Camden Yards crowd surges for Tupac Shakur bobblehead night as Orioles host Athletics

BALTIMORE (AP): Supporters began gathering outside Camden Yards well ahead of Friday’s first pitch, hoping to collect a Tupac Shakur bobblehead at the stadium.

“I grabbed three of them,” Baltimore Orioles manager Craig Albernaz said before the hosts fell 4-3 to the Athletics.

Shakur spent portions of his upbringing in New York and Baltimore, then shifted to the San Francisco Bay Area toward the close of the 1980s. During the early 1990s he was based in Oakland, California, circumstances the club highlighted in timing a remembrance of the rapper, who was killed in 1996, for an evening against the Athletics—the franchise that vacated Oakland before last season. As the visitors’ starters were introduced, the public-address system leaned into the opening of ‘California Love’.

Pressed on a personal favourite, Albernaz pointed to Pain.

“This is back on – I'm dating myself – Napster or LimeWire, trying to download that,” he said.

He added that All Eyez On Me best captures the current Baltimore club.

Because each athlete on the Orioles’ active roster arrived in 1989 or afterward, how well the group knows Shakur’s catalogue was anyone’s guess.

“I hope so,” Albernaz said. “I probably should ask around about that.”

Sekyiwa ‘Set’ Shakur, the entertainer’s sister, supplied the ceremonial first pitch.

Turnstiles recorded 39,311 people, the strongest Orioles home attendance since opening day.