It’s March 10, 1996, and it’s Selection Sunday for college basketball fans everywhere. The top seeds in the men’s tournament are Kentucky, UConn, UMass, and Purdue and the top seeds in the women’s tournament are Tennessee, UConn, Stanford, and Louisiana Tech. The University of Virginia women (full disclosure: Wahoowa!), who have made the Elite Eight in six of the previous eight seasons, are a 3-seed and can make it all the way to the Final Four without ever having to leave Charlottesville. Meanwhile, the University of Maryland men came into the day firmly on the bubble, but they made the Dance as a 7-seed and will face upstart Santa Clara University, led by little-known Canadian point guard Steve Nash. We’ll see how that goes.

It’s a quiet day down at O’s training camp in Florida, perhaps everyone’s busy filling out their brackets. So in lieu of much to report — and also because it’s Mario Day Mar10 — let’s introduce the most famous mustache in all of Baltimore.

Rafael Palmeiro was born in Havana, Cuba, in September 1964. He moved to the U.S. at a young age, settling in Miami. Just about every day growing up, Palmeiro’s father Jose would come home from his construction job and take Raffy and his brothers to the baseball field to practice. Jose was a practitioner of negative reinforcement, which is not an ideal tactic but seems to have worked on Raffy.

“He always made me feel like I wasn’t a very good player, and that I needed to work harder,” Raffy said. “That’s how he worked on my head, so I would always work harder and never be satisfied with myself.” (Baltimore Sun, p. 10C, March 30, 1996)

Hmmm… we will put a pin in that “never be satisfied with myself” part for now, and focus on the fact that Raffy is an incredibly good baseball player.

In college, he played at Mississippi State, where he became the first player ever to win the Southeastern Conference triple crown — leading the SEC in batting average, home runs, and runs batted in. He joined up with Will Clark, another one of the greatest college baseball players of all time, to form a duo dubbed “Thunder and Lightning.” The relationship between the two has always been… contentious, as we’ll touch on briefly but you can see more about in this ESPN mini-doc.

The Cubs drafted Raffy in the first round of the 1985 draft and after speed-running the minor leagues he debuted in Chicago in late 1986 and then hit 14 homers in roughly half a season in 1987. By 1988, he was an All Star, hitting .307 with 41 doubles and, curiously, only 8 home runs. That offseason, amid rumors that Palmeiro may have had an affair with star shortstop Ryne Sandberg’s wife, the Cubs shipped Raffy off to Texas.

With the Rangers, he blossomed offensively, leading the AL in hits in 1990 and all of MLB in doubles in 1991 (when he made his second All Star game). He topped 30 home runs and 100 RBI for the first time in 1993, which was a great way to set up his free agency when… OMG he signed with the Orioles!!!

But first, how did it happen? Well, we have to go back to his old college buddy Clark, who was also a free agent in 1993 after making five of the previous six All Star games with the San Francisco Giants. You see, Raffy wanted to go back to Texas, but the Rangers (and Orioles, for that matter) preferred Clark. When the Rangers signed Clark instead, Ken Rosenthal of The Baltimore Sun noted that Palmeiro “went berserk…, calling Clark ‘a lowlife’ with ‘no class’ and Rangers president Tom Schieffer ‘a back-stabbing liar.’” (Baltimore Sun, p. 1C, December 12, 1993) This was just the latest in Palmeiro’s now nearly decade-long feud with Clark. As Rosenthal continued, they both dominated with Mississippi State and appeared likely to go 1-2 in the 1985 draft. But then Clark was on the 1984 U.S. Olympic Team and the Cuban-born Palmeiro was ineligible. And then in ’85, Clark won the Golden Spikes Award for best college player while Palmeiro slumped. Ultimately, Clark was drafted 2nd overall behind B.J. Surhoff — and ahead of Barry Larkin and Barry Bonds — and Palmeiro fell to 22nd. Raffy has used that as motivation ever since.

The thrust of Rosenthal’s column was that this latest Clark-induced indignation faced by Raffy would fuel him to succeed with the O’s, and so far, that’s exactly what has happened. In the first season of his five-year deal in Baltimore — the strike-shortened 1994 season — Palmeiro blasted 23 homers, and just this past season, he hit a career-high 39 homers in just 143 games. As we reported earlier, he has come to camp in 1996 looking very big and strong indeed after working out very, very hard in the offseason. At 31 years old, he has fully tapped into his game power and should be one of the premier sluggers in the game again this season.

Clark went to the World Series with the Giants in 1989, but Palmeiro has yet to make the playoffs. With the Orioles new star-studded lineup and new manager Davey Johnson calling the shots, if that doesn’t change this year, the chip on Raffy’s shoulder — cultivated by his father from a young age — could become so huge he’ll topple over.

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

Okay, I cheated a bit in this one because this clip was actually in the paper on March 11, 1996, but since I talked about the NCAA tournament above, I wanted to share the full brackets. Who do you got in your Final Four???

(Click on images to expand)