Orioles’ Turnaround This Season Has Become One for the Books

A baseball season that began seven months ago in the heat and humidity of South Florida and that has taken them through freezing rain in Boston, an empty stadium in Texas and an all-night flight delay in Cleveland, is almost over for the Baltimore Orioles, who will meet the Toronto Blue Jays in a three-game series starting Friday night, with the American League East Division championship at stake.

A year after they came here to lose the last of their mind-numbing 107 games, after they decided to clean house and start over with kids, the Orioles arrived here to find minicams and a couple of dozen fans awaiting them.

They arrived to find themselves in the middle of one of the most stunning pennant races in major league history because a team no one knows has almost done something no one believed possible.

“I tried to tell people in spring training it would come down to this weekend,” said Manager Frank Robinson, who took an afternoon nap before going to dinner with friends. Either he or Toronto Manager Cito Gaston will become the first black man to manage a division champion.

“No one believed me, but I could see it coming,” Robinson said of the incredible season. He laughed a laugh that is both nervous and uncharacteristic for the cocky Hall of Famer. He later admitted his days seem to be getting longer and longer as he finds his hotel rooms growing smaller and smaller.

“The waiting,” he said, “is the toughest part. You want to go play, but that’s part of it. Everyone handles it the best way he knows how.”

No team in the 90 or so years of major league baseball has ever gone from last place one season to first the next. But after spending 116 days atop the AL East this summer, the Orioles enter this final weekend one game behind the Blue Jays.

The battle will commence Friday night at the soldout SkyDome. It will be only the 12th time in 21 years a division championship will be decided on the final weekend, and if Sunday’s game is the deciding one, it will be only the fourth time that has happened.

If a playoff is necessary, the teams will come to Baltimore for a 1 p.m. game Monday. The best-of-seven American League championship series will begin Tuesday night at the home park of the West Division-champion Oakland A’s. The East winner will host games Friday, Saturday and, if necessary, Sunday.

“A playoff atmosphere,” shortstop Cal Ripken said. “You play for opportunities like this, and since you don’t get many of them, you want to take advantage of it.”

What’s even more remarkable than the opportunity is the method the Orioles used to get here. A team that got rid of Eddie Murray, Fred Lynn and Mike Boddicker has won with 13 rookies and 18 players with fewer than two years’ experience.

Reliever Gregg Olson, who hasn’t allowed a run in almost two months, has been out of Auburn University for a little more than a year. Right-hander Bob Milacki and third baseman Craig Worthington -- both cornerstones -- are rookies, and Jeff Ballard, the ace of the pitching staff, has won 18 games in his first full season in the majors.

The Orioles have won not with overwhelming hitting or pitching, but with stolen bases, defense and a habit of finding the right player at the right time.

Of the 10 players who started opening day against Roger Clemens and the Boston Red Sox, only four -- Ripken, catcher Mickey Tettleton, left fielder Phil Bradley and Worthington -- have been regulars the entire season.

The Orioles have been a mosaic of players. They went to Rochester and found pitchers who would win 12 games. They went to Rochester to find Tim Hulett, who has taken the second base job away from Bill Ripken. And they stole outfielder Stanley Jefferson, who has driven in 20 runs in 44 games, in a minor league deal with the Yankees.

They represent a team that Robinson created last spring, then wrapped in a tight cocoon for most of the summer. They represent a team that, in a lot of people’s eyes, can’t lose no matter what the scores are this weekend.

Robinson wouldn’t even allow the words “pennant race” into his clubhouse until early September, but now says moral victories are no victories at all.

“We’re not in a no-lose situation,” he said. “We’re in the same situation as the other club. If we don’t win, we lose, and when you lose, you feel bad. How many times do you get to go into the last weekend of a season playing for a division championship? I’ve never done it. It’s a thrill and a challenge. It’s also a lot of fun, especially for the guys who finished the season here last year. That’s the way we look at it.”

No team has ever done what the ’89 Orioles have done, especially after two straight awful seasons.

“This team is different,” said reliever Brian Holton, a member of the World Series-champion Los Angeles Dodgers last season. “I don’t even think we know what we’re doing, to tell you the truth. I don’t think our guys realize there’s a pennant race. They realize it, but maybe don’t understand it.”

Holton said his solution is that, “I’ll be nervous enough for everyone because I am nervous. I go crazy just waiting to get to the park to play again. I tried watching a Tracy and Hepburn movie yesterday and that didn’t even help. I started pacing my room thinking about the game.”

A few feet away, Olson was tugging on a sweat shirt and agreeing.

“He’s nervous,” he said. “The last couple of days he’s jumped on me a dozen times. Maybe he’s making me nervous. When I went in that game Monday night, I started thinking, ‘Hmm, blow this game, blow a season.’ You can’t start doing that. We’ve had fun all year, and there’s no reason to stop now.”

Cloudless skies and temperatures in the mid-60s greeted the Orioles, who must sweep the Blue Jays -- who have never lost three in a row at the SkyDome -- to win the division outright.

Yet no matter what happens to the Orioles this weekend, they’ve been the game’s sweetest story in a season in which scandals involving Pete Rose and Wade Boggs and the death of commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti have dominated many of the headlines.

The Orioles came here having already won in a lot of ways, from drawing a franchise-record 2.5 million fans to Memorial Stadium to bringing the game a nucleus of new young stars.

It’s a team with 13 rookies and 18 players with fewer than two years experience, a team whose modest goal this season was not to win, but to simply wash away some of the memories of last season’s 107-loss embarrassment. In that sense it’s already been a wondrous season.

“I guess a lot of people would look at it that way,” Ballard said. “We don’t. We’re here and we think we can win. We’re not going to start measuring ourselves by what other people think.”

He reminded a questioner that he has pitched a few other big games. When his Stanford team played at Arizona State, “that was big. I pitched against Texas in the College World Series. I guess it’s not big on that scale, but at the time, it was a lot of pressure.”

It’s a different story on the other side of the SkyDome, where the Blue Jays are trying to escape the “choker” tag that has followed them since they blew a 3-1 lead in the 1985 league playoffs to lose a pennant to the Kansas City Royals.

Two years later the Blue Jays blew a four-game lead by losing the final seven regular-season games, including four to the Detroit Tigers on the last weekend.

Unlike the Baltimore Cinderella team, these Blue Jays have been booed, hooted and laughed at. Both teams may feel the pressure, but the Blue Jays surely feel a different and darker pressure.

“When we’re playing the games, it doesn’t seep into the brain,” said outfielder Lloyd Moseby, who was a Blue Jay in both 1985 and 1987. “But when there’s no game, that’s all you read in the paper. We get no peace. The old saying is that you learn your lesson once. We’ve learned it twice -- three times and we’re fools. We don’t want to be thought of as fools. We’ve been called enough already.”