It’s August 24, 1996, and with a tight 5-4 win over the Angels, the O’s passed the White Sox and hold a half-game lead in the wild card race. If the season ended today, they’d be in the playoffs.

Mike Mussina gave up four runs over seven innings to pick up his 17th win of the season. Rafael Palmeiro drove in two runs to pace a balanced Orioles attack that saw seven players with at least a hit.

O’s closer Randy Myers made it interesting in the ninth, but he got Chili Davis to ground out with the bases loaded to end the game. It was his 25th save of the season.

“I love that kind of situation,” O’s manager Davey Johnson said to the Sun’s Buster Olney about the ninth inning. “Shoot, I thrive on seeing that type of situation come up as long as I know I have the right matchup.” (Baltimore Sun, p. 10D, August 25, 1996)

The 46,000+ in attendance were probably not thriving during that situation, but Johnson and Myers are “built different,” as one says these days.

Jesse Orosco pitched a scoreless eighth to bridge Mussina and Myers. He has allowed just one run in 20 appearances since the All-Star break. If you cast your memory all the way back to April, you’ll remember that in two consecutive outings (including the game where the O’s gave up 26 runs to the Rangers), Orosco gave up 12 runs. Outside of those two games, his ERA sits at 1.27.

“All I can do is keep going out there and doing what I’m doing,” the 39-year-old vet said. “I struggled coming out of spring training. I had to work some things out.” (Baltimore Sun, p. 9D, August 25, 1996) 

Hopefully he keeps it going and so do the O’s now that they are back in playoff position.

Here’s the box score with the lovely totals.

No homers today, but a win is a win.

Angels (60-69) at Orioles (68-60), 1:35 p.m.

Starting Pitchers
CAL – RHP Dennis Springer (3-2, 5.98 ERA)
BAL – RHP Scott Erickson (8-10, 5.13 ERA)

With the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago coming up this week, the Sun has a front page article about how the Democrats are working to mend fences with “Big Labor.”

After an extended lede for fans of decades old labor history (i.e., how union leader Sidney Hillman helped pick Harry Truman as FDR’s VP in 1944), Sun reporter Jules Witcover’s talks about the Clinton Administration’s relationship with new AFL-CIO president John J. Sweeney.

“I don’t think they’ll be clearing it with Sweeney the way they cleared it with Sidney,” Sweeney said, forcing Witcover’s historical lead. “But we have a pretty good line in with the White House and the administration on issues of concern to our members.”

Who is this Sweeney guy? “Although at 62 Sweeney is not a young turk,” Witcover writes, “he has infused an aggressive spirit in the labor federation of 79 unions and 13 million members, which represents only 14 percent of the work force.”

He has mobilized the union, hiring organizers in 86 targeted districts and running a slew of television ads on things like Medicare.

Sweeney really doesn’t like the Republicans in general, and House Speaker Newt Gingrich in particular. “Some of our members may have voted for some of the freshman Republicans,” Sweeney said. “But they got a rude awakening. … If Newt Gingrich did us a favor, it was that he scared them to death.”

Sweeney will speak at the convention this week. While surely the Democrats will court the Labor Movement, this is also the ’90s, so the party is definitely open for business.

For comparison’s sake, in the era of FDR and Sidney Hillman, roughly a third (32.5%) of the entire American workforce was unionized. By 1996, that number was down to 14.5%. Today, it hovers around 10% (an all-time low, in terms of tracking with the Bureau of Labor Statistics).  

In 1944, the share of all pretax income that went to the top 1% wealthiest families dropped to 11.3% (from 23.9% in 1928), while the bottom 90% of Americans got 67.5%, up from 50.7% in 1928). 

What about today? Per the Guardian:

It seems that organized labor is really good for economic justice. And it seems like organized labor cozying up to Clinton ultimately did not help organized labor much.

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

The Baltimore Sketchbook is back! And this time it’s at a familiar place.