Memorial Stadium
Baltimore, MD
Review by Mike
Memorial Stadium was built in 1950 as a football stadium, but baseball came to town in 1954, when the St. Louis Browns became the Baltimore Orioles, and Memorial Stadium took them in. The Orioles played there through the 1991 season, after which they moved into the ground-breaking Camden Yards. The park was set in a quiet, residential neighborhood (at least it was in 1983), and we had to park on the lawn of the high school across the street.
My trip to Baltimore in 1983 was one of my very first ballpark adventures, undertaken at the frighteningly young age of 18. A friend went with me as we headed south down I-95 to Baltimore to see the Orioles take on the Texas Rangers. These were the classic Orioles of Jim Palmer and Eddie Murray that would go on to win the World Series that year.
Fools that we were, we didn't get directions to the stadium, figuring that road signs would lead us there. Wrong. We saw no signs directing us to any stadium whatsoever. Just before entering the Harbor Tunnel, we bailed off of I-95 and started wandering aimlessly through neighborhoods, completely lost. Then, in a miracle of Moses-like proportions, we came across a road sign that actually had a map directing travelers to the ballpark.
I have very little memory of Memorial Stadium as I only took a few pictures and I didn't write about the trip as I do now. I know the Orioles won and that we liked the ballpark, although we really had nothing but Shea Stadium to compare it with. Baseball Reference tells me that Mike Boddicker pitched a complete game shutout in 2:13, a very short game for such a long drive. So, based on a vague and scattered collection of memories, I will give it a rating of 3.5 hot dogs.
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1983
5
Memorial Stadium was demolished, but a community ballpark was built on the same site, the field in the same spot, allowing kids to pitch from the same mound as Jim Palmer. That's kinda cool.
