[Columnist’s Note: Inspired by recent developments, where a certain regional news outlet has deemed no aspect of Gov. Wes Moore’s life too insignificant for a full forensic review, a Baltimore Fishbowl contributor has taken pains to find the truth about yet another seeming discrepancy in the personal narrative of Maryland’s 63rd governor.]
It all started with a routine pop fly.
One lofted into the humid skies during the third inning of a Little League game, played between Stu’s Excavating and J.D. Burton Masonry on an unseasonably warm late April evening in 1990.
This decidedly unremarkable occurrence gave rise to a series of events that threatens to roil the clubby world of Annapolis politics and disrupt, 36 years later, what has appeared to be a comfortable re-election trot for Maryland Governor Wes Moore, a Democrat.
This was no ordinary pop-up. The batter was Moore, a star shortstop who batted cleanup that year for Stu’s – a traditional Little League power who had won three of the last five league championship trophies. The pitcher was Lance Anstiss – an amiable 12-year-old, best known around town for falling off the tailgate of his father’s Ford Explorer during the season-opening Little League parade, and for his claims of resemblance to Damn Yankees’ lead vocalist Tommy Shaw.
With the count two balls and one strike, and a runner on first with one out, Moore popped a 51-mph Anstiss fastball into short right-center field – about 10 steps behind the edge of the infield, according to interviews with several eyewitnesses at the park that evening. The second baseman, Kevin Clamant, took a drop step, turned his hips and backtracked to meet the ball while keeping an eye on its arc the whole time.
What occurred next remains the subject of conjecture and acrimonious debate, even with the passage of decades. Some say that Clamant lost the ball in the setting sun. Others cite an improbable gust of wind that pushed the ball beyond his reach at the last moment.
According to a Aidan Milne – a teammate of Moore who is now partner in a commercial real estate firm in Westlake, Ohio – Clamant simply misjudged the ball.
“Kevin was a good guy and, honestly, I actually agreed with him that he looked like Tommy Shaw. Even though I thought it was weird that it meant that much to him. But he was not what I would call a great ballplayer,” recalls Milne. “We all knew he was only allowed to start at second base because his dad would bring his motorized pitching machine to the ballpark and let us use it for batting practice.”
His pop fly having evaded capture and come to rest in the shallow outfield, Moore raced around first and slid into second as the lead runner came up with the tiebreaking run. According to newspaper clippings from the community library, Stu’s would win the game 8-4, and go on to hoist another league championship trophy – ironically, sponsored by Clamant’s Mowing and Landscaping – that June.
The future best-selling author, Robin Hood CEO and Maryland governor apparently assumed, without seeking verification, that he had been awarded a hit on the play by team mom and official scorekeeper, Kelly Mikaleck. Indeed, a brief account of the game, published the following day, credited Moore with three hits, including a run-scoring double in the third [emphasis added].
In perhaps the most compelling evidence that his hit was just that, Moore received a coupon from the league concession stand for a complimentary Peanut Buster Parfait at the local Dairy Queen – a treat reserved then, as now, for players who logged extra-base hits during their game.
However, according to the official scoresheets from that game – secured from Little League International’s Eastern Regional office in Bristol, Connecticut through a Freedom of Information Act request – Mikaleck ruled the play an error.
Which meant that in the eyes of the worldwide governing body of Little League Baseball, Moore would not be credited with a base hit on the play.
The disparity between Moore’s assumption and Mikaleck’s actual decision serves as the basis for a fresh round of speculation about the governor’s transparency and candor. Over the ensuing 36 years – even as he rose to national fame, ran successfully in 2022 to become Maryland’s first Black governor and attracted national speculation about White House aspirations – Moore has assiduously maintained that he recorded 27 base hits in 58 plate appearances that 1990 season, which would have given him a batting average of .46551724.
Or, rounded up, .466.
Take that disputed hit away, however, and the stats tell a drastically different story. Moore’s season stat line drops to 26 hits in 58 at-bats – an average of just .448.
True to today’s polarized political atmosphere, both sides have their fervent advocates who denigrate the perspective of the opposite faction.
Manuel Gutierrez, a fleet-footed and smooth-fielding teammate of Moore’s who now teaches late-19th Century Realist Fiction at Briar Cliff University in Iowa, questions both Mikaleck’s decision and her motives.
While he harbors fond memories of the German chocolate cupcakes she would bring to celebrate team birthdays, and while he confesses to having a mild crush on her at the time – “looking back, she kind of had a Janine Turner thing going on, and my parents used to love ‘Northern Exposure’” – he also believes she may have had special motivation for taking a hit away from Moore.
“I wouldn’t say she disliked Wes, because it was really impossible to dislike him, but she did resent him,” recalled Gutierrez. “Her son, Kirk, wanted to hit cleanup, but Wes hit cleanup so he hit fifth in the order. Kirk wanted to play short, but Wes was soooo much better, so he played left field.
“Which was good with all of us, because Wes gave us the best chance to win and because, quite honestly, Kirk was kind of a [explicative deleted]. But I remember Miss Kelly making snide little comments about Wes throughout the game, hoping – I guess – that it would influence our coach’s thinking. So I’m not sure she was the objective scorekeeper when it came to him.
“That said, have you talked to her,” concluded Gutierrez. “How does she look? Is Mr. Ron [Mikaleck, her husband] still alive?”
Interviewed on the deck his home in Callaway, Florida, where he owns a firearms retail store that boasts The Largest Inventory of Military Grade Night Vision Goggles in the Panhandle!, Kirk Mikaleck offers a different memory. “Well, lah-de-f—— dah. It’s about time the press popped the lid on this. I’ve been saying for years that Wes Moore is about as much of a .466 hitter as I am a lawyer for the A-C-L-U,” said Mikaleck, spitting out each letter for contemptuous effect.
“I don’t have no beef with Kevin – I’d go over to his house all the time to hit off his dad’s machine, and his dad let me have a few beers from the garage fridge. But that was the easiest pop-up I’ve ever seen and Kev just missed it. Everybody who was there that night knew it was an error, even though there was Wes, out there on second base and pumping his fist like he’d just caught a damn six-foot reef donkey [fish].”
Mikaleck reached for a Winston Red and lit it before polishing off his third Busch Light of the interview. “Doesn’t surprise me that Wes and a bunch of liberals up in Maryland are now trying to rewrite history to suit their purposes. Hillary did it with Benghazi, Biden with the election and now good ol’ Wes.
“I’m not a politician – I know too much about them – I have a buddy who’s a big wheel in Tallahassee and based on what he tells me, every one of ‘em should be in jail. But seriously – if you can’t even trust that guy to be honest about his Little League batting average, then why on earth would the people of Maryland – even as Dem-lusional as they are up there – trust the guy to make their lives better?”
Reached by phone at her home in the Panhandle town of Apalachicola, Kelly Michalek – the team mom, scorekeeper and curator of her son’s ill-fated dreams of baseball stardom – answered on the first ring, allowed this writer to introduce himself and the topic of intended discussion, then quickly short-circuited further conversation.
“Tell Kirk that if he wants me to get into all of that, then he can pay me back the $3,600 he borrowed from me to get his skiff back in the water. He made two payments back when he got that COVID money and then he just fell off the face of the earth.”
Moore would go on that year to win the coveted “FenceBuster” trophy – sponsored by Buddy Willey’s Fence and Deck and awarded each year to the Little Leaguer with the most “out of the park” homeruns. Through a spokesperson, he declined to comment for this story.
Hoping for some sense of resolution to this mounting controversy, this writer found and connected with Clamant. Or, to be proper, Dr. Clamant. As in Chief of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the Rush Medical Center in Chicago.
Reached in an airport concourse, en route to a keynote speech at a trade conference in Seattle, Clamant politely but firmly declined to revisit the pop fly that looms as a potential game-changer in the politics of 2026.
“Respectfully, is this a joke? We’re a nation at war – one with a failing democracy and one in which one in every six children go to bed hungry every night. And this is we’re talking about?
“Unbelievable. Our system really is broken.”
Please don’t use AI for illustrations, or at all.