It’s April 21, 1996, and the Rangers swept the O’s right out of town, scoring seven runs off of David Wells en route to a 9-6 victory.

For the fourth straight game, Orioles outfielder Brady Anderson led off the game with a home run. And for the fourth straight game, the O’s lost.

As Buster Olney reported in the Sun, when injured reliever Alan Mills jokingly told Brady to stop hitting leadoff homers so they O’s could win, Wells confidently jumped in, “Whatever you did the last three games, do it again. All we need is one [run].”

Nine innings later, Wells was singing a different tune. “Boy, did I eat my words.”

Dean Palmer had two homers and a triple and drove in six runs for the Rangers.

The numbers from the weekend are ugly. The Rangers outscored the Birds 43-16 in the sweep, with 10 homers and an incredible 21 walks.

Brady’s four-straight leadoff home runs is an MLB record. But not everyone has been hitting. B.J. Surhoff is 5-for-27 in his last seven games. Bobby Bonilla has four hits in his last seven games. Jeffery Hammonds hasn’t had an RBI in seven games. Rafael Palmeiro and Chris Hoiles each had only one RBI in their last seven games before both homering today. And Cal Ripken, Jr., still hasn’t homered.

The Orioles can’t get out of Texas soon enough. But next up is a trip to Cleveland to face the defending AL champs.

Here’s the box score with the not so lovely totals.

Both teams wore Turn Back the Clock uniforms in this game, sporting minor-league fits from the 1930s. I thought the O’s ones were pretty cool, with the script Orioles on the front and a bat and two oriole birds on it. But not everyone agreed with me. “It looks like prison-issue,” said O’s ace Mike Mussina.

Three more dingers today — Brady, Hoiles, and Raffy — but they’re cold comfort as the losses keep mounting.

Brady just can’t stop leading off games with homers.

Baltimore (11-6) at Cleveland (10-6), 7:05 p.m. ET

Starting Pitchers
BAL – RHP Scott Erickson, 1-0, 3.50 ERA
CLE – RHP Charles Nagy, 2-0, 3.32 ERA

Under the admittedly pretty good headline, “Net loss in the suburbs,” we have a story about how some heroic Baltimore County residents in Towson went out into the middle of the night to remove the rims from the basketball courts in a public park because they didn’t like the people playing there.

What follows is a pretty interesting discussion — considering the time — of basketball and racism in the suburbs, not just in Baltimore, but in cities across the country.

At the time, the Towson court was one of two dozen rimless suburban courts around Baltimore. Basically we have Occam’s razor going on here, in that suburban residents don’t like young Black men from the city coming to their neighborhoods. 

Patrycia Pickett, who is president of the Coalition of Concerned African-Americans of Baltimore County, said it thusly, “The outsider syndrome is basically a catch-all for covering up what people don’t want to say, what they feel. That kind of typecasting leaves the impression that only certain people play basketball and that, in itself, frightens me.”

The article goes into Baltimore’s rich basketball tradition, including how in the 1960s, members of the Baltimore Bullets played against a team from the Maryland Penitentiary. 

The article does some fun both-sidesing, too. Dr. Molefi Kete Asanti, who started the nation’s first doctorate in African-American Studies program at Temple University, says that efforts to keep basketball out of suburban neighborhoods is racist.

On the other side, you have Al Svehia, the deputy director of the Baltimore County Parks and Rec Department. Who says it is not racist and then blows deeply into his dog whistle.

“It centers around the fact that some of these basketball courts have become gathering centers for guys who use foul language, create noise long into the night, engage in public drinking and urination.”

Well, there you have it. Anyway, never change, Baltimore County. And they never really have.

Welcome to a recurring segment where I find fun things in today’s (in 1996) Baltimore Sun!

Just in case we didn’t get enough of the blowout from the other night, here are some fun facts.