University of Baltimore MFA student and super mom Austrie Martinez tells the magical story of how she and her family met and befriended Adam Jones–it reads like the stuff of legend, and it’s 100 percent true.
My wife, Denise, was strapping on her duty belt for work as I watched the Orioles postgame interviews. She worked night security at a psych hospital and often missed the end of the game. As she tuned in via radio, we’d text each other throughout the nine innings.
If you bought season tickets to the University of Maryland’s football games, you got a nice set of commemorative tickets. They listed highlights from the team’s “Proud Past [and] Fearless Future,” including its two undefeated seasons, 24 bowl appearances, 142 All-Americans, and 203 NFL draft picks. And they also included pictures of Terps both past and future.
The current players featured on the tickets were Stefon Diggs, Dexter McDougle, and C.J. Brown. Now, here’s where things start to get creepy:
In which UB Asst. Prof and Bohemian Rhapsody columnist Marion Winik tries to figure out whether the cosmic party train will be making a special stop in Baltimore.
Greetings from a lucky apartment in Brooklyn, where Jane and I are visiting this late January weekend. Experience has shown that the typing is good here, as if words swim beneath the floor thick and flashing as trout in a clear mountain stream. So although I have been contemplating the topic of today’s column for several weeks, I thought it best to begin my work in a proven juju spot.
My neighbor is a perpetual optimist. During the bleakest, hottest off-days of summer, he suits up in orange and khaki and heads down to the Inner Harbor to lead tours through the empty Orioles ballpark. Before the 2011 season began, he handed my one-year-old son his first Orioles uniform, wrapped in black and orange gift paper. For my wife and myself, he had a word of advice: this could be the year. They had just started farming a new pitching staff.
I was a little skeptical. I don’t know much about farming and I don’t know much about pitching. My wife and I hadn’t devoted ourselves financially to an O’s season since 2005. 2005 was the season of Sammy Sosa bobbleheads, Raphael Palmiero’s 3000th hit, and Mr. Sidney Ponson. The Orioles spent 62 days in first place. Then the bottom fell out. Sammy Sosa’s steroid-enhanced batting average deflated. Ponson was let go after his second DUI. One day after hitting 3000, the world learned that Palmiero had failed his urine test. And the Orioles finished fourth in their division, with 88 losses.
But 2011, my neighbor said, would be different. My son was wandering around wearing Oriole colors. People were whispering about the new ace, Brian Matusz. Besides, my neighbor is usually right about everything. His garden is perfect. He’s got a gas-fueled grill.
