Visiting Camden Yards - in Baltimore and (surprise twist) in Aberdeen, Maryland

(Randy's Perspective)

June 27 and June 28, 2014
Oh, yes: Orioles 5, Tampa Bay 2

I've missed writing and updating this baseball blog. I have a lousy excuse for being behind on the blog: Work. Too much of it. Precious little time for fun travel and writing. Life gets in the way, as the cliché goes.
Last weekend, however, it was baseball road trip time again. Penny, Peggy (Penny's sister, from Laytonsville, Maryland) and I hit Orioles Park at Camden Yards (again) en route to Philadelphia, which was a new destination.

In fact, we hit Camden Yards twice. First, we saw a Friday night game in Baltimore. Then, on Saturday morning en route to Philadelphia, we took a look at a place I didn't know existed: the Camden Yards stadium in Aberdeen, Maryland.
Camden Yards/Aberdeen is the principal stadium within an incredible Minor League and youth baseball complex that Cal Ripkin Jr. put together with help from Under Armour (and a lot of other people and corporate sponsors, I presume). It was just off  I-95 at Aberdeen, and it was a jaw-dropping site visit.
(More in a moment, as they say.)

Back to Friday night.
Visiting Camden Yards doesn't get old. It's a place that make even an apathetic "non-sports person" appreciate baseball. When it opened in 1989, it was the legitimate "built it and they will come" facility. It was funny, because old-timers felt like they'd seen it, even though it was the newest new ever.
Well, nothing lasts forever. Let's just say it was "built it and they will come" in the beginning. Great crowds. Good Orioles teams. Cal Ripkin and the streak, etc.

There have been some lean (in terms of crowds) years since the park opened. But now the Orioles are consistently good again. So, bottom line, when you go see the Orioles now, you get to visit the ballpark that was the first to blend past and present into a perfect mesh. It's the park that changed the way we view baseball today. It started a wonderful trend. Every city that needed a new park wanted a Camden Yards. It's that good.
And... you get to see a pretty good team.
So the lesson is this: Build a great park. Plug in a solid team. Ta-dah. They will come.

You would actually think that merely having a terrific team is good enough to make a franchise draw well. But that just doesn't always work.
Take the Orioles' opponent at our Friday night game in Baltimore: the Tampa Bay Rays. The Rays won the American League title in 2008, a division title in 2010, had a big-time wild-card win in 2011 and made the playoffs again in 2013. But Tampa Bay almost never play before a full house at home. The stadium is not popular; neither is the location, according to what I read.
The Rays aren't alone. Oakland is one of the most consistently solid teams in baseball. But their's is considered a bad, bad stadium, so it's a tough draw. (I kind of like the outdated A's home, but I seem to be in a minority.) Houston has a terrific park, but a cellar-bound team. They draw poorly. ... On the other hand, the Cubs are awful again. But they draw well every year, mostly because they have a destination venue. There is no foolproof formula.
So anyway, after that rambling, back to Baltimore.
The Orioles haven't played lights out this year, but as I write this they are in first place by a half-game.
We saw the tail end of a day-night double-header. Tampa won Game 1. Baltimore got homers from Hunley and Cruz and won the nightcap, 4-1.
We had cool seats. First row outfield seats. I had never sat in the front row. I had to prep myself on etiquette should fly ball drift in catching range. "Don't interfere with the play. Don't interfere with the play."
Our seats were in left field, just a few hairs stage right of where the fielders played most of the night. Hunley's homer went screaming 15 rows over our seats. That was the closest we got a baseball. (And, before Penny gives me hell, I missed Hunley's homer. I was in a concessions line.
We sat next to a highly entertaining young man named Keith Petters who said he owns the Blue & Gray Bar & Grill in Gerrysburg, Pennsylvania. I have no reason to doubt that information. He gave us a card.
His wife or girlfriend, I wasn't completely sure which, was with him. They were delightful folks.
Keith said he was a college baseball player at Virginia Wesleyan. He said, "I could have been out there" as he pointed toward center field.
"What happened?" I asked him.
"Couldn't hit a curve ball," he said.
Not the first time I, a former sportswriter, have heard that story.

I played baseball, too. I also couldn't hit a curve. Or a fastball, the last year I played. I was 14 at the time.
I loved the game. Loved it. But I went from being a .400 hitter at age 13 to hitting about a buck-fifty the last year I played. And I struck out a lot. ... I came to find out later that my vision had become terrible, and I want to think to this day that my needing glasses or contacts was the reason I lost the ability to hit. That's my story; I'm sticking to it. (Another cliche, I know.)
But the bottom line is that by the time I started wearing contacts a year later, I was heavily involved in football, basketball and track. I never went back to baseball. Man, do I regret that.
Wait... In a way I did go back to baseball. For two years, when I was in high school, I was a rec league umpire in Anderson, S.C., my hometown. I have plenty of stories about that. I umpired 15-under baseball. Every team had some good players, and they were just old enough to not be intimidated by an umpire - especially one only a year older than some of the players.
One night I was calling balls and strikes. The crowd behind home plate starting getting a pack mentality. Every ball was a strike. Every strike was a ball.
In about the fifth inning, I'd had enough. I called timeout, took off my mask and walked to the screen in front of those opinionated bastards behind home plate. (There were probably only seven or eight of them, but it felt like a hundred.)
I said, "Hey, I'm 16 years old. This is a summer job; it was all I could get. I make $3 an hour. I don't care who wins this game. I know guys on both teams. I dooon't care. I'm doing the best job I can. Will you all please just shut up for at least one inning?!"
I stared them down, left to right, up and down. Then as I started to put on my mask, an older gentleman raised his hand. He said, "Young man, we're sorry. We'll do better."
I bowed, and then saluted. Then I went back and called the rest of the game. They were quiet.
The good cheer only lasted for that game, as far as I can remember.

Anyway, this is a segue to talk about little league baseball.

That ballpark the 15-and-unders were playing on was probably the best "big park" in Anderson. It was a large-scale field behind the Anderson Recreation Center. It had deep walls and was made for older youth players and adult softball guys. It was 260 to left and about 330 to center, if I remember correctly. The field had a concrete wall surrounding it.
But best field or not, the grass got cut once a week if the teams were lucky. The grass was clumpy, even in a couple of spots in the infield. Guys learned to play the bounces the same way basketball guys learned to play in Anderson's mill gyms, where the home teams always knew where the soft spots in the floor were.
During my baseball playing days, teams I played on practiced on school playgrounds with no fences or rec league fields that weren't used for games.
A church team I played for held its games on a field with a three-to-four degree slope from the third base line through the infield and out to right field.
The crown jewel in our little city for the young ones (10-under and 12-under teams) was a facility called Embler Field. It had a concrete wall encircling the entire field. The outfield measurements were 180 feet to left, center and right.
We never really knew our fields were substandard and couldn't imagine there was anything better than Embler Field. There might not have have been. This was the late 60's and early 70's.

Memories of Embler Field and the Anderson Rec Center flooded back last week, as we pulled off I-95 to take a look at the Ripkin complex in Aberdeen. Penny had read about it, and we all said, "Well, we're going right by. Maybe it's worth a look."
We expected to see a Minor League stadium with some additional fields to help youth clubs in the area.
So we pulled into the parking lot of Ripkin Stadium, home of the Aberdeen Ironbirds, which in itself was astonishing. We came to learn that the park seats 6,300 and has luxury boxes, a three-tier party deck and a 200-person, two-tier "crab pavilion. The stadium has sold out every home game since its inaugural one in 2002.
We met a gentleman that works at the complex, who told us what else was there.
"Well, see the (Marriott) Courtyard Inn over there," he said, pointing to a seven-story hotel just to left of the Ironbirds stadium.
"Right on the other side is a replica of Camden Yards. That's why the hotel was built in that style. It matches the warehouse in right field at Camden Yards. If you walk to the other side of the hotel, I think you'll be amazed," he said.
I was amazed. There not only was Camden Yards, there were replicas of Wrigley Field, Fenway Park and Baltimore's old Memorial Stadium.
Please give it a look: https://www.ripkenbaseball.com/youth_baseball/aberdeen/facilities.
I hate to admit how many generations have passed since I played baseball as a 12-year-old on Embler Field in Anderson, S.C. Some things have gotten better.
As I stood beside the Camden Yards/Aberdeen complex and looked around, I saw the following: manicured baseball fields, a 15-batting-cage suite, a "training infield" with a synthetic surface and a misting machine blowing a cool-water spray. Games were in progress on all fields. The teams had spiffy uniforms and bags full of bats and good baseballs.
Not a single team had a bat that had previously been broken, nailed together and wrapped in about seven layers of electrician's tape. ... To be fair, I don't think any team I played on had previously broken bats. But that's about all we had sometimes in our neighborhood games.
Ok, now here's where I'm going to really sound old: I wonder if those kids have any idea what they've got? And I wonder if their parents, who are here in droves, get it?
I hope they do.
Here's a sad follow-up. I was in Anderson last week. My mother, who is in here nineties, still lives there, so I try to get back when I can.
I hadn't driven down North Murray Avenue - where Embler Field and the Anderson Rec Center are located - in 20 years.
The old parks are gone. The cement walls have been torn down. There are still fields in place, but the walls are gone.