COMES A HORSEMAN:

With another team, it might have been hard to pinpoint where the tipping point was from strange to surreal. With the 1988 Orioles, it's pretty easy: It was when the team fired the manager, who was also the father of their superstar shortstop and starting second baseman, after six games. Of all the awkward, preventable situations, that seems like the most awkward and preventable.

To be fair, there were on-field questions about Ripken, Sr. After the team mowed down by future all-star lefty Greg Swindell, it was certainly noticeable that more than half of the O's lineup was left-handed, especially toward the bottom of the order, where you would think more of the replaceable players would have been.

This is the kind of wholesale collapse that is needed to lose 11 games in a row. It can't be one player struggling. It has to be the entire team. It has to be a Powerball-level flukishness across the whole roster.

There were also extenuating circumstances. Ripken, Sr. had been arrested in February for driving under the influence of alcohol, and he pled guilty a few hours before being fired. It's hard to know just how much that incident played into it.

Still, it's always, always, always weird when an awful team fires its manager after a week of being awful. Nobody was projecting the Orioles to win the AL East, and nobody was projecting them to get close. To fire a manager after six games -- a manager who had been with the organization since 1957 and happened to be the father of the best player in franchise history -- was bizarre at the time and just as bizarre in retrospect. What was different in April 1988 that wasn't true in November 1987? Why upend the leadership after a week instead of at any point during the offseason, when there would have been time to prepare?

Let's just assume there had to be a reason.

Which is placing a lot of trust in the team that screwed up their DL paperwork and eventually lost 21 straight games.

Whatever the reason, suddenly you had a shellshocked team that felt responsible for a baseball lifer getting fired. Hall of Famer Frank Robinson moved from the front office to the open managerial spot, and his reputation was as a no-nonsense manager, to the point where the Giants once based an ad campaign around it. But for the '88 Orioles, he decided to be jocular and jovial. He was going to joke with the reporters before the game, and he was going to take the heat after the game. It was a sound strategy with a team in a losing streak.

But they kept losing.

By the time the Orioles were 0-10, reporters fanned out for different angles on the same story that every baseball writer in America started covering. Someone got in touch with former Orioles manager Earl Weaver, who wasn't keen on inserting himself in the conversation. It would have been a bad look to start giving advice from a 1,000 miles away, and he knew it. But after some badgering, he said, "You know what I did to end a losing streak? I gave the ball to Dave McNally and said, 'Pitch a shutout.'"

That same night, Mike Morgan pitched nine shutout innings for the Orioles.

They still couldn't win. The Orioles were 0-for-12 with runners in scoring position, and they lost 1-0 in 11 innings.

This is the kind of wholesale collapse that is needed to lose 11 games in a row. It can't be one player struggling. It has to be the entire team. It has to be a Powerball-level flukishness across the whole roster. Now the record for the all-time worst start was looming. The previous record for losses to open a season was 13, and it was shared by the 1904 Washington Senators and 1920 Detroit Tigers.

It had been 68 years since another team had a start to the season this futile. The Orioles had a new manager and a bad team, but it was really hard to lose 13 games in a row to start the season.

They were probably fine.

While the Orioles' streak was going on, the Atlanta Braves had also lost their first nine games. Orioles play-by-play announcer Jon Miller was given a respite from calling all the losses, and he was sent by NBC to call the back end of a Game of the Week doubleheader ... between the Braves and Dodgers.

As Braves manager Chuck Tanner saw Miller walking on the field, he muttered, "We've had the famine ... now here comes the pestilence." 

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