Round number anniversaries are typically considered milestones, and so it is that the coming baseball season will mark the 40th anniversary of the Baltimore Orioles’ victory over the Philadelphia Phillies in the 1983 World Series.
The team is remembered as much for its cast of characters as for its considerable talent. There were three future members of the Hall of Fame: Cal Ripken Jr., who won the first of his two American League Most Valuable Player awards that season; Eddie Murray, the team’s home run and RBI leader, whose two homers sealed the Game 5 Series finale; and Jim Palmer, who, approaching the end of his storied career, came into the pivotal Series Game 3 in relief, and, that night, became the only pitcher ever to win a World Series game in three different decades.
But this happy remembrance is tinged with some understandable sadness among Orioles fans. Ripken’s catch of a soft liner for the last out of Game 5 represents another 40-year anniversary — the last time the team has appeared in a World Series game. I have tried to assuage my own despairing over the Orioles’ long absence from the fall classic by concocting the notion that it has not really been a full four decades, because the World Series was not played in 1994 due to a players’ strike. Nevertheless, despite my machinations, I cannot dispel the reality that it has been 40 calendar years since a World Series was played in Baltimore. phillies t shirts world series
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