Dear Daily Princetonian

Editor's Note: This is the sixth in a series of postcards that The Daily Princetonian sports staff writers wrote about their experiences in the wide world of sports this summer. Keep reading throughout the next few weeks for more dispatches from across the country and around the world.

BALTIMORE — At least with sprint football, nobody really expects a win, so each year's winless season comes and goes without anything lost.

In my hometown of Baltimore this summer, however, we had a season so atrocious and painful that Hollywood's best screenwriters could not have been pitched anything more horrific. They say it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, but after you have had a tease like the one the Orioles gave us this summer, that cliché grates on the ear as falsely as Rafael Palmeiro's pleas of innocence.

In the opening months of the season, baseball could not have been better in Baltimore. We had breakout young stars knocking the ball out of the park day-in and day-out, weary old veterans pitching in and helping out the youngsters, robust starting pitchers racking up quality starts and a reliable bullpen getting the job done.

All of this was even more shocking coming in a season that began with absolutely no expectations and in a division with the returning world champion Boston Red Sox and perennial divisional-title winner New York Yankees. Just treading water and losing fewer than 100 games would have been counted as a victory.

But they did far better than that. Brian Roberts took over the league lead in batting average and never looked back. First we led the division for a week. Then a month. On April 28, when Baltimore had a .667 winning percentage and New York was still under .500, I wrote a column proclaiming a new empire in the East. In mid-June, we were still double-digit games above .500. Four players made it to the All-Star game. Yet there was something rotten in the state of Maryland.

It's hard to say where the tipping point came. I think it's safe to say the first visible signs that our luck was not to last were the string of injuries in the month of June — nearly every position on the field was affected by what, at the time, seemed to be just a particularly bad set of coincidences.

But beneath the surface there was more.

Sidney "Don't Mess With a Knight" Ponson was jailed for punching a judge and convicted of a DUI in January. Was it really a surprise when he was pulled over reeking of booze in late August, over two months since his last win?

Of course, the biggest bombshell came from our beloved Raffy. Just weeks after we reveled in his joining the elite group of players with 3,000 hits and 500 home runs, all hell broke loose when he was suspended for 10 days after testing positive for stanozolol, a banned steroid. This came five months after he had been the most vehement of a panel of players testifying before Congress on the use of illegal steroids in baseball, waving his finger as he denied being a user.

How guilty or innocent he is — or was — is almost of no consequence now. Even before Palmeiro came back and wore earplugs to block out the boos, before Lee Mazzilli — the once-triumphant O's manager — was fired, the camel's back was broken and the floodgates were loosed.

At least the pain has ended, now that the regular season is over. Now I can spend my fall waiting for a sprint football victory and, more importantly, reminding myself of those four magical words: "Wait 'til next year."