It’s May 20, 1996, and the 43,492 O’s fans in attendance had a bit of a fright when Angels second baseman Rex Hudler led off the game with a homer. But that was just the prelude to a fun night for the home crowd as the Orioles scored an avalanche of runs to support a returning David “Boomer” Wells en route to a dominant 13-1 win.

Wells had missed two weeks with a foot problem, but he was sharp in his return, giving up just the one run on four hits in seven innings.

“I had a case of the first-inning blues,” Wells said. “That’s from sitting for two weeks. [The toe] didn’t give me any problems, but my mechanics were off a little bit.” (Baltimore Sun, p. 6D, May 21, 1996)

Bobby Bonilla and Roberto Alomar each homered and drove in four, and Luis Polonia added three hits as the Birds overwhelmed Angels starter Jason Grimsley and the rest of the pitching staff. Brady Anderson also hit his first homer in over two weeks thanks to a sore quad. He still leads the team with 16 homers on the year.

“The pitching is my main concern,” O’s manager Davey Johnson said of his own staff. “We’ve missed [Wells]. Hopefully, Scott Erickson will be back soon. You need your pitchers. We’ve been banged up. We need to get our starting rotation going again.” (Baltimore Sun, p. 1D, May 21, 1996)

As Wells settled in, the O’s scored twice in the second to take the lead, then blew it open with eight runs across the fourth and fifth innings. Bonilla capped the night with a 3-run homer off former Oriole Brad Pennington in the seventh.

The O’s have scored 38 runs over the past four games. They are, as they say, hot.

Reliever Esteban Yan made his major league debut in the game, pitching a perfect ninth inning after being called up from Double-A Bowie. His reward? He was sent back down to the minors following the game. We’ll see who the team adds to the roster tomorrow to replace him.

Here is the box score with the lovely totals. 

As Johnson said above, Erickson is getting closer to a return from his sprained ankle. He’s throwing off a mound again and should be back soon.

In other, more dramatic, O’s news, Johnson has asked superstar shortstop Cal Ripken, Jr., to consider a move to third base with the injury to B.J. Surhoff.

“My understanding was that he was just floating the possibility,” Ripken said.

It would be asking a lot to do a mid-season position shift after playing every single game at shortstop for 14 years.

Brady, Robbie, Bobby … come get your bricks!

Thanks to a sore quad, it’s been over two weeks since we last saw the Brady-O-Meter. Let’s get those ’burns growing again!

Angels (20-23) vs. Orioles (24-18), 7:35 p.m.

Starting Pitchers
CAL – RHP Shawn Boskie (4-1, 4.91 ERA)
BAL – LHP Rick Krivda (1-0, 3.60 ERA)

Front Page News

The Sun takes us to Fort Washington down in Prince George’s County today to visit Potomac Landing Elementary School. Reporter James Bock’s lede shows what we’ll be talking about, the de facto “resegregation” of schools.

It’s been just over four decades since the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision ended legally segregated schools under the condition that they were inherently unequal. 

But in this D.C. suburb, Black families are saying that separate doesn’t have to mean unequal.

“When I look at my children and the children I deal with here, there is not a sense of inferiority,” said Col. Frank Taylor, who is in the Air Force and has children who attend Potomac Landing. “The important thing for children is to be in an environment where learning is important, where they feel safe, feel love from the faculty and feel community support.”

The phenomenon in PG County is pretty straightforwardly American. Black families — often wealthier — left the city to move to the suburb. White families, not wanting to have Black neighbors, left those suburban communities, resulting in what this article calls “resegregation.”

“If whites stopped moving, we could have mixed schools,” said Dunbar Brooks, a Black member of the Baltimore County school board.

Theodore M. Shaw, of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, acknowledged that learning could be achieved equally, but he also has his worries. “If we’re talking about the socialization process that occurs in public schools, my view is black and white and brown and yellow students profit educationally by being in desegregated schools,” he said.

As part of a comprehensive school boundary plan, Potomac Landing Elementary School closed following the 2022-2023 school year with its students joining those of the also closed Isaac J. Gourdine Middle School in the new Colin Powell Academy K-8. The new school is 4% white, but to underscore some of the demographic changes in PG County the last three decades, Black students make up just 52% of the population while Hispanic students now are 37% of the student body.  

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

Gas prices are still accelerating.