Carl Rabovsky didn’t take the road well traveled. A Baltimore native, he studied accounting and briefly working at WBAL before “deciding the straight and narrow life wasn’t for him,” wrote a family member, David Ansel, in a recent email exchange. (Carl was David’s father’s first cousin.) Carl worked as a waterman on the Eastern Shore and as a bartender in Ocean City before heading west to Los Angeles.
Wherever his travels took him, he remained a diehard fan of Baltimore’s beloved sports teams, the Orioles and Colts.
“Fully of the Unitas and Brooks generations, he had seen the franchises from their beginnings,” David Ansel wrote.
Carl Rabovsky in Los Angeles with his baseball allegiance fully revealed.
On a business trip to Los Angeles in the early 2010s, Ansel — a food entrepreneur and musician whose own journey as an Orioles fan (see below) is part of the story — took an extra day to visit Carl in Manhattan Beach.
“It would be one of the last times I saw him,” Ansel wrote. “We spent the day listening to records, sharing a lot about music. And then the conversation turned to sports.”
Carl shared that he’d written an Orioles fight song titled “Fly High You O’s.”
“He told me he’d always thought baseball needed fight songs; he loved the Colts fight song,” Ansel wrote. “He recalled the Colts’ band director offering his services to Art Modell when the Ravens came to town. He described this as framed out of duty and dedication to the cause and the city. Carl said he wanted to contribute somehow. He told me, in words I’ll never forget, ‘One fan, cheering the right way, can alter the course of a game.’”
That day in Manhattan Beach, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, Carl sang his Orioles fight song to Ansel, who recorded it. Here is that version in a YouTube clip:
Ansel’s recording soon took on added poignance. The next time he saw Carl, at a family wedding, Carl was “visibly wasting away and shared the news that he’d had a cancer diagnosis,” Ansel wrote.
They saw each other one more time, in Austin, Texas, where Ansel lives. Carl was driving across the country with a few possessions, going from California to Miami, where his mother and sister lived, to spend his last few months alive with them. When he stopped in Austin, “I told him I would turn his tune into a real fight song,” Ansel wrote.
Knowing he didn’t have much time, Ansel got to work: “I wrote out some MIDI horn parts based on a variety of fight songs, engaged some friends to sing the chorus, festooned them in O’s hats and shirts as best I could, and recorded them. A low-budget affair, to be sure. But I was able to deliver it to Carl on time.”
Carl passed away at age 58 in 2013.
Supporting the Orioles was as important to Ansel as it was to Carl. Growing up in the Baltimore suburbs, his father was never a big fan, but a friend’s father worked at Channel 2 and had access to tickets. “They were the ones who took me to games until we were old enough to drive ourselves,” Ansel wrote.
He avidly collected baseball cards and even invented a tabletop version of baseball in which the rolls of dice produced on-field outcomes. “I’d lay out baseball cards on a makeshift field on the carpet and play entire games in my basement,” Ansel wrote.
Eddie Murray was his favorite Oriole. “I remember calling in sick to school on Opening Day 1982 so I could stay home and listen to the game. Cal hit a dinger in his first at-bat and I was ecstatic. But I was a Murray man. He [along with Lenny Bias] was my main childhood idol. The fearsome expression, the deep stance, the taunting lazy twirl of the bat. I would practice it all the time,” Ansel wrote.
As can happen, his passion waned as he grew up and got on with his life, in no small part because he was busy. Living in Austin in 2002, he began delivering fresh homemade soup to neighbors on his bicycle. The Soup Peddler, he called himself. His endeavor attracted attention and grew, and in 2010, he opened a bricks-and-mortar Soup Peddler location. There are now seven locations.
“It has become a treasured story of quirky and plucky entrepreneurship in Austin,” Ansel wrote in an email. “As I like to put it, a lot of people don’t know this but I’m quite famous.”
David Ansel, Austin’s Soup Peddler and loyal Orioles fan. (Photo courtesy of souppeddler.com.)
Ansel admits he “got diverted a bit” from baseball and the Orioles in the early 2000s, but the flame reignited when he started his own family.
“It wasn’t until the Buck [Showalter] era that I discovered that I could listen to games on the MLB app. I’d loved listening to games on the radio as a kid,” he wrote, “and now that I had my own kid, it was a nice reconnection. Didn’t hurt that the team started turning it around, and there was a cute third baseman for my little daughter to be a fan of. So I started building back as a fan.
“Then the podcasting world caught my ear and I started understanding the depth of the organization, the GM’s view as opposed to just the manager’s view. The data, the contracts, the roster construction, all that. Just everything started going deeper. I realized I was part of a lifelong soap opera, one without a script. As the world has darkened politically, I have clung ever more to baseball as a source of intellectual and spiritual stimulation and also a bit of benign tribalism. I get to see one or two games each summer when I come home to visit my folks. I watch or listen to every single game.”
That day in Manhattan Beach, when Carl Rabovsky sang “Fly High You O’s” to Ansel and told him that “one fan, cheering the right way, can alter the course of a game,” it resonated deeply.
“Over the years, as my connection to the O’s has deepened, I have begun to understand the beauty of Carl’s words,” Ansel wrote. “Baseball is about hope. It’s about the collective, the community. This communal hope is nothing less than the prayers in the church of your choice. Carl wouldn’t describe himself as a religious person, but I felt he was sharing a hymn.”
Fly high you O’s,
You Orioles of Baltimore.
Fly high you O’s.
We’re with you everywhere you go.
We love you!
Pitch, field and score
For our valleys and the shore.
For old Baltimore,
Fly high you O’s,
Oh, fly high you O’s!
“I’d love for more ears to hear it, to get it into a few more hearts,” Ansel wrote. “Of course, I have a fantasy of all of Camden Yards singing it together, but it’s hard enough to get everyone through a few reps of Seven Nation Army before things fall apart. Regardless, it’s a cool inter-generational music project and a song about one fan’s journey.”
Full disclosure, Ansel reached out to me with this story after he was in touch with Ben Schenck, the clarinet player and bandleader from New Orleans who was recently also the subject of a Bird Tapes post because he’d authored an Orioles-themed jazz piece titled “Liftoff,” inspired by, of all things, current GM Mike Elias.
Here’s Ansel’s version of how he and Schenck, a pair of Baltimore expatriates and longstanding Oriole fans, became friends:
“A few years ago, I was at JazzFest in New Orleans and went to one of the small stages to see my friend and mentor Mark Rubin’s band perform. He played banjo in a very eclectic band called Panorama Jazz Band. I was wearing my ‘60s-era black Orioles hat with an orange brim. The bandleader was a clarinet player, and during the set he introduced a song and dedicated it to ‘the general manager of the Baltimore Orioles, Mike Elias … it’s called Liftoff!’ I believe my mouth literally dropped open, as I’d never heard of a song dedicated to a baseball player, let alone a general manager, let alone the GM of MY team. Then the bandleader, Ben, pointed at me in the crowd and said, ‘YOU know what I’m talking about!’
“We connected by text after the festival and have since texted about 10,000 times and met twice in person. We kind of needed each other in our lives. Yes, we had friends or cousins who we could discuss baseball with, but we didn’t have anyone similarly obsessed in our lives as we each lived in Baltimore exile. We could share our joys and frustrations, even about such minutiae as stuff+, barrel rate, or the quizzical Kade Strowd-for-Blaze Alexander trade. A more well-rounded friendship has built up around that obsession and also such mutual interests as bandleading, arranging, and klezmer music.
“I just think it’s sweet that two grown men north of 50 years old can find a true new friend through baseball.”
(Note: Click the play button on the image at the top of this post to hear the finished version of “Fly High You’s O’s.”)
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