The new manager was a familiar face—Frank Robinson, who had moved into the Orioles’ front office as a special assistant after a long career in uniform as a player, coach, and manager. Now fifty-two, he laughed when asked about taking over a winless team playing so poorly. “My family thinks I’m crazy,” he said.

After the season-opening losing streak reached eight games, it almost ended against Kansas City at Memorial Stadium. Boddicker threw a five-hitter with 10 strikeouts and had retired eighteen Royals in a row when Jim Eisenreich singled with two out in the top of the ninth and the score tied. The next batter, Frank White, hit a routine line drive that Jeff Stone, in left, charged and then lost in the lights. Eisenreich came around to score the winning run.

The next two losses also were by one run. McGregor took a 2–1 lead into the eighth, but the Indians scored twice and won. Then Morgan and Cleveland’s Greg Swindell matched shutouts for nine innings. After the Indians finally scored a run in the top of the 11th, Murray crashed a one-out, one-on double off the top of the right-field wall, missing a game-winning homer by six inches. But the runner, Jim Traber, advanced only from first to third before having to stop, preventing the tying run from scoring. Kennedy then struck out with the bases loaded to end the game. He never took the bat off his shoulders.

Bill Ripken: “We lost in every way. We scored runs and gave up more, and then sometimes when we didn’t score, we gave up just a little, but it was enough. The one with Stone [and the lights], the poor guy. He did everything in his power. He gave up his body. He tried to get hit in his face if he couldn’t catch it.”

Cal Ripken Jr.: “Sometimes you just start the season and things don’t bounce right. That’s happened many times. One year we were experimenting with Eddie at third and DeCinces at second [in ’78], and Milwaukee scored 100 runs in a three-game series out there. Those kind of things happen, losing streaks and slumps. But then Dad got fired, and that just threw the whole thing into a state of shock. Whatever could happen bad after that seemed to happen. It was the worst streak of crazy circumstances I can recall. So many things you would just shake your head at and say, ‘I thought it couldn’t get any worse.’ But it just kept getting worse.”

Eddie Murray: “It had started before that season. We hadn’t played well for a couple of years. But that was hard to take. When Traber was on first and I hit a ball off the top of the wall, and Traber didn’t score, you went, ‘How can this happen?’ But we had a team having on-the-job training, basically.”

Fred Lynn: “The ways we lost were amazing. On the play where the runner [Traber] didn’t score on [Murray’s] ball off the wall, I mean, we couldn’t even run the bases. I wouldn’t want to go through it again, not in any line of work. You couldn’t get away from it. No matter what we did or where we went or what time it was, people were reminding us. Like we didn’t know. They’d go, ‘You know, you’ve lost 10 in a row.’ And you’d go, ‘Oh, jeez, thanks for reminding me.’ And you couldn’t even turn on the TV. It was all over the TV.”

With Ripken and Murray each batting under .200 and the team average at .186, the club stopped posting averages on the scoreboard—too embarrassing. Leaving on a 12-game road trip never sounded so good. But the trip opened with an epic show of ineptitude in Milwaukee, a 9–5 fiasco featuring four errors, two passed balls, two missed signs, a baserunning blunder, a misjudged fly ball, and another blown lead. The Orioles’ record was now 0–13.

Bill Ripken: “[Reserve catcher] Carl Nichols came in to pinch hit in the ninth that night in Milwaukee, and it was freezing. Carl came all the way in from the dungeon out there in the bullpen, running across the field to pinch hit. He came in, and he had three parkas on, and he’d been sitting out in the ’pen for nine innings, and he looked like he was frozen solid. He actually hit a ball out to right-center. But they caught it, and that was the game.”

Eddie Murray: “Somehow all the blame got put on me. I didn’t have a whole lot of protection behind me and not a whole lot of people getting on in front of me, but I still put up some decent numbers—even though the other teams knew there weren’t many people in the lineup who could beat them. The guys on the other side were going, ‘How can you be doing what you’re doing, and we’re not even supposed to be pitching to you?’ My thing was, it had to be done early in games. I remember Sparky [Anderson] walking me intentionally with a man on third in the first inning.”

With the national media converging on the spectacle, the Orioles yielded nine runs to the Royals in the bottom of the first of loss number 16. “That was not a professional ball game as far as the Baltimore Orioles were concerned,” Frank Robinson said. The next day, the Royals scored the winning run in the bottom of the ninth after a wind gust blew Bo Jackson’s routine fly ball off the wall for a triple. A 3–1 loss after that pushed the streak to 18 and dropped starting pitcher Mark Thurmond’s record to 0–4.

Mark Thurmond: “You can laugh about it now, but at the time, going through it, that was miserable. Absolute torture. I remember waking up and thinking, ‘Hey, we’re already out of it.’ That was pretty depressing. We were not a very good team. That was obvious. There were some players who could play and had put up some good numbers at other places, but anything that could go wrong did. Add that to the fact that we weren’t very good to begin with, and you have a streak.”

Bill Ripken: “You can’t fathom it. The press was all over us. I mean, I saw cameras with CNN in the clubhouse, and they weren’t even covering sports yet. It’s not good to start getting national coverage for something like that. But I mean, you still go out and compete. Nobody on that team quit or blamed anybody else. That’s a tribute to the guys. We never said a word one way or another. No, ‘you stink.’ There was none of that.”

» NEXT