Who Says You Can’t Draw a Crowd for Weekday Afternoon Ballgame?

There’s nothing quite so rare, as any street-corner sage might suggest, as the Chesapeake Bay freezing over in the midst of a midsummer heat wave, a robin stranded in a snowbank or -- to direct the same thought process to more timely matters -- a baseball game played on a July weekday afternoon in Baltimore.

The Orioles were engaging the Seattle Mariners -- far from a midway attraction -- yet 35,691 witnesses responded to the strange site of players chasing after fly balls under a canopy of blue sky and wearing sunglasses.

It was different, a reminder of how it used to be, maybe a half-century ago, before baseball discovered electricity and turned on the light switch, with an assist from an inventive shortstop named Thomas Edison.

Usually, this time of the year in Baltimore, the height of the humidity season, the citizens are fleeing in droves to cool campsites in the green mountains of Western Maryland, are wading the crab flats of the Susquehanna or sprawling on the beaches of Ocean City, Md. Baseball, offered as a middle of the week matinee in July, is, by tradition, supposed to offer zero appeal. Not in Baltimore, anyhow.

Yet despite the weather and tradition, a sizable segment of the population showed up to see the Orioles play under a scorching sun, which proves that baseball isn’t entirely foreign to the daylight of a July afternoon. The 35,691 were there to applaud and implore the Orioles to victory, hoping to see them lengthen their lead in the American League Eastern Division -- which is now a comfortable seven-game spread over the New York Yankees.

When a previous Wednesday afternoon game was presented, a so-called “makeup” date on May 10, the same Orioles met the Oakland A’s and drew a gathering of 1,201, which was reminiscent of secret practice. That many can usually be expected to be standing outside a convenience store waiting to buy lottery tickets or else attending the parish bingo party.

What happened between May and July is the astonishing ascendancy of the Orioles. So many “walk up” customers stormed the gates, 10,962 by actual count, Wednesday that the ticket lines on the first base side of the stadium stretched through the parking lot. The partisans were disgusted with Orioles’ management for not providing more booths and sellers.

Daniel Gray McGee, a Philadelphia lawyer, was here with friends and finally was miraculously rescued out of the line by Norman Joyner, a cousin of Ken Griffey Jr., who provided him with complimentary seats, courtesy of the Mariners.

McGee, before his stroke of fortune, was more than slightly upset at how the public was being handled. Here it was the third inning and he wasn’t even going to get in the park in time to see Brian Holton throw a single pitch in anger. When McGee reached his seat, Holton had taken an enforced hike and the Mariners had established a comfortable lead on their way to a 7-0 victory. Meanwhile, the Orioles’ five-game winning streak melted away.

“The attitude of the club is profit, profit, profit,” said the Philadelphia visitor. “I come here for a lot of games but I’ve never seen it like this. The Orioles have the lowest payroll in the majors and are drawing record crowds. What are they doing with all the money? They also draft a pitcher named Ben McDonald, the best in the country, and haven’t gotten him signed. He deserves to be given what he wants, considering how the fans support the team.”

An official explanation for the long lines was sought from Rick Vaughn, who figures to be a runaway nominee for “rookie of the year” among baseball publicity men. “It was the combination of playing in the afternoon during the week, which is unusual in Baltimore, and the fact most of our employees are part-time at the stadium while holding regular jobs elsewhere,” Vaughn said. “We knew we were going to be strapped.

“We weren’t able to open the normal number of windows for tickets. This large of a walk-up crowd, almost 11,000, wasn’t expected. We had people in the windows without experience but we needed bodies. We’re sorry for any inconvenience. The turnout was a tribute to our team.”

Vaughn, when he’s having difficulty falling off to sleep at night, counts crowds -- not sheep. It makes for pleasant dreams. The Orioles, at this point, have drawn a total attendance of 1,473,491, or 30,697 per game. This translates to what is projected as an all-time high for the last 36 years of major-league baseball in Baltimore. At the present rate, it’ll mean they’ll play before 2,400,000.

All this for a team that lost 21 in a row in 1988, finished 34 1/2 games out of first place, established the worst record in the more than a century of professional baseball in Baltimore and was listed as a 200-to-1 betting shot by the Las Vegas oddsmakers in the preseason book for 1989. Suddenly, sailing down Chesapeake Bay isn’t as much fun as going to a ball game.