Baltimore Orioles Tickets

Baltimore's Memorial Stadium, built in 1950, is a solid brick building situated in an odd, not-quite-urban, not-quite¬-urban neighborhood. It is still standing at this writing, though it is no longer used by the Orioles or the NFL's Baltimore franchise, and is sched¬uled for demolition. The wonderful Camden Yards was built to replace Memorial, so baseball fans do not especially miss this stadium. Although baseball traditionalists usually protest the destruction of any stadium, when Memorial is inevitably razed protests will probably be minimal.

Memorial was difficult to get to, either by car or by mass transit, and the parking lots featured bumper-to-bumper parking: acres and acres of cars crammed together mere inches apart. Once parked, you could leave the premises only if the car directly in front of or behind you moved first.

Inside the park was a bigger problem: It simply wasn't a good place to watch a game. In big-league ballparks, not everyone can sit close to the action; in fact, a lot of fans sit closer to the parking lot than to home plate. But in Memo¬rial, even a seat in a ground-level section close to the playing field did not ensure a quality view. Thousands of seats were situated under the overhang from the deck above, twenty or thirty rows deep, foul line to foul line. Lost on those spectators was the opportunity to watch the arc of a pop-up or a deep fly ball, to observe the angle the fielders take to intercept the ball's path, to marvel at the majestic parabola of a long blast.

They might as well have been watching it on television, which many of them did on monitors suspended from the bottom of the very deck that was obscuring their view. And even in the seats that were not obstructed by the overhang, there seemed to be an odd configura¬tion about the place: In both the lower and upper deck, it felt as though the pitcher's mound should have been placed somewhere near third base.

Fans could not have been more enthusiastic about the coming of Camden Yards. No one lamented the loss of Memorial. And when Camden Yards opened in the revitalized downtown Inner Harbor, the fans were proven right.

JOHN SCHUERHOLZ (BRAVES GM) "What I recall the most vividly about my first trip to a major-league ballpark, which happened to be Baltimore's Memorial Stadium, my hometown of Baltimore, was how excited I was. My dad was a minor-league base-ball player and we talked about baseball, and baseball was a big part of our household at the time. And when I was old enough to go to a game and have some real enjoyment and be able to understand what was going on, my father took me. And what I remember most is how as a young boy, everything seemed so large, the people I met who were his friends seemed large, their handshakes seemed to envelop me when I shook their hands. My father said, 'Be sure to shake their hands firmly, son. Don't give them a dead fish.'

And I'm meeting all of these guys he played baseball with and basketball with in Baltimore. And then, as we walked up the tunnel, the walkway, and I saw this field, it looked like the most beautiful thing in the world." DENNY NEAGLE "I grew up in the Baltimore area so the first stadium I ever saw was Memorial Stadium.... I grew up learning to be a baseball histo¬rian-purist, my dad kind of instilled that in me. I still feel that way today and I'll always remember going to that park and watching Jim Palmer and Scotty McGregor, and obviously the great rivalry they had with the Yankees, too.... I think my first game, I was probably about seven years old. I used to sit there and say to him-probably not until I was about fourteen, fifteen years old, that I started saying-'You know what, Dad, I think I might have a chance to do this . . . You watch, Dad, one of these days you're going to watch me pitch in one of these parks.-

CAL RIPKEN JR. "I think the first time you walk out to a big-league field, no matter where you are, that signi¬fies the most special stadium to you. Memorial Stadium was my field, it was the home ballpark for the Orioles, and I came on as a pinch runner . . . It was the first time that I actually felt that a baseball field was like a stage. You went out, there were really bright lights and it was au ruiea, ana i naa never been in a situation like that. I had been to the stadium before, I had worked out early in the day before the people started to fill in. But it was such a different feeling
once the game had started and once it had filled with people."

WADE BOGGS "Old Memorial Stadium, I walked in and was in awe. I mean, I had finally made it to the big leagues and here I am in the same place that I was watching the . . . World Series. I grew up in Tampa, Florida, so I'd never been to a big-league stadium as a kid. We just had Al Lopez [Field], where the Reds trained, and that was basically all I had ever gone to."

ANDY MACPHAIL (CUBS PRESIDENT) "Baltimore's Memorial Stadium in the late fifties. There was something exciting about moving from the dark concourse . . . into the bright sunlight and the green grass. I would sit behind the plate with my older brother with seventy-five cents in my pocket waiting for the top of the fifth to get ice cream and a Coke"