Hard Times in a Proud Town

By Tom Callahan

While the rest of baseball was settling into the season, the Baltimore Orioles were spinning out of the way, reeling from inside pitches too mean to be believed, looking silly and sad. Starting with a 12-0 opener at home, the Orioles lost the first six games for second-year Manager Cal Ripken, who was abruptly fired. Frank Robinson replaced him, and they lost ten more to shatter an 84-year-old major-league record. Once Baltimore was the proudest team in the game, and the winningest.

Since the start of divisional play in 1969, even counting the two woeful seasons past, the Orioles have won 45 more games than the fabled Yankees, 63 and 51 more than the Dodgers and Reds. And how -- not how many -- was the real distinction. In the front office and on the field, Baltimore played the game smartly, happily and hard and, from 1966 on, to win titles. That was the year Robinson first came over from Cincinnati to show them how.

While he had been a terrific player for ten years, known as a lethal base runner and horrible loser, Robinson was considered a little volatile. One famous night at a diner, he showed a pistol to a quarrelsome cook who was directing Robinson's attention to a meat cleaver. The lithe outfielder -- marked down as "an old 30" by Cincinnati management -- was dispatched to Baltimore, where that watershed summer he hit .316 with 122 runs batted in and 49 homers, not including the one that won the Orioles' first World Series. Over the five prosperous seasons that followed, his competitive values became imprinted in the Baltimore clubhouse, and they heralded his selection as the big leagues' first black manager in 1975.

Robinson was handed the worst team that came along, the Cleveland Indians, and made it respectable. But he was still considered a little volatile. While a player-manager, he socked a Toledo Mud Hens pitcher, who, upset at having been cut by Robinson, nearly beaned him in an exhibition game. Fired within three years, Robinson reappeared in San Francisco, where in 1982 he managed the languorous Giants into the last week of a pennant race. This time, snatching an occasional jersey in anger, he lasted only slightly longer. The word was that Robinson could not communicate with the modern ballplayers. "I communicate with them," he said. "I just tell them things they don't want to hear." The whispers were that he was especially harsh with the blacks.

"Deep down inside," says Joe Morgan, the black second baseman whose splendid career wound down with the Robinson Giants, "I think it's true that he was hoping for and expecting more from us. We all like to say we give 100%, but a baseball player can always take another step somewhere along the line. The black players weren't fair to him in Cleveland; I'll leave it at that. And ! some of our guys let him down too, if you want to know the truth of it. When I heard about the Baltimore job, I almost sent Frank a telegram. I was going to say, 'Congratulations -- I think.' "

Besides a hopeless pitching corps that mocks the great Oriole staffs of the past, Robinson inherits two children of the deposed manager. Billy Ripken, 23, the second baseman, quietly exchanged his uniform number for his dad's. "I don't want to see anyone else wearing it," he grumbled. On the timing of their father's dismissal, Shortstop Cal Ripken Jr., 27, said, "As a player, I don't have an opinion. As a son, I'll keep my opinions to myself." Baltimoreans are especially worried about Cal Jr., the American League's Most Valuable Player of 1983, who went 0 for 29 at one stretch in the Orioles' slump. His contract is up this season, and they fear he will abandon the town. In fact, they have deeper fears than that.

Since 1979, the Orioles have been the property of Washington Trial Lawyer Edward Bennett Williams, famed counsel to Joe McCarthy, Jimmy Hoffa and the Birdman of Alcatraz. No local buyer could be found when Williams bought the team for $12 million; now it is said to be worth $60 million. Williams' general manager until last October, Hank Peters, insists that "winning and losing are both team efforts" and the blame for the Orioles' decline belongs to "me, the owner, the manager, the players and the farm system." But the emphasis should be on the owner. Like a lot of men who made it on their own hook in other fields, Williams came to believe he knew baseball better than his baseball people and favored the quick, free-agent fixes that the organization historically disdained.

A sad element of his impatience, frightening to the city that has already lost the basketball Bullets and football Colts, is that Williams is seven surgeries into a heroic fight against cancer. "If I die," he has said, "the team will be sold." Though the city is offering Williams a new stadium, he seems to be resisting signing any lease. A grim knowledge of trustees and their responsibility to highest bidders makes Baltimore wonder if this melancholy team is the final edition.

The old record of the 1904 Senators and 1920 Tigers was 13 perfect losses, but the Orioles were at 16 and looking unstoppable when they reached the crescendo of allowing nine first inning runs by the Kansas City Royals. Grayer at 52 and a little less volatile, Robinson finally closed the clubhouse door ! and screamed. Because he has been three of the only five black managers (Larry Doby and Maury Wills had momentary calls in Chicago and Seattle), some people are saying Frank Robinson has become an old-boy network complete unto himself, as recyclable as the much fired, well-traveled perennials Don Zimmer and John McNamara. "People say a lot of things," Morgan mutters through tight teeth, "but watch how much better the Orioles play. He can't make them great, but he'll make them as good as they can be." Having resolved not to "spit so much fire," Robinson said, "I was more diplomatic in San Francisco than I was at Cleveland, and hopefully I'll be more diplomatic here. But you can be too diplomatic." And a little fire hit the ground.

CHART:

American League East

Team W L Pct. GB

Cleveland 13 3 .813 --

New York 12 4 .750 1

Boston 10 5 .667 2 1/2

Detroit 8 6 .571 4

Milwaukee 8 7 .533 4 1/2

Toronto 7 7 .500 5

Baltimore 0 16 .000 13

Standings as of 4/22/88

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