"It just seemed like another two out of three we had to go out and win," Bill Ripken recalls.
"SkyDome had just opened up, and a young group of guys - Curt Schilling, Ben McDonald, Pete Harnisch and Steve Finley - were just trying to get our feet wet all at the same time," McDonald remembers. "I'm just about three months out of college ball and never played before more than about 12,000 people and come from a hometown of 18,000 people. All of the sudden at 21 years old I'm in the big leagues, I'm in the middle of a pennant race and experiencing 50,000 people in SkyDome. I was like a kid in a candy store. My eyes were as big as saucers."
The pitching matchups are Todd Stottlemyre (7-7) vs. Jeff Ballard (18-8), Jimmy Key (13-14) vs. Harnisch (5-9) and Jose Nunez (0-0) vs. Bob Milacki (14-12).
In the first game, the Orioles score one run in the first inning on a Phil Bradley home run, a score that holds until the eighth, when Toronto puts one on the scoreboard. In the 11th inning, Toronto pushes another run across. The Orioles' margin for error is gone.
"Nothing changed. The game was over, and we just said, 'We need to win these next two and we've got it,' " Bill Ripken says. "We actually looked at it like we're going to bring it back to Baltimore and win this."
Walking across railroad tracks on his way back to the hotel Friday night, Harnisch punctures his foot on a nail.
"If Harnisch don't step on that nail, who knows?" says catcher Chris Hoiles, a late-season call-up. "Don't get me wrong, Dave Johnson fills in and pitches a great game, but when something like that happens, it does something to you."
Loser of five straight, Johnson will pitch on three days' rest.
The Jays strike early with a run in the first, but Johnson steadies.
"I was smart enough to realize after about the second inning that you couldn't hit a ball out of that ballpark, with the dome open and the wind swirling, with a cannon. So I was throwing fastball after fastball right down the middle saying, 'Fellas, see how far you can hit it,' and they did, but they couldn't hit it out," says Johnson.
The Orioles answer with two in the third and one in the fourth. Johnson pitches seven innings, giving up two runs on two hits. But Toronto comes up three eighth-inning runs, and the Orioles have no answer in the ninth. Sadly, Baltimore fans have the answer to "Why Not? "
"Our magic dust ran out," says Bill Ripken. "Cinderella's slipper fell off at midnight and hit us."
