Pennant

SORRY, Colts fans. That wasn't the greatest game ever played. It was the greatest game ever played in football, but the greatest game ever played in sports was 40 years ago today. It took place at the Polo Grounds in New York, and the Giants won the National League pennant over the Dodgers, 5-4.Bobby Thompson, of course, won it with a homer off Ralph Branca, while announcer Russ Hodges shouted, "The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! . . ." It was a shout heard 'round the world (as we knew it then)

Sept. 24, 2000: Rookie running back Jamal Lewis scores his first NFL touchdown and the Ravens defense holds Cincinnati to 4 rushing yards as Baltimore crushes the visiting Bengals, 37-0. "We set a standard with this game," defensive tackle Tony Siragusa said of the Ravens' second shutout. They'll finish with four - and the Super Bowl trophy. Sept. 27, 1996: Called out on strikes in Toronto, the Orioles' Roberto Alomar spits in umpire John Hirschbeck's face and is slapped with a five-game suspension.

With the baseball season down to its final weeks, it's time to determine who will prevail in the only races remaining -- the AL East and NL West.In the AL East, will Toronto hold on? Or will Boston, 3 1/2 games back, or Detroit, 5 1/2 behind, make a last successful run despite not facing the Blue Jays the rest of the season?In the NL West, will Atlanta hold the 1 1/2 -game lead it earned this weekend by winning two out of three from Los Angeles? Or will the Dodgers even the score in their upcoming series in Los Angeles and go on to win the pennant?

A month before he joined the Orioles as the organization's new executive director of international recruiting, curiosity took Fred Ferreira to the Mexican coastal city of Mazatlan. With more than 40 years of experience scouring for international talent, Ferreira has uncovered many diamonds in the rough throughout Latin America. And his most recent such discovery emerged last November in the Mexican Pacific League, a world away from the intimidating cathedrals of the American League East like Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park.

He is the answer to a trivia question: Who drove in the winning run that eliminated the New York Yankees from the American League East race and clinched a playoff spot for the Orioles in 1974?It wasn't anyone on the Orioles roster. It was George Scott of the Milwaukee Brewers.Eight games out of first place on Aug. 28, the Orioles won 28 of their last 34 games, but it was Scott who delivered the knockout blow with a bases-loaded single in the 10th inning against the Yankees.It was 11: 06 p.m. on Oct. 1 and the Orioles were still in the clubhouse in Detroit, where they had agonized through a 7-6 win over the Tigers that afternoon to clinch a tie."

Athletics: Won 17 games in July for the first time since 1990, when they won AL pennant. Pub Date: 8/01/96

The wrong birds won the pennant, again.General Aidid made General Cedras' antics possible, in case no one had noticed.Merging Bell Atlantic with TCI gives one corporation control of every signal going in and out of your house. Bring back semaphore.Cheer up. The Postal Service is getting a new logo.

Never mind the division. A pennant or nothing.The interrupted Southeast Asian economic miracle is really something, if only you could breathe and see it through the smoke and haze.It's Baltimore Book Festival weekend in the City That Reads. If someone you know was ever going to read a book, now wouldbe the time.Be patriotic. Eat Chesapeake rockfish.Pub Date: 9/26/97

The following is a transcript of an argument that erupted in the Orioles' conscience soon after Arthur Rhodes limited the Minnesota Twins to six hits in seven-plus innings last night. The baseball disciples Patience and Pennant are arguing.Pennant: "Did you see that? Holy Vida Blue! That kid could win the division for us."Patience: "But he belongs in Rochester. He needs a little more polishing in the minor leagues. You know he does."Pennant: "How can you say that? He came in cold tonight and shut down the best-hitting team in the league.

Quote: "I'd like to feel [DH Chili Davis will] be fine. [Surgery] was a no-brainer, so we can have him right for the pennant run." -- Yankees manager Joe Torre.It's a fact: White Sox sluggers Albert Belle and Frank Thomas went a combined 0-for-8 with five strikeouts yesterday.Who's hot: The Red Sox's Nomar Garciaparra extended his hitting streak to 14 games with a third-inning single.Who's not: The Tigers lost their sixth straight.On deck: Next weekend's Yankees-Tigers series, originally set for Detroit, was rescheduled for Yankee Stadium.

The Orioles will unveil a bronze sculpture of Cal Ripken Jr. at Camden Yards on Thursday, the 17th anniversary of the day Ripken broke Lou Gehrig's record for consecutive games played. There was probably a time early in the season when fans expected the Ripken unveiling - the fifth in a series of six honoring the club's greats - to be the only bright spot in another dreary September of Orioles baseball. But in a twist that has shocked the baseball world, the current team is an even better story than the nostalgia.

Around the Baltimore metropolitan area, something is happening. It hasn't happened in many years - almost a generation, in fact. It's the end of August, the Orioles are in a pennant race, and there's a sense of possibility in the air. People are turning to MASN to see if the Orioles are staging yet another dramatic, late-inning comeback. They're flipping on WBAL to hear Joe Angel proclaim - as he has already done more times this season than all of last year - that "The Orioles are in the win column!"

Try to imagine it: a Sunday afternoon in late September, and not one so far away that it feels like a fantasy. Another sweltering Baltimore summer has dissipated, and in the cool autumn breeze you can smell fresh grass and meat on the grill. You're full of nervous energy because, as is the case today back in real life, it's the day of the Ravens home opener at M&T Bank Stadium. Maybe you're even heading to the stadium, ready to tailgate. But something is distracting you. It's stirring up old feelings, emotions so dormant you almost forgot you once had them.

The day began 20 years ago with overcast skies and wisps of fog, a Friday. Despite the fact that the weekend is not expected to brighten, Baltimore baseball fans bask in a warm glow that has been building since April. Their team, the American League cellar-dweller just a year earlier, has a chance to win the pennant. Just one game back of the Toronto Blue Jays with three to play, the Orioles need a sweep at SkyDome to make everyone forget about the previous season, the one that began with 21 losses and ended with 107. "From the beginning, everybody figured they didn't have a chance," recalls Peter Angelos, still nearly four years away from becoming the owner.

Two rare baseball phenomena are on course to happen so far this season, but, like asteroids that come hurtling into Earth's part of the galaxy, they are unlikely to hit the mark. These two things intersect at 1060 West Addison in Chicago, where the Atlanta Braves are playing the Cubs at Wrigley Field. Chipper Jones, the Braves' superb third baseman, is hitting over .400 for the first third of the season, chasing an elusive mark last achieved by Ted Williams in 1941. And the Cubs, the most championship-famished franchise in the history of major American sports, have the best record in the major leagues, with hopes of capturing their first pennant since 1945 and even - maybe, perhaps - their first world championship since nineteen-aught-eight.

There's a time-honored expression: "When one bowling alley closes, another opens." At least, I think that's it. And even if not, I'm using it because it's perfect for the top of today's column: There's a new bowling alley opening in Baltimore. Too many of our cherished, elderly lanes have died off in recent years - Seidel's closed in May at the age of 78 - but Mustang Alleys is due to open in another week or so on the edge of Little Italy, at Bank Street and Central Avenue. Mustang Alleys will be a sports bar-bistro with a party room on the second floor of a 19th-century tack factory that's been renovated and rigged for upscale bowling.

Outdoing TV host Robin Leach of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," Pennant Productions Ltd. hopes to take viewers on a more extravagant trip -- a three-dimensional animated video tour of the Baltimore Convention Center.The five-minute odyssey serves a simple purpose: to sell Baltimore and, even more, to sell convention space to prospective clients."What makes this better is, you can fly through the building," said Will Schwarz, president of Baltimore-based Pennant. "You can really get a sense of the dramatics this building would present in a way you couldn't possibly do by physically touring it."

CLEVELAND -- They used to call it the Mistake by the Lake. Now, Cleveland has a revitalized civic center, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and, if the Orioles don't figure something out in a hurry, soon will have a second American League pennant in three years.Catcher Sandy Alomar hit a dramatic, game-winning single off Armando Benitez in the bottom of the ninth inning to send the Orioles to an 8-7 defeat and push them to the brink of elimination in the best-of-seven American League Championship Series.

Forty years ago last week, the Orioles bagged a pennant and threw themselves a party. For three hours, the new American League champions whooped and hollered and turned the visitors' clubhouse in Kansas City into Lake Champagne. Players sloshed through the bubbly, pelted one another with sandwiches and reveled in having brought Baltimore its first AL flag. Manager Hank Bauer received a mustard-and-mayonnaise shampoo. Slugger Boog Powell dunked sportswriters in the whirlpool bath, upside-down.

Ten years later, Orioles fans remember the play, the kid and the umpire's call. Has it been that long since the team's playoff hopes turned on a 12-year-old's theft of a long fly ball? Since Jeffrey Maier reached over the wall at Yankee Stadium to pick the pocket of an Orioles outfielder? Since the ump twirled his finger, giving Derek Jeter a homer, the Yanks new life and the Orioles cause to loathe a giddy sixth-grader? The bitterness lingers. In baseball chat rooms, Orioles fans still berate Maier for his interference in Game 1 of the 1996 American League Championship Series and bemoan the play they say cost their team the pennant.