The 2025 World Series was epic. Too bad one team had to lose, and too bad it was the Toronto Blue Jays. We were rooting for them, and I’m sure that was the case throughout most of Birdland, home of the soon-to-be-great-again (and Blue Jays AL East rival) Baltimore Orioles.
Next year will bring the 60th anniversary of the Orioles’ first World Series championship, when Baltimore beat the Dodgers in four straight games.
Ticket prices for World Series games this year were nuts, with reports from Los Angeles of box seats going for the resale price of $30,000. Cheap seats for last night’s Game 7 at the Rogers Centre in Toronto started at around $1,500, with a resale value of $2,400, according to The Athletic. For Game 6 on Friday night, a lower box seat started at $1,200 — or 100 times what a similar seat cost for Game 3 at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore in 1966.
Imagine: 12 bucks to see Brooks and Frank, the great Robinsons, face the Dodgers and Don Drysdale in the long shadows on 33rd Street.
As I note in this essay on Substack, when I set out to write a third play about Baltimore, I looked to the Orioles of 1966. Watching from Massachusetts, where I grew up, I found it cool that two men named Robinson — Brooks and Frank, one white, the other Black — were united to lead the Birds to the top.
McKeldin
Decades later, as I did further research about the social changes and turmoil in Baltimore in 1966, the symbolism of that collaboration took on much larger meaning, coming as it did in the midst of the civil rights movement.
That’s what led to my new play, “No Mean City: Baltimore 1966.” It will be on stage in March. Tickets are already selling well, and it’s inspiring to see public interest in this aspect of the city’s history.
In addition to Brooks and Frank, the central characters are civil rights leaders Juanita Jackson Mitchell, the Rev. Herbert O. Edwards and Floyd McKissick, and Baltimore’s last Republican mayor, Theodore Roosevelt McKeldin. He was unlike any Republican of prominence today.
Substack essay: Once Upon a Time: A Republican Who Supported Civil Rights
(The magazine, ticket stub and World Series menu were given to me by Mayor McKeldin’s family.)
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Published by Dan Rodricks