Memorial Stadium

PORT CHARLOTTE, Fla. -- Add this to the endless list of Nolan Ryan feats: The Orioles' new downtown stadium figures to become the 35th park in which he has pitched a major-league game.Ryan no doubt will be delighted with the Orioles' new home. He hated pitching at Memorial Stadium so much, he should have attended the closing ceremonies and torched the mound.His record on 33rd Street was 4-10. When he beat the Orioles there last April 20, it was his first victory in Baltimore since May 18, 1975.

Parents battling red tape to create their own neighborhood school in Waverly moved closer to their goal yesterday when Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke agreed that the school should be housed at Memorial Stadium.Residents and community leaders are determined to have the Stadium School open for grades four through nine by this September."If we just wanted to do bake sales and let [the school board] run everything else, they'd love us," said John Erby, a parent. "If we succeed, we're a threat."In a letter to the City Council released after he toured the old ballpark with Stadium School leaders, Mr. Schmoke said the school "will be sited" in first floor offices on the east side of the stadium.

IT LOOKED LIKE the alumni association of our youth. Two by two the old buffaloes marched out Tuesday night, listening to the cheers on Memorial Stadium Night in a suburban country club dining room the way they'd once heard them at an old, vanished ballpark on 33rd Street. "Mike Flanagan and Scott McGregor," said Fred Manfra, the Orioles radio announcer, his voice instantly drowned out by several hundred folks who'd ducked in out of the evening's rain and gathered to benefit the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum.

THIS IS about shame. We should all be ashamed for the travesty that has been created out of the opportunity to redevelop Memorial Stadium, a monument to those who served our country in a time not unlike that which we face today. Last winter, promising and well-thought-out concepts gave way to an ill-advised, under-financed project that is now more in question than ever. Memorial Stadium is forever gone, leaving a forlorn vestige of the proud landmark - a vestige that now seems threatened by yet another detour on a tortured path to nowhere.

IN THE RUINS of Memorial Stadium, Mike Gibbons gestures through a raw Saturday mist toward the place that used to be the Baltimore Orioles dugout. "Come here," says Gibbons, director of the Babe Ruth Museum, leading a farewell tour of the old 33rd Street ballpark before the wrecking balls prepare to muscle up this year. We trudge through the wet gravel and weeds that have turned the old playing field into something resembling an unkempt graveyard, until we reach the tunnel by the first base dugout and step down into the darkness.

They fought more than two years to get their neighborhood school. Then, yesterday, they found out it won't be in the neighborhood at all, but four miles away.News of the Baltimore school board's decision stunned and infuriated teachers, parents and students of the Stadium School, the city's first public school to be conceived and run primarily by teachers and parents but paid for by taxpayers.Last night, more than 125 of the school's backers gathered inside Memorial Stadium, where all summer teachers have toiled over lesson plans, parents have jammed meetings and students have even longed for school days.

In the final wheezing gasps of the life of Memorial Stadium, you could hear the old dinosaur's bones breaking apart.Out there in Section 30, in the former right field general admission section, they were tearing entire bleacher planks right out of their roots and then waving them in the fading daylight like prehistoric bones wrenched from the earth. In normal times, this is called vandalism. On a moment such as this, in the final breaths of a dying ballpark already marked for the wrecking ball, folks were simply taking owners' possession of a piece of their very own history.

The Maryland Stadium Authority ratified yesterday an agreement under which the lettered facade of Memorial Stadium will be kept intact as city-owned property, state officials said. The state's contract with Potts and Callahan to demolish the stadium was amended to add about $1 million to the original $2.5 million cost. The authority will hire a consultant and contractor to give advice on how to stabilize and support the 10-foot-high wall. Under the agreement between the state and the city, the memorial wall will be maintained by the city after the site is turned over to the nonprofit Govans Ecumenical Development Corp.

The Memorial Stadium countdown gets serious this weekend, with the Orioles opening a 10-game homestand against the Kansas City Royals. After this stretch of games, the Orioles will have only six home games remaining -- three against Boston Sept. 23-25, and the last three games of the season against Detroit, Oct. 4-6.In their continuing series of commemorations of special moments of the last 38 years, the Orioles tonight will recognize the 20th anniversary of the four pitchers who each won 20 games in 1971.

Fans attending the Miami Dolphins and New Orleans Saints exhibition game Aug. 27 at Memorial Stadium won't see instant replays on the ballpark's Diamond Vision scoreboard. That's because yesterday, a giant yellow crane arrived to dismantle the screen and haul it away.It was an unsentimental finale for the video scoreboard, a fixture since 1985.But its financing was complicated. And, in the end, that forced the decision to dismantle and remove the screen.The city had been paying for the video screen since 1985 in twice-a-year installments of $220,000 each -- a cost covered by advertising revenue.