Vox youtube retro report2/19/2023 The Reds general manager who made the trade famously called Robinson “an old 30.” He immediately looked like one of baseball’s all-time idiots as the next six seasons with the Orioles saw Robinson bat a combined. The big difference between 19? It’s a well-established part of Baltimore sports lore that the Orioles made the bold choice to trade Milt Pappas, the best starting pitcher (most IP, lowest ERA and WHIP) from the ‘65 team, for outfielder Frank Robinson. O’s fans disappointed by ‘64 didn’t have to wait too long, at least, since two years later the team won 97 games and that was enough for them to win the American League by a nine-game margin. If that team had won just a few more games, we might tell a totally different story of Baltimore’s first title. The 1964 O’s who won 97 games, and spent 111 days in first place, missed out by two games, finishing in third place. Only the top team out of ten in the American League standings advanced to the World Series. The Orioles won 94 or more games in 1961, 1964, and 1965. The 1966 Orioles were not the first Orioles team to have what we would look back on now and think of as a great record. What it was like has always been the province of my imagination. The last time the Orioles played in a World Series game, my mom was pregnant with me. Some of us never even saw an O’s game at Memorial Stadium, and some of those who did (including me) barely remember doing so. In something of this spirit, the writers of Camden Chat will be spending from now until the end of January writing a series of retro recaps of some of the greatest wins of the 1966 Orioles. Maybe the best is over and those of us who are around now just have to wonder what it was like to get to see the Orioles win the whole shebang. This was a particularly strong feeling during the consecutive losing years from 1998-2011, and it feels strong again as the O’s have gone 178-368 since the start of the 2018 season. Thinking about this past Orioles greatness that I missed by virtue of not being born yet, I’m often reminded of the pilot episode of The Sopranos, in which Tony Soprano, the show’s ruler of the title crime family as the 20th century turned over into the 21st, says of his part in the family’s mob history, “I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. If you’re younger than 60 or so years old, then even the 1966-1971 Orioles dynasty that won two titles and appeared in and lost the World Series twice more was before your time. If you are younger than 42 years old, you either weren’t alive for or have no functional memory of the last Orioles title in 1983. This fact may not be much consolation to the many Orioles fans who were not alive for those glory days. The team doesn’t have the richest history of any MLB franchise, but any Orioles fan can be proud of the team’s accomplishments in Charm City. There are only six teams in the league who’ve won more titles than that. Since the Baltimore Orioles team came into existence in the 1954 season, they have been World Series champions three times.
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