I needed some good news by the end of yesterday, and the Orioles Card "O" The Day blog delivered. Kevin wrote about Brady Anderson playing "in an 1890s-style baseball game for charity." Yes, indeed.

"According to this excellent first-hand account from the Walkoff Walk blog, Baltimore's own sideburned hero of the 1990s made some of the headlines at the game. Before the first pitch, he was traded from the Legends to the Stogies in exchange for a catcher and a giant novelty bag of cash. Perhaps the Stogies owner was a distant Steinbrenner relative. Brady also pitched an inning, and reportedly threw very hard."

Flickr's evie22 got the above action shot (thanks, Flickr sharing tools), and the Mercury-News got a great pic of the 'burns. See photo #19.

The best Cal Ripken card I've never seen before, via the always-entertaining Orioles Card "O" the Day blog. Click through for the large version and suitable sweater commentary.

Additional recent card blogging: "I dug into my box of mid-90's Orioles cards tonight with something vague, yet oddly specific, in mind. I needed to go to my happy place. After the frustration and ranting and shiny unpleasantness of last night, I had to cleanse the palate. I wanted to find something silly and unusual. So I got halfway through the box and suddenly I found Ben McDonald, informing me that I had a front row seat to the Gun Show. Thanks for the boost, you crazy Cajun." Link.

The Coopers were all in town last weekend and saw a Nats win, the combined odds of which are about five billion to one.

The Dunn slam was wicked, probably my favorite Nats homer since the Zimmerman walk-off against the Yankees. After the O's intentionally walked Zimmerman to get to the big guy, the crowd wanted the come-from-behind shot bad. And everyone played well. Take the AP's sentence on the grand slam setup, "With Washington trailing 5-4, pinch-hitter Anderson Hernandez led off the seventh with a single against Chris Ray (0-1). Willie Harris singled, Cristian Guzman sacrificed and Ryan Zimmerman was intentionally walked to load the bases." Want to engage the fans? Be consistent.

Meanwhile, Kearns ran into everything to catch stuff, and Martis was less wild than he could've been and redeemed himself for giving up a hit to the opposing pitcher by getting a nice hit of his own. Hanrahan looked surprisingly confident with two strikeouts in a 1-2-3 9th.

Other highlights: Good to run into Penn Beth in the concourse. Teddy held a wide, wide early lead in the President's Race, but he lost when he stopped to beat up the Oriole Bird. Worth it. (Update since writing but before publishing: Meghan links to the video.) Missed her National Anthem, but the ending of God Bless America from five-year-old Kaitlyn Maher was way above expectations. Bird beating, kid song pix here. No idea if the kid behind Rob is about spit up a tater tot or what.

Joe MacLeod of the Baltimore City Paper writes "God Bless," pubbed yesterday. (Via The Awl.) Read the entire glorious thing here.

I went to a Baseball game the other day, and I have a few complaints. First of all, I understand the whole deal of how it (Our National Pastime) is a Business, and an Industry, and how it is Entertainment, so therefore you gotta make it Exciting–as in, way fucking more exciting than Baseball is to people who are not crazy about the Baseball but who end up at a game every now and then. So you gotta wake the motherfuckers up every inning because Baseball can be (get ready for this News Flash), according to some people, kinda Boring, but it's like all this goddamn Intro Music every time somebody from the Home Team steps up to bat, like BAMARAMARAMARAMARAMARAMA with whatever fucking shit they got–Metal, Hip-Hop, Country, even Western–it's all this goddamn BAMARAMARAMARAMARAMARAMA "BLAHRBLAR NOW STEPINNNN UPTOMRRMPH BALLLH, NUMMMBR PHRM-TNRMZLE BALWRR BLARR BLAHBLAH!!!" and then BAMARAMARAMARAMARAMARAMA BRRT-BRRT BAMARAMARAMARAMARAMARAMA, goddamn Jesus Fucking Christ, man, every goddamn time one of Your Baltimore Orioles steps up it's gotta be BAMARAMARAMARAMARAMARAMA?

Descriptions: "Leiter's got some nice flying gold chain action on the front of the card. … The back of this card is one of the cheesiest in this set, and the oddest word is quite clearly 'elan.' … Usher on the front, sweet chain around his neck on the back. What more could you want? … Not much to say about this card except for how sweaty he is on the back of the card. … Also interesting is the implication by Score that getting his college degree was better than playing minor league baseball. I'm not saying that I agree or disagree, just that it's sort of odd that Score would choose to make a value judgement on that."

Yes, the man who brought us the late, great 88 Topps Cards blog — working through the entire set, one '88-riffic card at a time (such as, "Those of you who aren't familiar with David Wells will look at the above photo and think, 'Gee, that guy is a little chubby,' while those of us who are familiar with Wells look at the same photo and think, 'Gee, I can't believe he was ever that skinny!'") – has returned to action.

The follow-up project, 78 Topps Cards, was done in by boredom, the blogger explains, so he's moved onto 88 Score Rookie and Traded Set. Don't know the set? Neither does the blogger! Nor me. Nor most folks. But with the sub-Topps photography of 1988 athletes and copywriters gone wild on the mini-essay-ish card backs, how can you go wrong?

Other good stuff linked from the new '88 blog: Orioles Card "O" The Day.  Recent highlights include mockery of an old-style Cracker Jack Sidney Ponson, the belief that Harold Baines who just turned 50 could still hit .300 (I agree) and maybe the greatest photo gallery ever of the 1979 Orioles. I am entirely serious about the last one. It is awesome. (Also, I'd forgotten about how Brady Anderson played after a bus hit him as he rollerbladed to the game.) And here's the Mussina archive.

The two mixed things about the first row of the Red Porch.

I have his autograph. If you want to talk about adulation, he's up there with Ripken for me. There's an upper tier of sports mascots in my mind, and he's entrenched. And now he's the enemy. He cheers for the enemy, a team I don't enjoy any more, and picks fights with our mascot. But he's so damn cool. If there's any way a cartoon could return to standard-issue MLB uniform hats, the Orioles Bird would be involved. If there's any way Nats management could realize Screech is a big wimp instilling no team pride in anyone above the age of six, the Oriole Bird would be involved. He could stand perfectly still next to the Screech for half an hour, and everyone would understand.

Not far from the mascot discussion is the presidents discussion. We saw Teddy take a big lead in our game, only to get a trip from the Bird. We didn't feel much. Teddy used to have an any-given-gameday feeling to him. But his losing runs to shutter RFK and open the new ballpark have gotten a little too close to the overall team feeling. When are we gonna win? Our most celebrated game spectacle is somebody losing in humiliating fashion. I still love Teddy, but my love of the other presidents and their handlers is falling off fast.

Previously: The two good things. Coming soon: The one bad.

Dave Shenin of the Post gives euphemy a good name:

"It doesn't matter how good I'm throwing right now," said Ponson, who allowed nine hits and four earned runs in 5 2/3 innings. "I [bleeping stink], bottom line…. I don't know what to say. I go out there and prepare myself, and it's not working out. I'm running out of things to say."

The St. Petersburg Times examines what makes a good ice cream sandwich. The photo is mouth-watering.

The Post reviews the latest Uncle Kracker, the man who ruined Drift Away for a generation: "Kracker's voice — marinated in Old Grand-Dad and then dragged through an ashtray — is ideally suited for chronicling the regrets that nag a shaggy, hung-over head."

A note to myself I just found in my bedroom, likely a blog post gone astray: "Don't stick the fork in the boiling water and then in the sauce and then in your mouth."

ElvisNews.com reports on two items of interest. First, "a Belgian couple whose 15 children's names are linked to Elvis Presley say they cannot think of a name for their 16th child." Second, SIRIUS Satellite Radio is launching a 24-hour Elvis radio channel.

Says 'scilla: "Elvis was a great fan of all new technologies in entertainment and communication. He was always the first person to get the latest gadgetry. I'm sure Elvis would have been SIRIUS Satellite Radio's first subscriber and would have had their rock, gospel and country programming going non-stop at home and on the road."

And then there's the sidebar-riffic AJC. About President Clinton sleeping on the couch, the paper asks, was that really so bad?

Had the misfortune of turning on ESPN Classic this week just as 12-year-old Jeffrey Maier robbed the Orioles of their 1996 hopes. I wondered where Maier was now. Turned out he's still in baseball.

Related site:

-Sox fan confronts collegiate Maier

Sir Sidney vs. Pedro, 8:05 p.m. EDT today.

Matty told Hatty about a thing she saw

Had two big horns and a wooly jaw

I can't believe the Orioles even play in the same division. These guys at the top of the American League East, they got a lil' spark under them, huh? Lil' spark. Lil' bit. The "two men enter, one man leaves" kind of spark.

The Orioles haven't had any sensation of the kind since 1998, the year Armando Benitez plugged Tino Martinez and the brawl spilled into the dugouts. ESPN.com named it one of the greatest baseball fights ever (see number three). Because when a fight goes into the dugouts, the only thing beyond the dugouts is the stands. You fight in the stands? You go to jail. A dugout fight is three-quarters of the way there.

But look at what's happened since in Baltimore: a whole lot of nothing. From 1998 until the present, the American League East has finished each year in exactly the same order: Yankees, Red Sox, Toronto, Baltimore, Tampa Bay. Six seasons where you should've bet on the horse that won yesterday.

Who knows why it's happened. Cal Ripken ended his streak in '98, but every team in the division has turned over their roster a few teams since — the Orioles more than most.

And while the division line-up shifted at the beginning of the year, it merely swapped the loser Tigers for the loser Devil Rays. If anything, the Rays have been even bigger doormats and should've evened out the division a little more. But no.

I'd pinpoint the date of stagnation as Dec. 1, 1998. That day the Orioles traded Benitez to the Mets, and the fight vanished from the bottom rungs of the American League East.

Since then, it's been early Gilligan's Island. The Yankees, the Red Sox and the rest. When no one else puts up a fight for those two, it's no wonder yesterday broke out.