a.k.a. V.J.

There was a point within my lifetime, when baseball was probably still a more popular sport among Americans than football. Personally, up until the 1990s, I cared a lot more about baseball than any other sport. The team I followed daily in the box scores and on TV whenever I could watch them was the Baltimore Orioles.

When the Orioles lost the World Series to the Pirates in 1979, it was my first true sports heartbreak. (I still get twinges of PTSD when I hear Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family.”) When Baltimore beat the Phillies to win the Series in 1983, I was jubilant. In those days, baseball was the number one sport in my heart and everything else was a very distant second place.

I started falling out of love with baseball after the strike year of 1994. There were a lot of reasons for my waning interest beyond just the strike. As I advanced deeper into adulthood and eventually into fatherhood, I had less time in my life to follow multiple sports. The Bills were doing a lot more back in the 1990s to keep me interested than the Orioles were, so football began to edge out baseball in my day-to-day consciousness.

Probably the biggest reason baseball became less important to me is that it was a sport I used to watch with my father (he was also the reason I became an Orioles fan). He died in 1994 — coincidentally enough, right around the time that season ended early due to the strike. That gave me a double jumping-off point.

These days, I don’t follow MLB at all during the regular season, other than to glance at the standings a few times each week. For much of the past three decades, those check-ins were usually to confirm that the Orioles were in or near the basement of the American League East. Not so this season! Much to my delight, the O’s have been playing great all year and, at this writing, enjoy the best record in the American League.

This Baltimore renaissance inspired me to dig into my closet and pull out a relic from sometime in the early ’90s — a very gaudy Orioles jacket from back in the era when Starter jackets and various copy-cat products were practically obligatory casualwear for young men in their twenties. I don’t think I’ve worn the thing since Bill Clinton’s first term, but it has held up well and still fits. It’s a bit heavy to wear at this point in the summer, but I have every intention of wearing it to work and around town this fall during the post-season.

And if any of the local Yankee fans out on the streets have anything to say about this jacket…well, I’ll just flip around and invite them to talk to The Bird.