My Canadian bride rescues me from the dying days of baseball.

You know what? I've been silent on the subject of my Baltimore Orioles for entirely too long. Yes, I said "my". The day I was born at Greater Baltimore Medical Center, Oriole Hall of Fame manager Earl Weaver was ejected from a game, as was his style. Being born and raised in Baltimore, I was destined to root for the Birds. There are pictures of me sitting in my high chair, wearing a tiny replica Jim Palmer jersey. My dad took me to my first game at Memorial Stadium when I was five. I didn't take to the team or the sport right away, but I've been draping myself in black and orange for thirteen years now, over half of my life. Sometimes it seems a lot longer. I have seen a lot of great players and moments in that time. Mike Mussina striking out fifteen Indians in the American League Championship Series. Eddie Murray returning to hit his 500th home run. That fantastic bench-clearing brawl against the hated Yankees. Cal Ripken...well, everything about Cal Ripken, especially the urban legend that his consecutive games streak was jeopardized when he was arrested for assaulting Kevin Costner after catching him in mid-coitus with Mrs. Kelly Ripken.

But those grand moments have been few and far between lately. "Dem O's" won the World Series in 1983, when I was still an infant. In my early years of fandom, they made back-to-back playoff appearances in 1996-1997. At no other time in my life have the Orioles even been to the post-season. Still, I've supported them through it all. When they let my heroes like Mussina and Rafael Palmeiro leave for greener pastures in New York, Texas, and the like, I still went to Camden Yards and shouted myself hoarse. As they populated the team with has-beens like David Segui and never-wases like Omar Daal, I tuned in to Comcast SportsNet for the first pitch. Even when the ragtag Orioles of 2001 battled to an even record late in the season, only to crash and burn with a dreadful 32 losses in their final 36 games, I gritted my teeth and hoped that I had seen the worst. But I can safely say that the second half of the 2005 baseball season has been one of my most frustrating and depressing experiences as a sports fan, and sometimes it leaves me wondering why I keep coming back.

Sure, the losing sucks. In my more fatalistic moments, I've wondered if my home team will ever win another championship in my lifetime. But when the O's burst out of the gate in first place in April, and stayed there for two whole months, I allowed myself to enjoy it, with a little caution along the way. For the first time in recent memory, the Orioles were winning. Fans, reporters, other players were all talking about them! My team! The Yankees and even the Red Sox were looking up from behind. As soon as it came, it was all gone, though. Injuries and inconsistency caught the Birds, and they fell hard. In a month and a half, they've gone from first to near-worst, with no signs of recovery. It eventually cost the manager, Lee Mazzilli, his job. That sucks for him, but someone always takes the fall, and he was about as interesting as the soap scum I just scrubbed off of my bathtub. Oh well.

No, the worst part is the actions of a select few players who are giving Baltimore a bad name. If you watch Conan O'Brien with any frequency, you know that star first baseman and Viagra pitchman Rafael Palmeiro tested positive for steroids back in May, although he wasn't suspended until after he notched his 3,000th career hit in August. When I first heard about it, I was just stunned. I spent my adolescent years claiming him as my favorite player, and was glad to see him return to the Orioles at the end of his career, at a time when he was setting records and cementing his place in the Hall of Fame. I defended and trusted him in March, as he pointed defiantly, stared down a Congressional panel and declared that he had "never used steroids...period". I wanted to believe that it was a technicality or a misunderstanding, even as Raffy made flimsy excuses about confidentiality agreements and mistaken ingredients in health supplements. I held on to my last shreds of hope as he said, amid wild speculation, that the truth would come out soon. In the end, that was all I wanted. Even if he was guilty, I would have forgiven him - most people would have - if he had just spoken candidly, honestly. No rehearsed written statements, "no comments", or flimsy lawyerese and double-talk. But I'm still waiting. Meanwhile, he just keeps digging himself deeper, attracting more scorn and jokes by resorting to earplugs to block out the jeers of a relatively sparse and apathetic Toronto crowd...the only road fans he faced before shutting down for the season with a knee injury. Is it his knee that is hurting, or his fragile ego? Well, you know what the public is going to say. I can't say I disagree with them. Rafael Palmeiro is out of second chances with me.

However, ol' Raffy is a boy scout compared to the flushed, bloated nightmare that is Sidney Ponson. The Orioles signed the righty pitcher as a seventeen year old in his native Aruba, and stuck by him for ten years as he struggled to develop into a major league quality pitcher. They didn't even give up in 1996, when he collected his first DUI while pitching for their minor league team in Frederick. So when all of that patience seemed to pay off with a 17-win season in 2003, the Birds rewarded Ponson with a three-year contract worth over 22 million dollars. They were confident that he would finally be the star pitcher to take the team to the next level. How did he respond to this newfound responsibility? Simple. He showed up in the spring weighing in at 260 pounds, and sputtered his way to an abysmal 3 win, 12 loss first half of 2004. He turned things around in the second half, winning 8 of 11 decisions, but it was too little, too late. The O's were way out of contention. Still, it seemed to set the right tone for 2005.

However, 2005 began with the Sidster in an Aruban prison after he caused a drunken ruckus on a beach and ended up punching a judge. If you haven't noticed yet, Sidney likes his beer. A lot. It seems to cause all of his problems; it's funny how that works. Ponson was apologetic, and he and the team did their best to put the incident behind them...for a few weeks, until he hurt his pitching hand in an altercation with a rowdy fan in a Fort Lauderdale restaurant. To Sid's credit, he was not the aggressor, but he still had to realize that he was under a microscope more than ever. With this in mind, he went out at got pulled over for his second DUI, which was also his second criminal offense in a month. Maybe you can see where this is going. As the Orioles went from first to worst, the constant was horrible, embarrassing pitching from Sidney Ponson. It was no wonder...his alcohol-fueled exploits were common knowledge to Baltimoreans. I myself was regaled with one such tale from my high school English teacher, a fierce party animal of a woman who apparently got into a shouting match with Sir Sidney in a local bar. "I no talk to you no more!", she kept telling us in her best Aruban accent. Class act, that Sidney.

So what is a baseball club to do? To their credit, they tried to make him someone else's problem...and came tantalizingly close. A potential trade to the San Diego Padres was vetoed by the other man in the deal, Padres veteran Phil Nevin. Don't get me started on that. Instead, Sid was still our problem as a calf injury mercifully landed him on the disabled list. Without his pesky pitching dates to worry about, our hero had ample time to get pulled over on I-95 just outside of Baltimore at 2 A.M. for his second DUI this year. That's three strikes overall, if you're counting. Well, fool me...umm...I won't get fooled again. The Baltimore Orioles at long last invoked the little-used morals clause in the standard player contract to void the remaining year and 13 million dollars left on Ponson's deal. We are free...sort of.

You see, the Players' Association has filed a grievance, claiming that the Orioles released Big Boy without "just cause". The sickening thing is that they will win the grievance. No one has ever successfully used the morals clause - it's been tried in reaction to players with cocaine addictions, a healthy appetite for prostitutes, you name it. Their union is just too powerful. You would think that endangering his own life and the lives of others and being a public nuisance and a criminal, and an embarrassment to a proud organization and city, as well as drinking himself into terrible shape for an athlete, would be "just cause". It's always good to know where the priorities of the MLBPA lie. No wonder my uncle has given up on baseball.
Maybe I should, too.

But there is a light at the end of the tunnel for me. I am not nearly cool or masculine enough to deny that I watch reality television. The show that captivates me these days is Rock Star INXS, where some ghoulish washed-up Aussie rockers set about the task of replacing their lead singer on worldwide television, seeing as how he only committed suicide last DECADE. But I just can't get enough of these cutting-edge twentysomethings and thirtysomethings performing glorified karaoke of rock's greatest hits, from the Rolling Stones to Foreigner to the Killers. There's one contestant in particular who...how can I say this...

I'm in love. Her name is Suzie McNeil, and she's an adorable blond pixie from Toronto. She has battled all the way to the final four, and is unquestionably the underdog, considering where she started in the competition. At one point, she was finishing on the outskirts of the fan voting so often that she fashioned herself a nifty hat that read, "Queen of the Bottom Three". But in recent weeks she has vaulted to the forefront with energetic renditions of "Start Me Up" and "Bohemian Rhapsody". So really, what more do you need? All I have to do is figure out how to get her to marry me. It's a perfect scenario, really. She is cute, has a great sense of her own fashion (complete with nose ring), and can serenade me with REM and Queen. Plus, my sister approves of her. Best of all, I could finally take asylum in beautiful, Bushless Canada. What more could you want?

See, I've got plenty of good ideas. It's just my execution that is lacking...

Current Music: Suzie McNeil - Losing My Religion