Hey, You, Baltimore, Hands Off Our Rams

Lately, I have been hearing a lot of babble about Baltimore, a great crab-eating city in the East, licking its lips over one of our football teams. Baltimore covets the Rams because the underprivileged villagers there no longer have professional football of their own.

The obvious gag making the rounds, of course, is that if the people of Baltimore want professional football, why would they want the Rams?

All the same, to Baltimoreans or Baltimorers or Baltimorons or whatever you nice men and women call yourselves, I beg of you:

Keep your clammy hands off.

None of us feels like watching Georgia Frontiere doing another of those TV spots on Sunday afternoons where she discusses her charity work. We don’t feel like hearing her say: “Thanks to us, the city of Baltimore is playing football again, the United Way.”

Leave our team be.

The Rams’ leaving would be the third-biggest NFL mistake of 1993, right after the two involving Leon Lett.

Listen, we do readily acknowledge what a bunch of carpetbaggers we are. We know that we stole our pro football teams from Oakland and Cleveland, stole our pro basketball teams from San Diego and Minneapolis, stole one of our baseball teams from Brooklyn. We know what sticky fingers we Californians have.

And we also know that you lost your beloved Colts. We know you had Johnny U and Big Daddy Lipscomb and Fatso Donovan and a lot of other great guys with crew cuts on their heads and horseshoes on their helmets. We all know that one fateful midnight, the Irsay family--Bob, Jim, Gomez, Morticia, Lurch, all of them--came creeping into your compound like grave robbers and filched your favorite team.

But please, don’t steal ours.

Think of the moving-van expenses. Three thousand miles!

We want our Rams to stay and play in Anaheim, right where they have always belonged!

(After they moved there from Los Angeles, where they moved from Cleveland.)

We do care about our Rams, skinny legs and all. Oh, I know we neglect the poor darlings terribly. We don’t always go out and watch them every Sunday the way we should, partly because the quality of Ram football in the 1990s has approximated that of Southern Methodist University’s.

But that doesn’t mean we want Georgia and her band to hit the road, and don’t come back, no more, no more.

There are plenty of things that we admire about the Ram organization. There’s. . . .

There’s. . . .

Well, pretty cool helmets, wouldn’t you agree?

I can think of many reasons why Baltimore would be making goo-goo eyes at our team. For one, Baltimore happens to have one of the world’s great aquariums. And the Rams do have a player named Flipper.

Also, if Jacksonville, Fla., can be a big league city, then Baltimore definitely should be a big league city. Baltimore has more of everything than Jacksonville. Baltimore has more Jacksons than Jacksonville.

What a league.

I used to look forward to a good Colt-Packer game or Colt-Giant game. Now all I can do is look forward to a Panther-Jaguar game, provided I can remember which city has the Panthers and which one the Jaguars.

Ah, nothing like a big Jag game to while away a Sunday.

Boy, I was so disappointed that Baltimore was overlooked again in the NFL house’s latest wing addition. Baltimore always supported its team through thick and thin, including some very spectacular thick.

There was Alan Ameche, who, as you know, scored a very famous touchdown after first starring in that movie as the guy who invented the telephone.

There was John Mackey, the tight end, who was about as easy to tackle as a greased bus.

There was Lenny Moore, a running back who was so popular in town, he should have named his first son Balti.

There was Raymond Berry, who later coached the New England Patriots into a Super Bowl, thus qualifying him as a great student of either football or voodoo.

Baltimore even supported its bad players. Whereas a half-empty stadium can be commonplace in St. Louis or in Foxboro, Mass., or, yes, in Anaheim when the local team is a doing a bow-wow act, fans from Baltimore were always 100% behind their team, often going directly from their French fries with gravy at the diner to the stadium for the kickoff.

The weirdest thing about Baltimore trying to get the Rams is that actually, Baltimore is trying to get the Rams back.

See, the only reason Georgia Frontiere owns the Rams instead of the Colts is that her late husband, Carroll Rosenbloom, got together with a fellow owner and swapped football teams the way younger people swap football cards. In other words, she could be Madame Colt, right now.

I suppose she could become the toast of that town again, provided Baltimore is a town where someone would like to be the toast.

Baltimore is so bummed out by being snubbed by the NFL that it is prepared to do anything. I understand that the first thing Baltimore intends to do upon acquiring the Rams is bench all of their quarterbacks and start Tom Matte.

Best of luck, Baltimoratonians, on getting a team of your own.

Unless it’s ours, in which case we will be coming after your precious little Orioles, sometime right around midnight.