Check out 1993. I think that the O's were pretty crummy on Sundays until June or July.

This isn't a new phenomenon. For many years, my wife and I had partial-season tickets that included Sunday games (both at Memorial Stadium and Camden Yards), and the Orioles lost far more of those Sunday games than they won. It quickly became clear to us that the problem was the old "day game after a night game syndrome" in which the manager would regularly rest a number of veteran starters on Sunday afternoons.

We loved going to the park on Sundays, but reached the point where we swapped or gave away a lot of those tickets because we got so sick of the losing. And we never understood why the management didn't ever take the fans into consideration – depending on pitching match-ups, of course, there is no reason they can't rest some stars on Saturday nights and then play them on Sunday afternoons at least some of the time. -------------------------------------- Joe, Huh, that's an interesting take. Buy shouldn't it balance out if that's the practice of most teams. -- Bill O.

I've never seen much like this -- very strange.

It often seemed to us that the opponents were coming at us with full firepower on those Sundays while we routinely rested 2 or 3 regulars, but surely the other guys were at least sometimes resting some of their guys, too. Maybe the Birds just didn’t fare well in any day games over those stretches, or maybe it was more reflective of a lack of Orioles' bench depth vs. many of their opponents over the years. But I think we just sat out too many of our good guys at once to have much of a chance to win those games.

I just remembered this after I hit "post" – coincidental or not, I'll throw it on the "bad Sunday" pile. Wilson Alvarez's no-hitter for the Chicago White Sox against the Birds came on Sunday, Aug. 11, 1991 at Memorial Stadium.

I went back and looked it up, and our line-up that day included Juan Bell (instead of Billy Ripken) at second, David Segui (instead of Joe Orsulak) in the outfield, Leo Gomez (instead of Craig Worthington) at third, Chris Hoiles (instead of Sam Horn) at DH and Bob Melvin (instead of Hoiles) behind the plate. Maybe some of those regulars were hurt or sitting out because of match-up reasons, but clearly we didn't have our A-team on the field that day, either. ---------------------------------------- Wow, great records. -- Bill O.