Announcement Breaks Gloom of Winter

For sports fans, especially those without cable, Baltimore is not the most exciting place to spend the winter, even with the new skating rink.

The hockey is minor league, the pro basketball is on loan, the college basketball is not much of a draw and the Major Indoor Soccer League really isn’t that major. And whatever happened to the bowl game they were going to play at Memorial Stadium? The genius who thought that one up is probably the same person who designed the rock-and-roll assault on Noriega at the papal nunciature in Panama.

But who says there ain’t no cure for the wintertime blues? If you’re the mayor of Baltimore, what you do is slip on your best Oriole suspenders, head off to a news conference and hope you get a little air time on the local stations. It worked for Kurt Schmoke. He, like the rest of us, was rescued by the Orioles, who spend their winter thinking of ways to make us think of summer. They’ve got their own cruise. They’ve got a Florida dream week. And they dream up those many announcements they space through the dark days of, as they like to call it, pre-spring training.

The latest announcement, as you may have heard, was fairly dramatic. It doesn’t just make you think of summer, but many summers hence. It’s the kind of announcement that would have you mark a giant red circle on your calendar if you could only find one for 1993.

The All-Star Game is coming to Baltimore. At a news conference Thursday, Schmoke said he was excited. Oriole President Larry Lucchino said he was excited, too. And, not to be outdone, Herb Belgrad, who heads the stadium authority, said he was as excited as anyone else.

And, heck, I guess we all are, especially because the baseball All-Star Game is by far the most enjoyable of its kind. Or did you miss the Bo Jackson show last year?

What you don’t want to do is spend much time thinking about how far away 1993 is, or, for that matter, just how far away the summer of ’90 remains. No, you’re just supposed to think about baseball and how much you miss it. The idea is to get you in the mood.

This is part and parcel of the Orioles’ high-concept marketing technique. We know how hot the Orioles were last season, when they became the pre-earthquake story of the baseball world. What Lucchino is trying to do this winter is keep them hot, in the manner of a roaring fire.

There is next season, of course, to sell. But there is also the new stadium, the plans for which were reviewed last fall in the New York Times, which basically said it was the greatest structure since the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. If the Orioles were to play in the new stadium next season, they’d be a cinch to draw 3 million. If the team has success anything like last year’s, they may do it anyway.

Belgrad said Thursday that the stadium, which is scheduled to open in time for the 1992 season, was “ahead of schedule” and “under budget.” These are strange and unlikely phrases to be heard in connection with building stadiums, but, of course, they haven’t broken ground yet, and there was already that original price overrun. Whatever the eventual price, once the stadium is built, it will be a tourist attraction in its own right, complementing the nearby Inner Harbor. You can bet on that. Pete Rose already did.

It’s also a pretty sure bet that the competition for season tickets at the new stadium will be extreme, and, adding to that pressure, of course, will be the All-Star Game, tickets for which will almost certainly be tied to season-ticket holdings. That July evening in 1993 is one that a lot of people, for a lot of years, will be pointing to. These are good times to be young and in Orioles marketing.

The Orioles worked hard to acquire the All-Star Game, which hasn’t been played in Baltimore since 1958. One reason for the long gap is that the Orioles hadn’t worked very hard to return the game to Baltimore. But, with a new management, and the new stadium, and the still-renewed city, the timing was perfect. According to Schmoke, the game is a $20 million bonanza for the city. It’s worth much more than that in public relations and in the continuing effort to promote Baltimore as a destination city.

Schmoke said he hoped the good folks at the National Football League would be paying attention to what is being planned as a weeklong celebration. Let’s hope that the NFL isn’t waiting until 1993 to make these kinds of decisions. If the NFL would only do the right thing and return a franchise to Baltimore, then these winters wouldn’t seem nearly so long.