[Why (and When) did You Become an Oriole Fan ???]

No, at fertilization!!!:laughlol:

That would be the same time as conception.

For me, it was 1969. Brooks, Boog, Frank, the best defensive team in MLB, the best pitching in MLB. As someone else put it, need I say more?

[REGGIE JACKSON'S Lost Season]

Free agency was a completely new concept in baseball, then, pretty much in sports in general. It's easy to look at hindsight after 35 years of watching free agent markets develop, and say he should have known what the "market" was. But pretty much before Catfish Hunter, there had never been a free agent market in any sport before. The notion that players could control their own destiny and sell themselves on the open market was new, untested, radical, upsetting and even unimaginable to many people. To say that a small market GM should have predicted the market and made an offer to prevent Jackson from going to the Yankees is the kind of historical revisionism that judges people by today's standards, such as complaining that women didn't have the right to vote in 1800, when such a notion was so far from the normal mores and ideas of the time that no one ever would have even considered it.

Wow, I'm aware of when FA started in MLB. Maybe you missed the part of my post where I said it's not hindsight and why.

[REGGIE JACKSON'S Lost Season]

Can you imagine how much better we would have been had we been able to resign him?

Yeah that was a major major mistake. According to reports at the time, Reggie was prepared to sign 4 years for $1 million. That was a bargain and the Os probably would have won the AL East those 4 years. And it's not hindsight, Hank Peters should have KNOWN that was a bargain price because Catfish Hunter received much more than that on the open market a year or two earlier. Maybe ownership wouldn't allow it, who knows. Peters called Reggie's proposal "mind-boggling". What a fool. It still irks me to this day.