? He’s the only appointment pitcher the Orioles had in the past 15 years. 

I was naive, I thought Mussina would play in Baltimore forever. Especially after Cal’s record breaking streak. The night Ripken was set to break the streak Mussina was scheduled to have an off day. However, he so wanted to be part of Ripken’s streak they moved his start. But it wasn’t meant to be. Following the 2000 season, Mussina understandably left for the Yankees in free agency. I don’t blame him, he deserved to play for a winner.

I guess it hurt the organization worse than it did the fans because. The club still hasn’t gotten over it — they’ve acted like a child ever since. To my knowledge, there has been no communication between Mussina and the Baltimore Orioles since he last took off the uniform. The Orioles have frozen out the young Stanford pitcher they drafted and brought up in the minors. The star pitcher who spent nine great years as a Baltimore Oriole.

The worst of it came at the beginning of the 2011 season. Guess who threw out the first pitch at Opening Day in Yankee Stadium. Yup, Mike Mussina. Has he ever thrown out an opening pitch at an Oriole game? Nope. He’s gone. He spent more time and had greater success here in Baltimore and you would never know it. If he goes into the Hall of Fame (which he should) Mussina will do so with a Yankees cap on, all because the Orioles organization couldn’t grow up.

Nick Hall is part of the Chitwood & Hobbs team, a site dedicated to the intersection of sports and culture with a particular soft spot for the 70s and 80s before sports were all about statistics, global brands, or the 24/7 news cycle.

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