Wiffle Kings

CHILD'S PLAY
To a growing number of older guys, wiffleball is serious stuff.

Byline: Jonathan Pitts
Source: SUN STAFF

Published on Saturday, August 10, 2002
Section: TODAY Page: 1D
Edition: FINAL
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© 2002 The Baltimore Sun

PHILADELPHIA - The right leg-kick is slow and high, the knee bent to the level of his chin. His slender upper body rotates left and rear. At the apex of his motion, he harbors his power - a kind found less in muscle-bound strength than in movement reverently mastered.

Natural as a waterfall, the leg descends, the torso follows, the front foot anchors in the earth. A ball erupts from his left hand, sizzling. How hard it travels, nobody knows: No radar gun can track it.

This Philly ballyard is thick and green, lush with summer on a steamy late Sunday afternoon. The pitch zips across it - so flat, so level, so low it seems to riffle the grass. No batter - not Tony Gwynn, not Tony Batista-would take a cut. It's too far down. The hitter slumps, relaxed.

But to the skilled in this growing game - like the Stompers of Gaithersburg, clad today in their trademark Dodger blue - a play is never over till the last millisecond. A foot before it reaches home, the ball jerks up like a frightened horse. It leaps, all but vertical, through the strike zone. Bang! Strike three, inning over.

It's early in the game, but Danny Isenberg, 20, the Stompers' ace southpaw, has his seventh strikeout. He trots to the bench, head lowered. It's the title match of the all-day tournament.

Void of expression, he sinks into a lawn chair. It's in him to fool a hitter. It isn't in him to show one up.

If the ball he threw were cork, horsehide and stitching, "Dan-o," as teammates call him, would be worth millions. His whippet frame, graceful motion and smooth delivery call to mind Ron Guidry, the former Yankee Cy Young winner. His mastery of four pitches, each thrown from multiple arm angles, makes him harder to hit than a big-league star.

That's partly due to the physics of his game: wiffleball.

At five and a quarter ounces, a baseball is a whirligig in the hands of a Guidry or a Glavine, but at least it seems to follow the laws of science. A wiffleball? This 18 grams of hollow plastic, perforated with slots along one side, can be made, with zealous practice, to dip and rise, to dance and sing, to drive the greatest hitters out of their minds.

You know wiffleballs. Like Slinkies, Silly Putty and BB guns, they're a classic American toy. Maybe, as a kid, you flung one around the back yard. You and your buddies made up rules - a folded glove was home plate, a ball off the fence a triple - and you tried out your curve, your slider and every other pitch you couldn't throw with the big-league sphere.

Some hopped like a toad on asphalt, some floated, some fell. Some splashed in the neighbor's pool. But you knew it was a toy - evanescent as boyhood, transient as a summer afternoon.

Don't remember? Just pick one up. There's nothing to it. Never has been - not since 1954, when the Wiffle Ball Co. of Shelton, Conn., rolled out the first model. Throwing a wiffleball, says Nick Schaefer, the Stompers' right-handed starter, is like throwing air.

Wiffleball - it's one of those childish things you put away. Or is it?

What's so funny?

Tim Cooke, 20, the blond, buzz-cut captain of the Gaithersburg Stompers, knows just why you ask. If the plastic ball and bat didn't bring out the kid in him, he'd never have picked them up in the first place. Sometimes pals will ask him what he's up to this weekend. "Playing wiffle," he'll say. It always draws a laugh.

That's when Cooke, a 215-pound ex-baseball star, gets his team-captain look. "I just hand them a bat and say, `Here, take a few cuts against Danny.' When those balls start diving in from all over the place, they don't think it's so funny anymore.

"That's when they hand me the bat and say, `Have fun.' "

Cooke and his teammates always do. Fast-pitch, semi-pro wiffleball, now one of the fastest-growing sports in the nation, has its roots in a whimsy that gives birth to teams called Wiffle du Fromage (Costa Mesa, Calif.), the Toadkiller Dogs (Dundein, Fla.), the Savage Geckos (Annapolis) and Naked Lunch (Salem, Mass.).

One of the deepest joys, though, is that "wiffle" repays those who take it to heart. Schaefer, for example, who weighs all of 132 pounds, throws a drop ball feared throughout the East. He's honed it for a decade. "I aim it at the top of the backstop," he says, "and throw it as hard as I can." From a height of 15 feet, it dives through the strike zone like a bird of prey.

"Not to sound cocky," says Schaefer, 22, "but that pitch, on a good day, is unhittable." You've seen a few today. He's right.

He'll never tell you this, but Cooke, a public relations major at Salisbury University, is one of the bulldozers behind the national game. "Wiffle" has exploded so dramatically over the past 10 years it's hard even for insiders to count the leagues, teams and tournaments at play from Walla Walla to Waco. Cooke guesses there are 2,000 serious players or more - maybe a lot more.

You might expect that, in the shadow of labor wrangling, jocks who pocket millions and rocketing ticket prices, wiffle was born as an antidote to big-league baseball. Not true exactly, but you wouldn't be far off.

People come to the game for many reasons, says Cooke, who, with his teammates, rises at 4:30 a.m. to travel to tournaments. "Mostly, it's fun," he says. "People are familiar with it. They played in the yard as kids. When they hear there are organized leagues and teams, with ballparks, standings and rules, they think, `Hey, we can do that.' They'll form a team, which takes just three to five players, enter a tourney, and we grow a little more."

What Cooke and others like him found in the '90s was that wifflers all over the country were tossing plastic, never guessing organized play was available nearby. Bruce Chrystie, executive director of the Stompers' league, the United States Perforated Plastic Baseball Association, says when he started 20 years ago, he was just fooling around with his buddy in the yard. News spread only by word-of-mouth. He got wind of a tourney, signed up on a dare and found to his shock he was already one of the top pitchers in the East. At 38, he still anchors In The Box, a longtime New England power.

"Today, though, we're Internet-driven," he says. "That's why it's exploding. Anyone can get online, click on Google and find good wiffle within a few hours' drive." The USPPBA site, at www.wiffleball.net, even boasts an online magazine, Fast Plastic.

Hard-core wiffle can be a rude awakening for newbies, though, many of whom show up never having seen an Isenberg, a Schaefer, or a team like the Gaithersburg Stompers. But that's part of the process. "When we started," says Cooke, "we had no idea how bad we [were]. We saw pitches so hard we couldn't believe it. We had no chance.

"But it was fun. Wifflers are great people. They were encouraging. We decided to stick it out and learn. Four years later, we've arrived. We have a chance to go a long way."

Today, three of 12 teams in the Philly tourney play competitively for the first time. One, the Dodgers, consists of a dad, 48, and his two sons, 22 and 13 - a typical wiffleball range. They learned of this competition in the paper, scraped together the $100 entry fee and showed up for the dawn-to-dusk extravaganza.

They do well, winning one game, then dropping three by a run apiece. The two other newcomers - the Deer Run Dodgers and the Delaware Dillywoppers - are less successful. Their jaws drop as veterans of the circuit - the Stompers, Bronx Bombers, the New York State of Mind - cordially trounce them. "Deer Run did great," says Cooke. "I'm sure we'll see them again. Their pitcher isn't fast yet, but he throws strikes. That's the place to start."

During their 10-run win over the Dillywoppers, Cooke and Schaefer visit the other team's sideline. They show how a curve and a riser are held, how to wait longer before swinging the bat. The 'Woppers, wide-eyed, listen. Schaefer returns to his sideline. "Cool guys," he says with a smile. Across the field, the Delaware rookies are tossing it back and forth.

A little Fenway

Cooke's discovery of grown-up wiffleball was typical: It was love at first sight. A man in Bethesda had built a scaled-down Fenway Park in his yard, a towering "Green Monster" wall in left field included. Cooke saw it in the paper. "Now, there's something I can do," he thought.

He meant the game, but also the stadium. He begged $500 off his dad, drove to Home Depot for a truckful of boards and built a ballpark near his house. Before he knew it, teams were forming and wanting in. Tournaments happened. "Wiffleball is pretty easy to set up," he says.

Cooke, his younger brother and current teammate, Paul, and Isenberg grew up in the same neighborhood with clear ideas how the game should be played. There are many variations, including slow-, medium- and fast-pitch, and fields whose foul lines intersect at anywhere from 70- to 90-degree angles. "Anyone can hit a slow-pitch grapefruit," sniffs Isenberg. "The best wiffleball replicates baseball as closely as possible."

Cooke watched tourneys in Bethesda. From those games and others, he learned that pitching is a team's key asset and got ideas for a standard set of rules. Most are now in use in the USPPBA - the only league with teams coast to coast - and spelled out in the league's rule book.

Some leagues give a hitter six balls and two strikes, says Chrystie. Some give only one strike. Field dimensions differ. Some have baserunners, some don't. "Our league is the only one with uniform national rules," he says, "so when we have our Final Four, everyone knows the same game. We get a legitimate national champ."

Only one other league, New Jersey-based Wiffle Up!, has tournaments in multiple cities. Mike Alessie, the commissioner, operates 12 during the season, all of them in the East. The annual Baltimore tournament, scheduled for next Saturday in Holabird Park, will have at least 32 teams. "We have a one-strike rule," says Alessie. "It keeps things moving. We play a lot of games in a day."

The USPPBA has its own ways. First, it's all fast-pitch. The rubber is 40 feet from home, and some hurlers bring it at 75 miles per hour. (That's an estimate; radar guns don't register perforated plastic.) The foul lines are set at a 90-degree angle. Fifty feet divide the bases, which for cosmetics' sake must be official white baseball sacks. Runners are imaginary. "Our fields look good, and the competition is big-time," says Cooke.

Bat rules are dizzying. The familiar yellow plastic style - also invented in 1954 - is legal but rarely used. More sophisticated bats - the Ledge Sledge, the AirMax, the Loco Bat - have taken its place. Isenberg has the Rolls-Royce of wiffle bats, a $100 Moon Shot: eight ounces of graphite, guaranteed for life against nicks and dents. Most bats between seven and 12 ounces, unless home-doctored, are allowed.

On the offensive side, a fair ball no one catches cleanly (gloves prohibited) is a single, advancing each "runner" one base. A ball that hits the right or left field fence (80 feet from home) is a double. Off the center field wall (100 feet), it's a triple. Anything over the fence - a relative rarity - is a home run.

The league uses a regular baseball count: four balls for a walk, three strikes for an out. "This way you learn to work the count," says Cooke, "and pitchers have to do the same. It's more strategic." The "strike zone," Big Johnny, is a tin rectangle behind the plate, painted with the image of a Johnny Bench-like catcher. Fifteen inches off the ground, it's 25 inches high, 21 inches wide. Any pitch that touches it is a strike. Calls in the field are reached by consensus.

Every team is guaranteed four games a tourney. The four with the best records advance to a single-elimination playoff. The last team standing wins $300, usually enough to cover expenses, and eight points in the league's Power Rankings.

The USPPBA includes four regions: New England, the Northeast, the Southeast (mainly Florida) and the Southwest (greater Los Angeles). Each has five tournaments a year; all tourneys are played at the region's hub city. By the end of those five tourneys, the team with the most points in each region moves on to the Final Four.

This year's finals take place next month in Sarasota, Fla. - unless, Chrystie says, the film crew now documenting the league is free to shoot that weekend. Then the site would be Philadelphia's, the most photogenic of all the league's fields.

Which brings us to the USPPBA's long-term goal: to gain enough media exposure to generate more revenue, all of it to be spent on equipment, advertising, travel funds and permanent ballparks. It's not far-fetched: the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, Atlantic Monthly magazine, ESPN and Fox Sports have all covered the USPPBA. That might be just a beginning.

"Most board members want a TV contract," says Cooke, himself the youngest elected member. "It's possible, but it's a long way off, 10 or 15 years. Right now, we're just expanding the game. We're already the big leagues of wiffleball, and we want to keep on growing." Cooke knows of 50 to 100 "elite teams," he says, but feels the best is out there somewhere, off the radar screen, in Oklahoma, Texas or Baltimore.

"Can't wait to find them," he says. "That's really what we play for."

Isenberg's aims are just as long-term. Asked what he'll be doing in his 40s, the University of Maryland psychology major laughs.

"I don't know," he says, "but I do want to be playing wiffle, and with these same guys. I want to build that history. How about professional wiffleball pitcher?"

The closer

If there were such a thing, Isenberg might just become the first. Today, New York State of Mind, a long-established juggernaut, is the Stompers' title-game foe. Eight hours in soggy, 90-degree heat has enervated most, but Isenberg summons energy. His sinkers and risers, swerving in and out, batter every square inch of the strike zone. Some miss the plate but hook so sharply they nick Big Johnny for strikes. "Best game I've ever seen Danny pitch," Cooke says later.

New York's pitcher - head shaved, goatee a mess - is one of the toughest in wiffleball. But Gaithersburg sees he has only two pitches today. In the fifth, he wearies and walks the bases loaded.

Cooke hasn't hit much today, but he's studied every at-bat. He expects the drop ball and gets it. He launches it off the top of the wall, inches shy of a homer. It clears the bases. Stompers lead, 6-3.

In the last of the sixth, the final inning, Isenberg starts to tire. He gets the first two outs, then, cursing himself, walks the bases full. His mechanics are off. His eyes search the bench for help.

Schaefer is on the edge of his seat. "I want the last out," he tells Cooke, who simply nods. The righty strides to the rubber and takes the ball.

The drop pitch is ready; Schaefer can feel it. Ten years of muscle memory tell him so. He aims at the top of the backstop and fires as hard as he can. Three times, plunging like an anvil, it rattles Big Johnny. Stompers win.

Before this year, the team had never won a tournament. Now they've bagged three out of four and, for the time being, second place in the nation. "We've snuck up on everybody," says Cooke with a chuckle. "They're not used to us. We're a fluke."

He gets the pleasure of this little kids' game. Sure, it's fun - always has been. But it's more fun now. When you win, he knows, it's never by mistake.

ILLUSTRATION: Photo(s)
GRAPH_SOURCE: 1. - 3. KIM HAIRSTON : SUN STAFF PHOTOS
CAPTION: 1. Nick Schaefer, 22, juggles plastic wiffleballs. He is a right-handed starting pitcher for the Gaithersburg Stompers-and their best hitter.
2. The Stompers, from left, Tim Cooke, Nick Schaefer, Adam Friend and Paul Cooke, leave the field after a tough tournament win against the Bronx Bombers.
3. Dan Isenberg, 20, is a feared southpaw in fast-pitch wiffleball. Here he pitches in a regional tournament in Philadelphia.

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Putting Age on Ice

They're over 60, and they call themselves the Geri-Hatricks. But their hockey skills tell a different story.

Byline: Jonathan Pitts
Source: SUN STAFF

Published on Wednesday, August 27, 2003
Section: TODAY Page: 1E
Edition: FINAL
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© 2003 The Baltimore Sun

He gathers the puck at center ice, fakes to his left and finds open terrain up the boards. Bill Wellington, a Detroit native who has played ice hockey since he was 5, calls to mind a forward for the NHL Red Wings as he shows the puck to one defender, snatches it from another, then lurches into the offensive zone, eyeing the enemy net for an opening that might change the game.

With his bandy-legged gait, Wellington scares few with his speed, and his shot reminds no one of Brett Hull. But the "Golden Brett" should have his pluck. At 82, this geriatric Gretzky may be the one senior citizen you'd want running your power play with the Stanley Cup on the line. "Seventy-five years I've been at this," he says afterward, limping around a locker room on his two artificial hips. "I guess I've taken a liking to it."

You might say that. It isn't just that Wellington, a retired CIA economist who once flew planes for the Army Air Force, braves age, infirmity and year-round meteorological extremes to get to the games he says he can't live without. The Silver Spring resident is an impresario for the elderly. Three years ago, he founded the Geri-Hatricks, the group he's playing with tonight, a collection of skaters 60 and older who gather for weekly scrimmages, compete in national tournaments and generally enjoy a reputation as the Devils of the dentured set.

The name "came to me from out of the blue," says Wellington, who asked himself a while back "how I could get a bunch of geezers out on the ice with me." A puckster who scores three times in a game has netted a "hat trick." The pun belies the players' approach, which might be described as serious - with a caveat.

"We're old, but we're athletes, eh?" Wellington says. "So we do like to win. But mostly it's about getting out there and continuing to play a sport we all love."

Grumpy Old Men seems to meet Slap Shot as the group splits into red and gold teams and the game unfolds at the Ice Gardens rink in Laurel. It's not hard to spot the skill that won this bunch a gold medal at the Senior Olympics in 2000, on the same Lake Placid, N.Y., rink where the United States pulled off its "Miracle on Ice" 20 years earlier. The play is surprisingly crisp.

Most skaters, such as Jim O'Brien, 64, a Massachusetts native who starred at Merrimack College in the 1950s, and Bill Oliver, 63, a Baltimore micro-brewer who grew up in Ontario and played at Cornell University, get up ice in a hurry. Their strides are seamless. They trade rink-wide passes that speak of good team play - and perhaps, just a bit, of a desperation not to have to carry the puck too far themselves. "As you get older," says Wellington, "you have to play smarter. It saves energy."

O'Brien and Oliver make things happen when they take the ice together, and their speed and teamwork set up one scoring chance after another. Oliver, the swiftest man in the game, is far from the hardest worker, but he's always ready for a breakout pass. Fifteen minutes in, he has tested the goalie six times. Soon, he sets up O'Brien for a quick shot from the side of the net, and the gold team takes a 1-0 lead.

But whimsy, too, is in the air. The gold team's very logo - a satire of the San Jose Sharks' predatory mascot - is a set of choppers biting a hockey stick in two. Wellington loses a puck and takes a razzing. "Keep in mind, he's an old man!" hollers Chris Sturm, 69, a fleet youngster from Ellicott City. Sturm rides Dave Gilmer, 70, a bulky defenseman from St. Leonard, into the boards, and the two exchange a playful shove - tottering Tie Domis on the verge of a brawl. "You've got to protect yourself," says Sturm.

As the players tape up before the game, the banter is ruthless and comical. Wellington is derided as "somebody's great-great-great grandfather." He pleads, in his defense, that he once played at St. Michael's College in Vermont, which he clearly considers a hockey hotbed. "Hey, I played at a real hawkey school," says O'Brien in his thick Boston brogue. "They didn't let us wear tutus at Merrimack."

"Well, that was back in the dark ages of hockey," retorts Bob Ruppel, 71, of Lutherville, a man less concerned than he might be with the niceties of chronology. "Did they have skates back then?"

O'Brien, a bright-eyed sort who could pass for 55, recalls the good old days before mandatory face masks. "You had to eat that puck," he says. "Back then, you kept your stick on the ice. If you didn't, you were guaranteed a trip to the dentist."

Sturm, too, remembers those days. The balding forward with the salt in his beard can't recall just when he lost those two front choppers, but his smile, a timeless hockey image, came courtesy of a Baltimore boy. It must have happened during a pickup game on natural ice. Sturm grew up near Woodlawn Cemetery, and he and his neighborhood pals used the graveyard pond as a rink.

"Wasn't much else to do but skate," he says. "We'd come home after school, shovel off the surface, play till dark. Saturdays and Sundays, we'd play sunup to sundown. No coaches, no training. There was no money for that."

They wore several pairs of socks under too-big skates, played with hand-me-down sticks and used magazines for shin guards.

Meanwhile, up in the rarefied hockey air of Ontario, Oliver, who started skating before he turned 2, was just as resourceful. "Yep," says the man who owns the Wharf Rat, a restaurant across from Camden Yards. "It was the Eaton's catalog on one leg, the Simpson's on the other."

Perhaps it matters little that in one of the sport's most fabled towns - Hall of Famers Bobby Hull, Gerry Cheevers and Stan Mikita played or grew up in Ste. Catharines - Oliver starred on a youth team that won the province championship, then competed in Junior "A" and earned a four-year scholarship. The Geri-Hatricks seem to care more that he simply knew Hull, a man whose powerful slap shot made him an NHL legend.

"He was a massive guy, even as a kid," says Oliver. "His dad ran a cement plant, and Bobby used to carry those heavy bags. He had that athlete's physique before anyone knew what `working out' meant. Once, he was over at the house, and we were playing around. He picked me up and tossed me against a wall. He only used one arm."

To chat with the Geri-Hatricks is to soak up hockey history, especially that of Washington and Baltimore. Half a century ago, long before the National Hockey League brought the Capitals to Landover in 1974, kids in the region were icing memories on rivers, lakes and ponds, and sometimes in organized play indoors.

Gilmer, who drives an hour each way to make the weekly game, was, conveniently, the son of a milkman. "Dad would be done with his rounds by 2," he says, "so we could skate after I got out of school." The Washington-area native remembers but one indoor rink, Uline Arena, in the nation's capital in the 1940s. It was home to the now-defunct minor-league Chiefs, whom he occasionally saw play.

Gilmer didn't take up the sport until he was about 30, when he started teaming with other adult skaters for regular pickup games. Forty years later, three of those skaters are Geri-Hatricks teammates.

Up in Charm City, Sturm taught himself the game. The town's best players came from West Baltimore, he says, where his makeshift cemetery rink, and ponds in Dickeyville and Franklintown, were the hockey hubs.

By the time he entered Forest Park High School in the late '40s, a five-team high-school league was thriving. Forest Park, Polytechnic, Loyola, Calvert Hall and Mount Saint Joseph all had squads on the ice, and Sturm remembers thousands packing the old Sports Center arena on North Avenue to root at Friday-night doubleheaders.

Forest Park and Calvert Hall fought for the city title most years. Sturm was a starter on the team that won the regular season in 1952, only to lose to its closest rival in the playoffs.

"My picture was in the Sunpapers on March 15 that year," he says through his gap-toothed grin. "I took a few years off, but mostly I've kept up with [hockey].

"And here we are again. Funny how that works."

In some ways, Wellington is the most serious Geri-Hatrick. He's not the swiftest, but he may be the most involved. He's in demand in age-bracketed national tournaments across the country. In late July, he played for an over-75 team in the legendary Snoopy tournament for seniors, held annually at the rink the late Charles Schulz (creator of "Peanuts" and a lifelong hockey fanatic) built in his adopted hometown of San Jose, Calif.

The tourney's star might have been Red Berenson, the former NHL All-Star and coach who now runs the powerhouse Division I program at the University of Michigan. "Serious player," says the Geri-Hatrick in awe. But his team also excelled, seizing the gold medal in its division.

The 82-year-old is accustomed to hockey success, much of which came in deepening the sport's roots in the region. He founded, and helps operate, the Capital Hockey League at Fort Dupont Ice Arena in Washington. That pool of players, ages 18 to 82, helps fill out the Geri-Hatrick roster, along with six Baltimoreans who have played together off and on for more than three decades.

The team can claim a national profile. NBC's Today show reported its national championship in 2000. The new captain, John Buchleitner, is angling to bring the 2004 Senior Olympic tourney to Maryland. And the team's collective doggedness has gained attention in the health-care field. When Dr. J. Patrick Caulfield of Bethesda "saved my hockey life" with hip-replacement operations in 1996 and 1998, Wellington became a poster boy for the surgery. "No one should suffer the kind of pain I had," he says. He starred, along with 11 teammates, in a TV commercial for the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons that aired nationwide.

"Bill's a prominent guy," says Sturm. "He has done so much for hockey. And I got to be the comic relief. They did a shot of me putting in my partial [dental) plate."

Wellington, a team player, always looks to pass first, to shoot second, but at times takes his unselfishness a little far. He stickhandles side-to-side into the red team's zone, eyes peeled for a teammate. He sees no one open, holds on too long, and sees a scoring chance disappear. The puck ends up behind the goal, not in it, and the enemy breaks out, another crisis averted.

After the game, Oliver, who has scored his usual three goals in a tight win, shows why he is MVP. He hauls out the ritual post-game beer, brought in straight from his Wharf Rat brewery. "It's a low-alcohol beer," he says, a gourmand among the goons. "Full-bodied. An excellent choice for lunch."

Meanwhile, local hockey's great-great-great granddad is taking yet another ribbing. The "youngsters" remind him of his gaffe on the ice.

Wellington faces the music, as usual, like a grown-up.

"I've heard that from a few coaches lately," he says. " `Don't wait so long,' they say. `Shoot the puck.' It isn't bad advice, eh? I guess I'm learning."

ILLUSTRATION: Photo(s)
GRAPH_SOURCE: CHRISTOPHER T. ASSAF : SUN STAFF PHOTOS
CAPTION: 1. Before taking to the rink at Ice Gardens in Laurel, Bill Wellington, 82, helps teammate Bob Ruppel, 71, put on his jersey.
2. Geri-Hatrick member Bill Wellington looks to skate around a defender during a Saturday-night game in Laurel.
3. As his teammates take a breather, Dick Baker, 61, goes over the wall as a replacement.
4. Jim O'Brien (right) fends off a player as they go after the puck at Laurel's Ice Gardens. O'Brien, 64, was a college star in the 1950s.
5. Bill Oliver, 63, tapes up his hockey stick before a Geri-Ha tricks game.

Tracking Dirt

Take one huge arena. Add tons of earth. Spread it around. Then bring on the bikes.

Byline: Jonathan Pitts
Source: SUN STAFF

Published on Saturday, January 15, 2005
Section: TODAY Page: 1D
Edition: FINAL
© The Baltimore Sun


It's tempting to dig up an old cliche to describe Lenny Mays' line of work: It's a dirty job, but somebody's gotta do it.

The construction man from Columbus, Ohio - in town this week with the professional indoor motorcycle-racing circuit known as Arenacross - is doing what he and three crewmates do every week between late October and early March: turning 3 million pounds of local dirt into a bike racer's paradise of well-packed straightaways, banks and jumps.

Tonight, when star riders like Josh "The Sheriff" Demuth of Texas and Darcy Lange of Canada buzz around the finished dirt track at 1st Mariner Arena, competing for cheers, cash and headlines, Mays and a handful of other earth artists will be fine, as usual, with anonymity.

"You don't work with the Arenacross Series to get rich or famous," said Mays over the roar of a John Deere front-loader as his crew worked the 1st Mariner floor on Wednesday. "You do it because you love the sport. That's how it happens. We're just a big old family out here."

Mays and his three mates - all employees of Clear Channel, the communications giant that owns Arenacross - hit Baltimore on Tuesday night, fresh off an all-night drive from Dallas. By Thursday afternoon, the track - 24 feet wide, a coiling three-tenths of a mile in length, 6 inches deep at its shallowest - was complete.

The pros began competing last night and will continue this evening. Local amateurs take to the track tomorrow.

The place will be clean by tomorrow evening, the concrete 1st Mariner floor empty of any vestige of dirt.

"It's a labor of love," says Mays with a laugh.

The work begins every year in the Fort Worth, Texas, office of Riggs Hipps, the man who oversees Arenacross, which is in its 20th year. Director of track construction for Clear Channel Entertainment, Hipps eyeballs the calendar of events for the coming four-month indoor season, scrutinizing the floor diagram for each venue. Using a custom computer program, he lays out the track blueprint for shows in arenas from Tacoma, Wash., to Denver, Dallas, Bridgeport, Conn., and, for the past six years, Baltimore.

"In theory, we lay out the same obstacles for each race," says Hipps, "but we also have some variation from race to race. We want to show the riders something new each week. You adapt to the dimensions of each arena."

Like most people on the circuit, Hipps, a one-time rider, learned the ropes through experience. Each track features, at a minimum, three sets of obstacles: what the biking world knows as "whoops," a "catapult" jump and a "rhythm section."

The whoops are between six and 12 back-to-back humps, each 3 to 5 feet in height. After rounding a sharp left-hand bank, riders face the spectacular catapult, a ramp 12 feet high, angled upward at about 40 degrees. (From that peak, they leap to a landing hump 50 to 60 feet away.) One hard right turn later, they enter the rhythm stretch, which is normally three quick double jumps or two consecutive triple jumps.

If there's enough room in the arena - as there is at 1st Mariner, Hipps says - the bikers then head into a flat straightaway toward the finish line.

Depending on what heat the riders are in - an early qualifying heat, say, or a final-round heat - a race can be from six to 20 laps around this hard-packed circuit. When the riders are keeping a good pace, a lap takes about 20 seconds.

"It's simple," says Hipps. "No matter what happens, first guy to the checkered flag wins."

At least $25,000 is at stake every weekend, with the winnings distributed among the top 16 riders. A star can make about $5,000 a weekend. Competing on the Arenacross circuit and others, including outdoor circuits such as the Clear Channel-owned Supercross, a top rider can earn a good living.

None could make a dime without the work of construction crews, and Hipps is lucky enough, he says, to have the best. His three Arenacross teams, each four men strong, are "extraordinarily good. I can count on them to know what they're doing, how to set things up, how to solve problems that develop" before he flies into town for final inspections Thursday.

Normally, Hipps says, Clear Channel contracts a local trucking firm to provide the needed dirt in any city. In Baltimore, the company hires CAMZ Corp., a 34-truck outfit in Edgemere. A year ago, CAMZ owner Chuck Campbell showed Clear Channel officials the dirt from one of his construction sites, the Eastpoint industrial park on Quad Avenue, and they were sold.

"They loved the dirt," says Campbell, who has ridden four-wheelers. "They said it had just the right amount of clay."

"The right stuff holds together well for takeoffs and landings," Hipps says, "and doesn't rut easily."

Clear Channel, which presents three racing shows locally each year, pays CAMZ to store the 3 million pounds of dirt year-round, to keep it dry, and to haul it in and out of 1st Mariner, a job that requires about 80 truckloads per show.

At roughly $20,000 per weekend, "it's a great job for us," Campbell says above the roar of his trucks as they rumbled into 1st Mariner late Tuesday night.

But even the best jobs can have their downsides. His grade school-age kids, Melanie and Zachary, are ace four-wheelers who have caught the bug.

"They love this stuff," says Campbell. "Now they're after me to build them a ramp."

Campbell isn't about to turn his kids into midair free-stylers just yet, but if he wanted to learn how to set up a proving ground, Lenny Mays' crew offers a world-class exhibition.

By Wednesday morning, CAMZ had left 1st Mariner Arena's floor looking like an untilled garden. Starting at 8 a.m., the Clear Channel crew members set about turning their raw material into a state-of-the-art motor-sports playground.

Baltimore's mild weather gave them a good start: Unlike the rain-drenched messes they faced in Texas and Ohio recently, where they had to work overtime with lime mixes and giant fans to ventilate their tracks, the dirt here was warm, clean and dry.

"Mother Nature can be a bear," Hipps says.

Here, though, the Clear Channel crew could get right to sculpting. Mays' colleague Dave Klinger, an old-timer on the circuit, worked a Caterpillar front-loader - a giant bulldozer with a shovel on the front - seizing up mountains of earth and piling them, in the rough shape of the jumps and ramps, in all the right places. A younger crewmate, Pete Henderson, operated a rubber-track John Deere skidloader in Klinger's wake, rocking the smaller, more agile 'dozer back and forth atop the mounds to pack them to firmness, then shaving them into shape with his front blade.

"Ask a regular 'dozer operator to do what they're doing, and he'd be clueless," says Mays as he takes a break from his job for the day, festooning the stands with banners. "Some people are artists with a paintbrush and paper, others with a pen. Those two are artists with equipment."

By 1 o'clock, the catapult section loomed above the center of the floor like the back of a coiled dragon. By 3, the humps of the rhythm section rose from the earth as if from the primordial ooze. The four turning areas, 45-degree earthen banks, took shape by 4, the undulating whoops by the next morning. By Thursday afternoon, bikers in ad-spangled outfits tested the circuit, their 250cc Yamahas and Kawasakis rising and falling amid the roar of engines.

But the work of a family is never done; even last night, before an expected sellout crowd of more than 10,000, the crew was expecting to get dirty. Henderson was to drop the gate to start the race - and to man a Bobcat bulldozer, filling in dirt wherever holes developed.

Klinger and Mays were to wave red and checkered flags as Demuth, Lange and the other riders whizzed around the circuit. And they're on tap to do the same for the pros tonight and for local amateurs tomorrow. On Monday, they'll set out for the next arena.

"It all comes together better than you'd think," says Mays. "If we weren't family, I guess it wouldn't. It's a good thing we like each other. And love the sport."

Dirt Facts

Total volume of dirt used: 1,400 cubic yards

Weight of dirt: 2,000-2,200 pounds per cubic yard; about 3 million pounds total

Number of truckloads hauled: 80, each weighing 37,500 pounds

Size of track-building crew: 4

Average time to build track (once dirt is on-site): 16 hours

Average time to disassemble track: 12 hours

Average thickness of dirt (straightaways): 6 inches

Height of "catapult" jump: 10-12 feet

Track length: About 0.3 mile

Width of lanes: 20 to 24 feet

National Arenacross motorcycle shows

Where: 1st Mariner Arena, 201 W. Baltimore St.

When: Tonight, 7:30 (professional motocross races and events); Tomorrow, noon (amateur races)

Tickets: Tonight, $18-$22 adults, $10 children (ages 2-12); Tomorrow, $16 adults, $5 children ($2 more if purchased tomorrow)

Purchase: 1st Mariner Arena box office, Ticketmaster outlets, participating Kawasaki dealers; online at Arenacross.com or ticketmaster .com; or by phone at 800-551- SEAT or 410-547-SEAT

Note: From 5:30-6:30 tonight, those with tickets may walk the track, meet riders and get autographs.

ILLUSTRATION: Photo(s)
GRAPH_SOURCE: GENE SWEENEY JR. : SUN STAFF PHOTOS

COVERING ALL THE BASES

With presidents at the top of the order, fans' embrace of the national pastime is captured in 'Baseball as America' exhibit at Smithsonian.

Byline: Jonathan Pitts
Source: SUN STAFF

Published on Saturday, April 3, 2004
Section: TODAY Page: 1D
Edition: FINAL
© The Baltimore Sun

WASHINGTON - Maybe it's his affection for U.S. history. Maybe it's that he spent the previous afternoon schmoozing with an old pal in the Oval Office. Whatever the reason, when Dale Petroskey, the president of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y., is asked to name his favorite installation in Baseball as America, the sprawling exhibition that opens at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History
today, he's on it like Bonds on a hanging curve.

He walks past the Abner Doubleday baseball, which, at 150 years old, looks something like a shrunken head. Past the warm-up jacket once worn by Moe Berg, the catcher who, some say, spied on military installations during a barnstorming tour of Japan in 1934. Past the bat carved from a tree limb by an American POW in a German prison camp in 1942.

He stops in front of a glass case under a sign that reads "Fan-in-Chief." Inside are a row of baseballs signed by presidents from William H. Taft (April 1910) through Petroskey's pal, George W. Bush (October 2001); a scorecard from Washington's old Griffith Stadium, filled in by Dwight Eisenhower, and a seat from that ballpark that was once reserved for chief executives.

He stoops to eyeball an old program, perfectly preserved. On the cover, a man in a tightly buttoned suit tosses a ball from a packed grandstand. "`A big enough boy to enjoy the national game,'" Petroskey reads, his voice as earnest as a schoolboy's, "`and a man big enough to guide our country through its greatest crisis.' That's President [Woodrow] Wilson, throwing out the first pitch at the 1916 World Series."

Petroskey, 47, looks up. "Baseball and presidents," he says with a safe-at-home smile. "They're intertwined. Through history, they've shaped one another. They still do."

The same could be said for America and its national pastime. That's more or less the theme of Baseball as America, an exhibition of 500 artifacts from the Hall of Fame whose Washington opening coincides with Opening Day 2004 (scheduled for tomorrow night at Camden Yards, weather permitting). "It's the first time [a collection] of our treasures have ever left their home" in Cooperstown, says the Hall of Fame's chairman, Jane Forbes Clark, whose grandfather, Stephen C. Clark, founded the place in 1939. Washington, which presents the show through Sept. 30, is the sixth stop in a 10-city tour.

At an opening ceremony this week, Hall of Famers such as pitching legend Bob Feller, 85 (elected 1962), Negro League and major league superstar Monte Irvin, 85 (1973), Oriole icon Brooks Robinson, 66 (1983), and Cuban-born Cincinnati Reds great Tony Perez, 61 (2000), were among 20 legends who grace an auditorium stage. They personify the words on a placard in the show. "The history of American freedom," reads a sign in a display called "Ideals and Injustices," which is complex. That complexity is starkly visible when America is viewed through the prism of baseball."

Feller, an Iowan, pitched his first game at age 17 and won 266 in an 18-year career despite serving four years in the Navy during World War II. Irvin, a longtime Newark Eagles star, crossed the color line in 1949, two years after Jackie Robinson did the same, helping the New York Giants win two pennants. Robinson, a native Arkansan, was one of the first to be inducted largely on the strength of his defense; Perez, whose last job before big-league ball was in a Havana sugar-cane factory, made his mark as a clutch RBI man.

`Makes it better'

They bear out the free-market philosophy of the first ex-Little Leaguer elected to the Oval Office. "Any time you can add new blood and competition to the game," said Bush, who was managing general partner of the Texas Rangers from 1989-1994, "it makes it better, and it also helps our society understand people with different cultures."

Baseball's growing diversity, including its sometimes reluctant progress in the area of race, is just one of the seven themes Baseball as America explores. Another, "Invention and Ingenuity," includes an inflatable chest protector from 1884, a cup-tipped bat used by Hall of Famer Johnny Bench, the cleats of base-stealing king Rickey Henderson, and a Red Barber microphone.

"Weaving Myths" displays artifacts that helped turn players like Ty Cobb (shoes), Babe Ruth (Bunyanesque 56-oz. bat), Willie Mays (sheet music to "Say Hey, Willie Mays") and Ted Williams (a lookalike GI Joe) into larger-than-life characters. "Sharing a Common Culture" uses books (Casey at the Bat, 1912), games (Strat-O-Matic Baseball) and artifacts (the "Wonderboy" bat from the film The Natural) to show how baseball seeps into the nation's consciousness.

Nowhere, though, is Petroskey more excited to think about the meaning of the game than in "Our National Spirit," including its display on chief executives-and its focus on moments when baseball helped the nation through its darkest hours.

You can learn a lot about presidents from their pitches. Taft made the first-ever Opening Day toss when he rose from a seat specifically designed to accommodate his 300-pound bulk and found his target, the glove of Washington Senator Walter "Big Train" Johnson - who played before more different presidents than any other player. Herbert Hoover, a boyhood shortstop, triggered Depression-era boos just entering the ballpark. Franklin D. Roosevelt threw out more first pitches than any president, and Harry S. Truman, not content with his status as the first left-handed First Tosser in 1946, threw out two pitches - one with each hand - at Griffith Stadium in 1950. Eisenhower was the only president always to wear a glove, and Ronald Reagan, bent on throwing well, smoked a fastball into a crowd at Memorial Stadium. Bill Clinton once played catch with Hillary on the South Lawn to warm up.

"Any president would be foolish not to accept the chance to throw out a first pitch, anywhere, because the act has universal appeal," says Petroskey, who put together a presidential first-pitch exhibit for the White House in 2001. "It doesn't matter if you're a Republican or a Democrat. Fans on both sides will look at you and say, `Hey, I like the game; he likes the game. He must be OK.' "

Sometimes the act is more than just an annual pick-me-up. Wilson's 1916 toss offered a welcome connection to wholesome, all-American values during a brutal war. FDR's famous "Green Light Letter," on display here, had the same effect. Just a month after Pearl Harbor, in January 1942, he wrote the baseball commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis: "I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going."

Fifty-nine years later, the current President Bush, a lifelong seamhead who unwinds by reading the sports page or catching highlights on ESPN, delivered what most consider the most dramatic ceremonial first pitch of all time. On Oct. 30, 2001, as the rubble of the Twin Towers smoldered in ruins only miles away, he took the mound at Yankee Stadium before Game 3 of the Arizona-New York World Series.

Bush "is a competitive man," says former presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer, "who wanted badly to bring heat across the heart of the plate to send a symbolic message of hope to the nation." As if Secret Service snipers on the rooftops didn't make for enough pressure, Bush had to overcome the memory of an Opening Day pitch he'd bounced in the dirt at Milwaukee's Miller Park six months before. He wasn't going to let that happen again, Fleischer says.

On the way to the mound, he got a bit of New York razzing. Officials had rigged a pitching rubber in the front half of the mound to shorten the distance, but Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter told him that wouldn't cut it. "This is New York, Mr. President," Jeter said. "You'll have to throw the full distance or they'll boo you."

That got the juices flowing. Wearing a heavy bulletproof Yankee jacket, Bush headed to the mound, ball in hand, the crowd's roar building steadily. "Don't choke, Mr. President," Jeter said.

He didn't.

"Just flat heat, right down the middle," says Fleischer with a hint of awe. "When that place started chanting, U.S.A.! U.S.A.! - well, I can't remember when I've been so moved. It meant so much to the country. He hadn't been cowed."

Latest addition

That ball, signed by Bush, is the most recent in the line of presidential balls on display in Baseball as America. When Fleischer becomes one of millions to see the exhibit in the coming months, it will remind him of what happened the next morning. That was when the president stuck his head into the White House situation room, still jazzed by the thunderous patriotic chants. "Whatever else happens in my presidency," he told his staff, "that is a moment I'll always remember."

So will legions of Americans. As baseball fans have found across the generations, the rituals of their familiar game have a strange power to restore, inspire and summon from the toughest moments something altogether new.

Hitting the stats

Here's a bit of trivia from the Smithsonian's Baseball as America exhibit:

1839: Abner Doubleday does not invent baseball in Cooperstown, N.Y. The game is an American version of a British game called rounders.

1858: First admission fee for a game is charged: 50 cents.

1887: Fred Thayer, captain of Harvard University's baseball team, invents the catcher's mask.

1893: "I dos" are exchanged on a baseball diamond for the first time during a wedding at Cincinnati's League Park.

1908: Although neither of them had ever been to a ballgame, Jack Norworth (lyrics) and Albert Von Tilzer (music) write "Take Me Out to the Ball Game."

1909: A tobacco company issues the Honus Wagner T206 baseball card, which becomes the most valuable baseball card of all time (last sold in 1996 for $640,000).

1911: Helene Britton inherits the St. Louis Cardinals from her uncle, becoming the first woman to own a major league team.

1916: As a promotional ploy, the Chicago Cubs become the first team to let fans keep balls that are hit into the stands.

1941: The Cubs install the first organ in a baseball stadium.

1972: After a lengthy court battle, Bernice Gera becomes - at a minor league game - the first woman umpire in professional baseball.

-K Kaufmann

Exhibit

What: Baseball as America exhibit from the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum

Where: First floor, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, 10th Street and Constitution Ave. N.W., Washington

When: Today-Sept. 30

Hours: Daily 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m.; extended summer hours (10 a.m.-7:30 p.m.) from May 23-Sept. 1

Admission: Free

Call: 202-357-2700 or go to www.baseballasamerica.org

Child's Play ... By Play

At sports broadcasting camp, aspiring announcers learn to talk the talk



Date: Monday, June 30, 2008
Section: TODAY
Edition: Final
Page: 1C
Source: Sun reporter
Byline: Jonathan Pitts



Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett and their respective teammates on the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics lob a few final warmup jumpers. The referees trade dramatic nods. Nearly 20,000 spectators at TD Banknorth Garden get to their feet, jazzed for the opening tipoff.

"Welcome to this NBA Championship Series, perhaps the most anticipated in years," says play-by-play man Zach Parnes. "Let me put things in perspective, folks. ... The Boston Celtics haven't won a championship since I've been on this Earth."Earnest as he is, by most measures, it's not saying a whole lot.

Zach, a Frederick native, is 11 years old, one of the 50 aspiring announcers between ages 10 and 18 who hit the leafy North Baltimore campus of the College of Notre Dame for a sportscasting camp last week. Zach speaks into a cassette recorder, watching the videotaped action of the previous week's pro basketball championship on a big-screen TV.

"Great voice," says Steve Goldstein, co-director of Scholastic Play-By-Play Network, the Philadelphia company that staged the five-day sports-travaganza, one of seven it will operate in the U.S. this summer. "Do the rest of you guys hear how excited he sounds?"

The campers know that's important. Just the day before, a celebrity guest speaker, ESPN TV reporter Sal Paolantonio, shared with the group his "Sal Pal's 4 P's."

"Prepare; [Be] Personal; Perform; and [Be] Professional," the list on the chalkboard read. Full-color Paolantonio 8-by-10s, autographed in silver ink, littered the classroom.

In a world where many kids grow up on 24-hour-a-day, ESPN-style sports coverage, watching witty broadcasters who are bigger stars and, in some cases, as well-compensated as many of the athletes, celebrity goes a long way, and Scholastic serves up a goodly portion. Ravens defensive tackle Dwan Edwards appeared just after Paolantonio, fielding questions in a mock news conference. "Does Rex Ryan consider you a playmaker?" one 11-year-old asked Edwards, referring to his team's assistant head coach and defensive coordinator. "I certainly hope so," the 315-pounder said.

But the camp's specialty is hands-on experience. Today, Zach's group - the 19 campers younger than 13 - will complete their "calls" of the Lakers-Celtics game (not to mention a touchdown drive from this year's Super Bowl). They will also write and perform scripts for a sports segment; sit in with the aptly nicknamed Paul "Jolly" Jolowitz, a talk-show host at WIP in Philadelphia, for a faux phone-in show; and team to produce a full-fledged sportscast in the campus TV studio.

"Oh, I'm learning a lot," says Bradley Meadows, 9, of Spotsylvania, Va., who chose the option of spending each night in the campus dorms (total fee: $1,025, as compared with $485 for day campers). "I've loved everything about this camp."

That's good news for Goldstein, a former sports marketing major, and his co-director, Jeremy Treatman, a producer of high school sports broadcasts who founded Play By Play in Philadelphia seven years ago. The initial camp, Treatman says, drew about 50 kids. A couple of years later, it had grown to twice that size.

Today, the Scholastic Play-By-Play Network operates camps in seven cities each summer, including Boston, Chicago, Miami and Atlanta. Philadelphia's, set at Villanova University, drew 120 this year, and the company plans to expand into the Los Angeles market soon.

The Universities at Shady Grove in Rockville hosts the last camp this year, Aug. 18-22. The week will include an appearance by ex-Philadelphia Eagles and Washington Redskins defensive back Troy Vincent, a former president of the NFL Players Association.

"These are the kind of kids who scour the box scores, watch the games, study the announcers," Treatman says. "They come up with very interesting stuff."

Sometimes it's typical camp shenanigans. One panicked boy needs help when his tape recorder jams. Another is so focused on announcing he trips over a cooler full of punch.

"You all right, buddy?" Goldstein asks with a sympathetic laugh.

The camp's lone female student - camps are open to boys and girls, though males are usually in the majority - draws disproportionate attention.

"She thinks I'm cool," brags one boy in a Washington Capitals T-shirt.

Many campers are wide-eyed. Inside a radio studio, Jolowitz offers pointers and swaps friendly barbs with Tobias Stokes, 13, of Philadelphia and Zevi Lowenberg, 14, of Pikesville.

"Remember, everybody has an opinion," he tells them. "But 'why' is the key to any talk radio. What's your reasoning?"

He rolls tape, Tobias serving as co-host, and grabs his mic.

"Paul Jolowitz here," he says in a booming voice. "Tobias, if you were the Chicago Bulls, who would you take first in today's NBA draft?"

"Derek Rose," the boy says after a long pause. "The Chicago Bulls offense - it needs somebody to take control."

Zevi, posing as a caller, disagrees, favoring power forward Michael Beasley instead. A debate ensues.

"Good radio," Jolowitz says. He hands both boys their tapes.

In a nearby classroom, budding announcers pair off to write and film segments called "Fact or Fiction." Counselor Steve Hochman will edit them into a Hollywood Squares-type show for viewing on the camp's last day.

"Eagles kicker David Akers used to be a substitute teacher," Matt McCool, 15, says into his mic as a classmate rolls the camera.

Hochman helps him build it into a story. "How about this? 'Eagles kicker David Akers is known for his consistency, but did you know that early in his career, he struggled and even got cut once or twice? In fact, between jobs, he had to work as a substitute teacher out in the Midwest."

Matt, getting into the flow, changes "substitute teacher" to "greeter at Wal-Mart." The bit becomes "fiction."

It's the fifth straight broadcast camp for Matt, a Westchester, Pa., native in a Philadelphia Phillies T-shirt. He's among the 23 who have attended at least one of the camps before. He has also gotten used to meeting kids from all over the country. Last week's group features campers from New Jersey, Washington state and Colorado, though most are from within an hour's drive of Baltimore.

In the TV studio, as a Notre Dame staffer directs, six boys man the production controls, working the knobs that fade music in and out and display the anchors' names across the TV screen. Inside a soundproofed room, the "talent"- two campers - sit side-by-side at the anchor's desk, reading the news from a Teleprompter.

Some play it straight. Zach Parnes has the mellifluous timbre of a miniature Marv Albert as he handles word of Tiger Woods' recent knee surgery. He tosses matters back to his partner, friend Matthew McKay, 11, also of Frederick, who announces offensive lineman Jonathan Ogden's recent retirement from the Ravens.

"Smooth presentation," Treatman tells the other boys. "They planned that themselves. You can be creative."

Every camper gets a chance to anchor, and when Kai Dambach, 16, of Crownsville takes his turn, it's clear that he, too, has thought ahead.

He announces the Orioles' series at Chicago's Wrigley Field, the team's first ever, slated to start that evening with Jeremy Guthrie on the mound. There's a pause. He rips open his button-down shirt, revealing a black T-shirt with white letters beneath it.

"Free the Birds," it says - a reference to the frustration some fans have felt toward Oriole ownership - and Kai bellows the words as his segment comes to an end.

"I dislike Peter Angelos," he says afterward, grinning as Ray Lewis might after a fourth-quarter sack. "And everybody needs a good sign-off line, don't they?"

jonathan.pitts@baltsun.com