Bird Tapes Mini-Pod: What I Wrote on Deadline About the Jeffrey Maier Incident

Introducing a new Bird Tapes content series, available to all subscribers, in which I read the column I wrote for the Baltimore Sun about a famous moment in Oriole history.

Occasionally over the years, a reader has innocently asked me if I was there at Camden Yards on the night Cal Ripken Jr. set baseball’s all-time Ironman record.

For a long time, my stock reply was kind of smart-alecky. But I couldn’t help it.

Yes, I would say, I was there. And I also witnessed Cal’s 400th career home run. And his 3,000th career hit. And his 2,000th straight game, a few months before he passed Lou Gehrig.

I was there the night in Kansas City when he broke the world Ironman record, previously held by a Japanese baseball star. I was there the night at Memorial Stadium when he got tossed out of a game in the bottom of the first inning for barking at the umpire, a narrow escape for his streak.

I wasn’t there in Toronto on the night in 1987 when his consecutive-innings streak ended. But I wrote about it.

My point to the reader who’d innocently asked a simple question: I was there for pretty much every touchstone moment in Ripken’s career, not just the big one in 1995. That was my job for the 23 years I wrote columns for the Baltimore Sun. If something big happened in Baltimore sports, I was on hand. And on deadline. My job was to say something about what I’d witnessed.

For the first half of my time at the paper, the Orioles were the only game in town. The Colts had departed for Indianapolis. The Ravens hadn’t arrived from Cleveland. The Orioles were always Topic A. Whatever I wrote about them was certain to be read more than anything I wrote about anything else. So I wrote about them. A lot.

By the time I left the paper in 2007, I’d written at least several thousand columns about the Orioles, frequently on deadline in a press box after a night game.

With this post, I’m introducing a new Bird Tapes content series in which I read what I wrote on some famous (and infamous) occasions in Oriole history.

I’m inaugurating the series with a reading of what I wrote on one of the most infamous nights in Oriole history. They were in New York for Game 1 of the 1996 American League Championship Series against the Yankees. They’d come in hot, making the playoffs after a late-season surge, and they held a 4-3 lead going into the bottom of the eighth inning. Leading off for the Yankees, Derek Jeter hit a fly ball to deep right field. The Orioles’ Tony Tarasco retreated to the wall and appeared camped under the ball as it descended. Then a young fan reached out. The ball wound up in the seats. The Yankees eventually won the game.

Sorry, you know the story.

I wrote about the umpire who missed a call that surely would’ve been overturned had replay existed then, as it does now. (Click on the play button to hear me read the column.)

Last month – almost exactly 30 years later to the day – the same thing happened in a playoff game at Yankee Stadium. In Game 1 of the ALCS against the Tampa Bay Rays, the Yankees’ Anthony Volpe hit a high fly ball to left field. The ball landed in the seats for what appeared to be a game-tying, two-run home run … until the umpires checked instant replay and discovered that a fan had reached out over the wall and touched the ball before it cleared the fence, preventing the Rays’ Victor Mesa Jr. from having a chance to catch the ball.

The home run was overturned. The Rays eventually won the game.

In Baltimore, fans just shook their heads.

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Jon Miller
Davey Johnson
Earl Weaver
Fred Lynn
Al Bumbry
Peter Angelos
Rick Dempsey
Elrod Hendricks
Mike Flanagan
Eddie Murray
Ken Singleton
Brooks Robinson
Frank Robinson
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Cal Ripken, Jr.
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