The Highs & The Lows of 1999

When it came time to choose the recipient of the 1999 Louis M. Hatter Most Valuable Oriole Award, members of the media covering the team didn't face much of a dilemma. It was as simple as voting for Pedro Martinez for Cy Young and against Pat Buchanan for President: B.J. Surhoff was the underachieving club's most outstanding asset. The left fielder was flawless in the field and posted career-high offensive numbers in hits (207), home runs (28), RBIs (107), runs (104) and total bases (331). The irony of having a superlative year on a miserable team wasn't lost on Surhoff.

“It would have been more satisfying if I didn't have as good of numbers and we were playing well,” he says. “When you look back at what you're trying to do, sure it is nice to say that I drove in a hundred runs and put together that type of year, but it is even nicer to say I had a chance to go to the World Series.”

Typical of the player who shares a corner of the locker room with Cal Ripken, the one personal statistic in which Surhoff takes pride is 162 games played. He finished the season with the game's longest active consecutive games played streak with 324.

“What I'm really excited about is being ready and able to play in every single game,” Surhoff said as the season mercifully came to an end. “I haven't always felt good when I woke up in the morning, but when I got on the field I was ready to play. My whole body hurts. There's no direct correlation between how you feel and how you play. I believe that.”

On a team that often appeared devoid of fire and hustle, Surhoff lacked neither.

“You have to want to play defense,” he says. “You can always run balls out hard and play hard on defense. That's something you can control. Those are things you can bring to the table.”

Despite a solid career, Surhoff had never appeared in an All-Star game until this year. But his reputation as an underappreciated, nonglamourous player doesn't faze him.

“It doesn't bother me if somebody says I'm a 'grinder,'” he says. “It just means you're in there plugging away, every single day, every play and giving what you've got on that day.”

The 1999 season was nothing if not a grind for the Orioles. Here are some of the more memorable occurrences, both good and bad:

• The Orioles had one of the most prolific games in team history in a nationally televised contest against the Braves on June 13. The 22-1 victory capped a three-game sweep. Their 22 runs and 25 hits were each one shy of the franchise records. Cal Ripken led the way, setting club records with six hits and five runs scored. His 13 total bases tied his own mark. On the night, he was 6-for-6 with two home runs, a double and three singles. Mike Mussina became the first Oriole pitcher since 1972 to collect three RBIs in a game.

• Center fielder Brady Anderson logged one of the best seasons of his career, leading all AL leadoff hitters with a .408 on-base percentage. He reached base 279 times, the ninth-most in the league, and was tied for tenth in the AL with 96 walks. Anderson passed Al Bumbry with his 253rd steal to become the Orioles all-time leader.

• 42-year-old Jesse Orosco became the all-time leader in games pitched when he appeared in his 1,072nd career game on August 17. He finished the year with 1,090 games pitched.

• Mike Mussina was runner up for the AL Cy Young with his 18-7 record and 3.50 ERA. Mussina has won 19 and 18 games twice in career. His shot at his first 20-win season in '99 was taken away when he was struck on the right deltoid by a Brook Fordyce line drive on August 22. He missed his next four starts. Moose pitched at least seven innings in 18 of his 31 starts, including 17 quality starts. He suffered losses in three of his four complete games. Named to his fifth All-Star team, Mussina fanned Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire with men on second and third during his one inning of work.

• Jerry Hairston, the Reason to Believe. During two stints with the big league club, the speedy second baseman hit .258 with four home runs, 17 RBIs and nine stolen bases in 182 at bats. The 23 year old did not commit an error in 269 chances while filling in for the oft-injured Delino DeShields. Beyond his numbers, Hairston's gritty play and hustle quickly made him a fan favorite.

• A symbol of how badly things went wrong in '99 was the trade of Harold Baines. One of the team's most beloved and respected members, there was a feeling of happiness that the 19-year veteran was able to leave the team to be with a contending club in Cleveland. Before he departed, Baines became the all-time leader in home runs for a designated hitter with 220 and set the DH mark for games played when he passed Hal McRae's 1,428. Baines is now 45th on the all-time home run list with 373, although he has never hit 30 in a season. Baines singled in his first All-Star game appearance since '91.

• The Oriole bullpen went 9-19 with a mere 14 saves in 34 chances before the All-Star break. First-year Oriole Mike Timlin was a primary reason: He was 3-8 with a 5.06 ERA and nine saves in 17 attempts. As he had done the previous season, Timlin rebounded in the second half (1.40 ERA, 18 out of 19 in saves), but the Orioles' hole was too deep for it to matter.

• The Birds led the majors in fielding for the second straight year, posting a .986 fielding percentage and a AL-low 89 errors. Mike Bordick led AL shortstops in fielding percentage and total chances. Anderson was third among outfielders with a .997 fielding percentage and Albert Belle tied for the AL lead with 17 outfield assists. Surhoff tied for second with 16 assists. The team's catching was dramatically improved over 1998, thanks to Charles Johnson. He threw out 37 of 93 (39.8%) runners compared with 22.5% a year ago. Mussina won his fourth-straight Gold Glove. He was charged with his first error in since 1995 (a span of 120 starts) on a questionable scoring decision in Seattle in June.

• What began as a noble gesture by owner Peter Angelos many months earlier as an effort to use baseball as a mechanism for breaking down barriers between the United States and Cuba ended in deep embarrassment for the Orioles at Camden Yards on May 3.

  The Cuban national team on that day completely humiliated Angelos' players, 12-6, in the first game ever played by Cuba in the U.S. against a major league team. The Orioles were thoroughly poor sports, griping about having to play the game­and thereby eliciting heavy criticism from other players like the Yankees' David Cone­and looking like sorry losers on the field. The Birds had beaten Cuba in Havana, 3-2, in 11 innings in the first of the two-game exhibition series on March 28. But the return engagement in Baltimore exposed all that is wrong with spoiled and overpaid American big leaguers, as the Cubans out-hit, out-pitched and out-hustled the Orioles into mortification.

  Cuba's supporters even outdid the Baltimore fans, as a group of several hundred Cubans, donning red caps and sitting behind their team's dugout, clapped and stomped and played music, making more noise and outlasting tens of thousands of Orioles fans, who left the game early as their heroes let them down.

• Baltimore got to meet the good Albert Belle and the bad Albert Belle in 1999.

  The good Albert was the new superstar in town who worked overtime signing autographs at the Orioles' winter FanFest, charming all of those who met him.

  The bad Albert made crude gestures to bleacherites at Camden Yards one summer day, alleging that racial remarks were hurled his way, showing a sad lack of sensitivity toward all the children in the stands who had to witness his boorish behavior.

  The good Albert was a role model to his teammates, working long hours in the batting cage and preparing diligently every game to assure that he would be at peak-performance level.

  The bad Albert tried to lead a clubhouse insurrection by calling for a boycott of an exhibition game in Rochester and by embarrassing himself and his club by childishly keeping his bat glued to his shoulder to show his displeasure at having to play in an earlier exhibition game against Cuba at Camden Yards.

  The good Albert threw out 17 base runners from right field, tying for the AL lead in outfield assists.

  The bad Albert angrily hurled an inanimate object through a TV screen in the visitors' clubhouse in Tampa Bay.

  The good Albert showed why he is one of the most feared sluggers in the game, batting .297 for the season with 37 home runs and 117 RBIs. Twice he hit four doubles in a game and once three homers, and his presence in the lineup allowed the man batting in front of him, B.J. Surhoff, and the man hitting most of the season behind him, Harold Baines, to have career years.

  The bad Albert got into a dugout fracas with Miller after the manager rightfully took him out late in a game for defensive purposes.

  Baltimoreans learned that one either loves Albert or hates him. There was no in-between. His fans point to his great stats. His critics say his lack of hitting early in the season put the Orioles on a downward spiral from which they could never recover. Belle advocates say he was unfairly picked on by the media, which turned against him when he stopped talking with reporters in spring training. His detractors claim his overall bad behavior, especially in light of his astronomical, $13-million annual salary, besmirch the reputation of Baltimore Orioles baseball.

  Whatever, Belle became a lightning rod for all that was good or bad about the Orioles in 1999. And with his five-year contract running through 2003, the moody slugger is certain to ignite continuing debate and controversy as long as he wears an Orioles uniform.

• Cal Ripken Jr. has been one of the most written about, talked about and intensely covered people in professional sports. Yet we still learned two new things about him in 1999: He is not made of iron, and, at the age of 39, he still can hit the bejesus out of a baseball.

  Half a year after he voluntarily sat out a game at the end of 1998 to take the monkey of The Streak off his back after 2,632 consecutive games, Ripken showed that he is, in fact, mortal, by going on the disabled list for the first time in his career in April with severe nerve irritation in his back. Cortisone shots helped alleviate the pain, but Ripken returned to the DL in August. And finally, in September, he succumbed to the inevitable and had surgery on his back in Cleveland to suppress the severe pain he had been enduring. Overall, Ripken missed 76 games during the year. Age and a nettlesome nerve problem had finally benched professional sport's most endurable performer.

  But that devilish duo of creeping age and injury were unable to sabotage Ripken's performance in the batter's box. The two-time AL MVP put together what in some ways was his most remarkable offensive season, despite having to play with severe pain much of the time he was on the field.

  Ripken hit for his highest seasonal average ever­.340­and his all-time high slugging percentage­.584­finally putting to shame those persistent critics who have claimed for years that he had lost his bat speed. Ripken also was hitting home runs (18) and driving in runs (57) at a pace that would have challenged his career highs had he been able to put together a full season.

  He topped off his remarkable power exhibition by banging out his 400th career home run on September 2 against Tampa Bay at Camden Yards, just his second game after he had returned from his second stint on the DL, and but three weeks before he would undergo back surgery.

  He also was on pace to record his 3,000th career hit (and thus join Tony Gwynn and Wade Boggs, who accomplished the feat earlier in the season) until the nerve pain knocked him out of the lineup with 13 games left in the season. He is nine short of the 3,000 plateau.

  Ripken had one of the most remarkable offensive days in Baltimore history on June 13 in Atlanta, becoming the first Oriole ever to get six hits and score five runs in a game (see previous page).

  A famously analytical hitter, Ripken was unable to explain why his bat was so electric in 1999. Some attribute it, at least in part, to the artful counsel of hitting coach Terry Crowley, who worked closely with Ripken during the season. Ripken himself said for some reason he got in a groove that just seemed to last all year, enabling him to step to the plate every day with the confidence that he was going to hit the ball with authority.

  Whatever the reason, Ripken once again proved that he is one of the most remarkable baseball players ever to compete in the game, a man who always seems to perform at his best when the odds are most heavily stacked against him.