Memorial Stadium: Final Thoughts On 33rd Street Ballpark As Demolition Looms

For the 51,268,097 fans who streamed into Memorial Stadium from 1954 through 1991 to watch the Orioles, the memories are both magnificent and manifold.

Five World Series. Six no-hitters. One ball-and only one ball-hit completely out of the stadium. Three runners picked off first base in a single inning. A game decided by the clock, when Dick Williams hit a home run for the Orioles during the final seconds of a game that had a predetermined curfew so the White Sox could catch a plane. U.S. presidents throwing out first balls. A cricket exhibition between games of a doubleheader.

A total of 4,743 home runs, 23,471 runs and 27,727 innings.

Twenty-one losses to open a season, punctuated by a sell-out crowd to show the hometown boys they still were loved. A moving tribute to a feisty little manager on a fall day when the Orioles lost the pennant. An All-Star game in which the hero was a young Baltimore pitcher barely out of Clemson College. Countless ninth inning rallies and late season surges. A sweep of the first-ever World Series in Baltimore against the likes of Koufax and Drysdale.

Hall-of-Famers like Williams and Musial, Mantle and Berra, and, of course, Robinson and Robinson. Three Orioles MVPs, 50 Gold Glove winners, six Cy Youngs, 118 All-Stars. One-thousand seven hundred and six Orioles victories, 1,321 losses, nine ties. And enough thrills, emotion, excitement and elation to last several lifetimes.

Yet for the athletes who performed at Memorial Stadium, for whom the old ballpark was a place of work rather than an entertainment venue, the memories are of a more personal nature.

“First and foremost, as soon as you say Memorial Stadium, it was where I played my first big league game,” says Bill Ripken. “We had a history there already, before I arrived, with my dad and Cal being there, but for me, my first big league game was in that stadium, and that’s my top memory.”

Ripken, who played second base for the Orioles during Memorial Stadium’s final five years as a big league ballpark, remembers the park as a great place to play a ball game.

“The one thought we had when we were moving-even though we knew Camden Yards was being built as a state of the art stadium-was that for a baseball player, Memorial Stadium had a good feel,” he recalls. “There was nothing wrong with the stadium as far as playing in it goes. Obviously, you can see why Camden Yards was built-there’s no comparison. We were excited about it, but on the other hand, you almost wondered why they were doing it. Memorial Stadium was a great place to play.”

Like Ripken, Elrod Hendricks remembers Memorial Stadium for the personal “firsts” he accomplished there. “My first hit, my first at-bat-they were at Memorial Stadium,” the long-time Oriole coach and former Baltimore catcher says. “My first World Series was at Memorial Stadium, and my first at-bat in the World Series, in which I got a base hit.”

If there was one particularly great memory he had, Hendricks says, it was catching Jim Palmer’s no-hitter in 1969.

“It was taxing, though,” he remembers of Palmer’s no-hitter. “He was on his second or third start coming off the disabled list, and he didn’t have his control down pat yet. He walked seven or eight guys. It seemed like he had guys on base all game. I don’t know who was more taxed after the game, him or me.”

Hendricks also remembers the sadness he felt on the final day of Memorial Stadium’s life as a baseball park-October 6, 1991.

“That was a very, very sad day,” he says. “I didn’t take anything from the ballpark at that time, because I didn’t want it to be ruined.” Now he worries that the razing of the stadium at 33rd Street and Ellerslie Avenue is ruining it for those to whom it was dedicated -the U.S. veterans of World War I and World War II. “It was a special place for the veterans of the world wars,” he muses. “To take that down now and lose it, what did they fight for?”

Don Buford, the Orioles director of minor league development and a former star outfielder in the team’s glory years of the late 1960s and early 1970s, agrees with Hendricks that the stadium-or at least its front façade-should remain as a tribute to veterans.

“I certainly hope they save the front façade,” he says. “It would be a tremendous tribute to the stadium itself, and to Baltimore and the state of Maryland. I hope they bring the letters from the façade to Camden Yards-it would be a tremendous memento for the state.”

Buford is one of the few players or fans who can savor a positive recollection from the 1969 World Series-the one the Orioles shockingly lost to the Mets, four games to one.

“I led off the ’69 Series with a home run off Tom Seaver,” he relates. “I’ll never forget that. We won that game, and then everything went downhill afterwards.”

As far as being a ball field goes, Buford believes Memorial Stadium still could be used today. But the fan’s amenities, he says, became outmoded.

“I certainly have a lot of memories of Memorial Stadium,” he says. “It’s the stadium where we ended up being in three World Series. It was an outstanding stadium. If it was built in the modern day, it would still be one of the most outstanding. It was an great park to play in. But it became an old stadium, and it didn’t have the suitable bathrooms and concessions. It was outdated. But there sure were a lot of outstanding reasons to like playing in it.”

One of the men who created some of the most memorable moments at Memorial Stadium-Earl Weaver-retains many, many wonderful memories of his days there.

When discussing the stadium's history, the former Baltimore manager has trouble deciding which days were his favorite at the park he helped make famous. Like a fan, he is overcome with a deluge of terrific memories. He rattles off several. “Just the last day in 1991,” he begins. “I have a lot of thoughts about Memorial Stadium. The thrill of my life was my day, when I was honored at the stadium. And then there was the day when the fans called us back onto the field after the 1982 season, when we lost the pennant to the Brewers. And then there was the last day ever for the stadium, when the Orioles brought us all back and put as many players as they could on the field. I have so many memories.”

Another man who spent an enormous amount of time at Memorial Stadium and who shares Weaver’s dilemma in trying to select favorite or particularly great memories is long-time Orioles radio broadcaster Chuck Thompson.

“It’s hard to pick only one or two,” says Thompson. “I guess Frank Robinson’s home run that went completely out of the ballpark. And the no-hitters. And the last pitch by Flanagan [on the final day of the final season in 1991]. There are so many different, wonderful things that happened there. I think of the day they got all of the players, as many as they could, to come back [also on the final day of 1991], and they all went to their own positions, and it was done without any announcement on the PA system. One of the most unusual things about that day is that when each player took his position on the field, I seem to remember, I didn’t see one single high-five. They just shook hands and embraced each other.”

Thompson also has a humorous recollection from the days when bushes lined the outfield perimeter at Memorial Stadium, when the distance from home to center was a whopping 450 feet. “In the early, early days of Memorial Stadium,” he relates, “prior to the outfield fence, there was shrubbery in the outfield. We had a center fielder named Chuck Diering, who was as good a fielder as anyone. Mickey Mantle hit a tremendous drive to left center field, and it looked uncatchable. But Diering dove into the bushes and made the catch. Mantle was just rounding second, and when the ball was caught, he gave it that Mantle kick and skip and went into the Yankee dugout, which then was on the third base side. Mantle was angry and upset, because he didn’t think the ball could be caught. In the dugout, he went up to the drinking fountain and pulled it right off the wall. Later, Orioles executive Jack Dunn sent Mantle a bill to pay for the drinking fountain.”