It’s April 27, 1996, and the O’s just can’t beat the Rangers. Bobby Witt scattered two runs and four hits over 7-plus innings and Texas won its fifth straight over Baltimore, 4-2.

Scott Erickson gave up four runs (only one earned) over 7⅔ innings to take the loss. Frustrated, he blamed his teammates.

“I could easily be 4-0 if our defense played good,” Erickson (1-2) said, adding a grammatical error to the counter. “The last three games we definitely should have won if we played solid defense.” (Baltimore Sun, p. 1F, April 28, 1996)

Though he didn’t call him out by name, first baseman Rafael Palmeiro had a brutal error, letting a ball go through his legs with two outs in a decisive 3-run eighth inning for the Rangers.

“I tried to catch it, keep it in front of me,” said Palmeiro, who has already made as many errors this year (four) as he did all last season. “I just came up too soon.” (Baltimore Sun, p. 8F, April 28, 1996)

In the last 10 days or so, the vibes around the team have shifted dramatically, and the Sun’s Ken Rosenthal has followed suit with his columns. After today’s game, he called out Erickson and outfielder/designated hitter Bobby Bonilla for griping about the defense and not playing the field, respectively.

“The Orioles can’t beat Texas, but they sure can point fingers,” Rosenthal wrote. He then said the Orioles are displaying something that affects all professional sports, what basketball coach Pat Riley called “the disease of me.”

Rosenthal correctly points out that since Erickson hardly ever strikes anyone out, the defense bails him out more often than not. He is also right that Bonilla is a much weaker option in the outfield than Mike Devereaux and Tony Tarasco. But ultimately the real problem is the team is not winning. Losing eight of 10 will cause any clubhouse to strain.

Manager Davey Johnson is trying to stay upbeat. “We started off really jelling, then everything got discombobulated,” he said. “We’ll find a normal [pattern] here in a minute.” Let’s hope so!

The lone bright spot was Brady Anderson hitting his tenth home run of the year, tying Frank Robinson’s club record for most in April. Brady crushed it out onto Eutaw Street and hit the warehouse on a bounce. It was the seventh ball ever hit onto Eutaw Street.

“It does mean something to me,” Brady said. “But it would have meant a lot more if we would have won.” (Baltimore Sun, p. 8F, April 28, 1996)

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

Elsewhere around baseball, scoring is way up and people are trying to figure out why. The Sun’s Buster Olney has an article where he talks to people around the league. Some say the pitching is down, some say the defense is worse, some blame a shrinking strike zone. Whatever the reason, the American League composite ERA is 5.26, which is half a run higher than last year at 4.71. With 30 years of hindsight, we have a little more information on what might have been the cause, pharmaceutically speaking, but for now we’ll just let them think it’s the pitching, defense, and strike zone.

Today, April 27, 1996, is the 50th anniversary of an integrated professional baseball game that happened a full year before Jackie Robinson’s major league debut. And it happened right here in Baltimore.

Writing in the Sun, local historian Fred B. Shoken has the details of how on April 27, 1946, Robinson and his teammate John Wright became the first Black players to play a regular season minor-league game, when their Montreal Royals came to play the then-minor-league Baltimore Orioles at old Municipal Stadium in Baltimore.

Attendance was down — with only 3,415 fans attending — due to near-40-degree weather, but the crowd in attendance rained racist taunts on Robinson. Rachel, his wife, said the taunts were even worse than what she heard during spring training in Florida. Jackie didn’t speak to it at the time, instead focusing on the conditions. “You know, they told me this was the southernmost city in the league, but last night I felt like I was playing in Alaska.”

The weather lightened and over 25,000 people attended the Sunday doubleheader, including an estimated 10,000 Black fans. Despite some handwringing from white people beforehand, there was no trouble. Per the Afro-American: “Many whites feared trouble because there were so many colored people among the 25,000 spectators Sunday afternoon for the doubleheader. Hats off to you colored fans for while the cops took out three white drunks (and were they drunk) and two white youths for rowdyism, the colored fans seemed to have everything under control.”

So there’s a fun fact you can share. Jackie Robinson played his first regular-season professional baseball game in Baltimore.

Brady already has 10 bricks to his name.

Starting a new row of ‘burns on our boy!

Texas (15-8) at Baltimore (13-10), 1:35 p.m. ET

Starting Pitchers
TEX – RHP Ken Hill, 3-2, 4.11 ERA
BAL – RHP Mike Mussina, 3-2, 4.66 ERA

In what we can file under “hard lessons of the digital age,” we have a story headlined “E-Mail Goes into Space Without Privacy File.” It’s 1996, so electronic mail, or e-mail, is quickly becoming the primary way of communicating at work. But guess what? There’s no privacy in e-mail!

The Sun lets David Sobel, an attorney with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, explain, and so will I.

“It’s become a cliche that e-mail is more like a postcard than a letter in a sealed envelope,” he said. “[It’s more] like a postcard that might be getting xeroxed in every post office it might pass through.” 

E-mails are being used as evidence in trials and as cause for firing folks. The article has some examples of this, including how a federal court ruled that Pillsbury was entitled to fire a woman who had sent e-mail critical of a superior — possibly the Dough Boy himself, but unclear — even though the company had explicitly promised that it would not monitor employees’ e-mails.

Don’t worry, AOL says they are secure.. “We do not read e-mail,” said a spokesperson there. But the article rightly points out that most customers agree to regulations — like how the company can respond to complaints of profanity in on-line exchanges — without paying much attention.

Let’s let Sobel finish us off here: “The big problem with this issue is that the average user does not have a very good idea about how any of this works,” he said. And even though he watches these issues as his job, “I don’t either.”

So ya, be careful with e-mails, y’all.

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

This fun little section looks back on this day in history. Looks like on April 26 we have a little bit of good news (Magellan killed) mixed with some bad news (Murrow died). And I think I speak for everyone when I say that we all stand with Captain Midnight.