Tigers' dark year brings '88 to light

Baseball: For many Orioles fans, Detroit's 3-25 start brings back unpleasant memories of Baltimore's 0-21 streak to begin the 1988 season.

Baseball

Before there was the exhilarating "Why not?" season in 1989, there was the debilitating "Why us?" debacle of 1988.

We thought we had put it behind us, but the early-season struggles of the 2003 Detroit Tigers have brought it all back.

The Tigers tied the '88 Orioles for the worst 28-game start of the modern major league era when they lost to the lowly Tampa Bay Devil Rays on Saturday to fall to 3-25. They've won a few since then, including last night's 7-6 victory over the Orioles, but that doesn't change anything.

This historically bad baseball team has conjured up the repressed memories of a hysterically bad season in Baltimore, a season of such futility that it makes the past five years at Camden Yards seem benign in comparison.

Of course, that was the year the Orioles set a dubious major league record with 21 straight losses to open the season and went on to lose a club-record 107 games. It was so bad it was good.

The onerous Orioles found so many ways to lose so early in the season that they became a national phenomenon.

They got their manager fired in little more than a week, then proved to Cal Ripken Sr. that it was nothing personal by losing the next 15 in a row for Frank Robinson.

They had new general manager Roland Hemond so discombobulated that he broke out the champagne-soaked suit he wore during the Chicago White Sox's division title celebration of 1983 and vowed to wear it every day until the season-opening losing streak ended.

But somehow, the Orioles managed to maintain their dignity and, perhaps even more surprising, the fiery Robinson managed to maintain his sense of humor.

Late in the streak, a radio reporter walked up to Robinson and asked him what he tells his players when they arrive at the ballpark on the day after another discouraging loss.

"I'm glad to see you guys showed up again," he replied.

The players weren't the only ones who kept showing up.

When the Orioles finally won a game on April 29 at Comiskey Park and returned to Memorial Stadium with a 1-23 record three days later, they were met with a sellout crowd that gave them a standing ovation. It was a magic moment that represented the beginning of a new era for baseball in Baltimore.

That same night -- May 2, 1988 -- more than 50,000 were on hand to hear the Orioles announce a deal with the State of Maryland to build a downtown ballpark that would become one of the architectural jewels of professional sports.

The Orioles and their surprisingly faithful fans would have to stick out five more months of frustration, but they were rewarded with an unlikely division title run in 1989 that also captured the national imagination before falling short on the final weekend of the season.

The early-season collapse of 1988 forced the Orioles organization to take a hard look at itself. The front office stopped trying to cling to its storied past and started making decisions that made sense for the future. Hall of Famer Eddie Murray would become an unfortunate casualty, but the Orioles were better for their year as the worst.

The 2003 Tigers should be so lucky. The Orioles fell to a major league record-worst 3-25 record 15 years ago today, but somehow parlayed that pathetic performance into something positive. They went from lovable losers to laudable contenders in just one year and embarked on a decade of progress that turned the Orioles into a large-market franchise and peaked with back-to-back appearances in the American League Championship Series in 1996 and '97.

The same thing could happen to the bedraggled Detroit franchise. The Tigers already have a new downtown ballpark, and they already have one of the team's all-time greats (Alan Trammell) in the manager's office. They also have a team packed with young players who will either benefit from this test of character or be buried by it.

What they don't have is a sense for the dramatic. The Orioles of 1988 proved that it is better to be fantastically bad than routinely awful. They wouldn't be remembered the same way if their one victory in the first 24 games of 1988 had come in Game 10, as the Tigers' first win did this year.

The Streak, as it was called before Cal Ripken appropriated the term in the early '90s, made a hopeless season special in a strange, Charm City sort of way.

Tigers fans are never going to wax nostalgic about 2003 the way some Orioles fans remember 1989 -- especially in this, the 16th year since the once-proud Tigers' franchise participated in the postseason -- but they may someday remember it as the darkness before the dawn.

The Tale of Two 3 - 25 Teams

1988 BALTIMORE ORIOLES * 2003 DETROIT TIGERS

Here's how the 1988 Orioles and 2003 tigers stacked up by position after tying for the worst 28-game start in modern major league history.

FIRST BASE