I’ll never forget the first game I played in Paintsville, Kentucky. It was Opening Day, 1978, for the Highlanders in the all-rookie Appalachian League, and their management had draped red-white-and-blue banners everywhere, and the mayor, the mascot, and the band were all at the park. But there were just three little sections of stands about four rows high, and they weren’t full. There wasn’t much of a field, either, to be very frank. The dugouts couldn’t have been twenty feet long, and there were weeds up to the knees of the relief pitchers in the bullpen. Typical low–minor league playing conditions, in short: charming but definitely on the primitive side. Plus I made three errors and wasn’t much better at the plate.
Back at the motel, I picked up the phone to call home in Aberdeen. Now, if you listen to Brooks Carey, my roommate that summer, he’ll say I moaned and groaned and told my parents I wanted to come home. Brooks exaggerates, just like he exaggerates when he describes the scene at the park in Paintsville. I never said I wanted to go home and I never thought about calling it quits—no way—but those first two or three weeks in rookie ball were a low point, there’s no doubt about it. Brooks tried to encourage me, and he reminded me that the infield conditions in Paintsville, particularly, were poor, but I was scuffling. I wasn’t quite eighteen years old, baby-faced, barely shaving, and I’d never been away from my family for any length of time. I had some very unpolished talent, and I was going from being a star back home in Maryland to playing in a league in which everyone, especially the seasoned players coming out of college, was much closer to me in talent and performance, if not considerably better.
Jesse Orosco, for example. In Elizabethton, Tennessee, where the lights were about fifteen feet off the ground and not white, either, but yellow, we faced Jesse, who had two strong college years in California under his belt.
“Is he throwing hard?” someone asked in the dugout.
“It sounded like it,” I answered. Jesse was throwing seeds I barely saw. (Seed: vernacular for a fastball thrown so hard it looks mighty small approaching the plate.) Jesse was one of those college pitchers who totally outclass their rookie league competition.
Making matters worse for me, Tom Giordano saw some of those early games of the Orioles’ franchise in Bluefield, West Virginia. Although he never said a negative word, I pictured him thinking about me, See? I told you to stick with pitching. Some of our pitchers might have wondered the same thing. They’d see me messing around on the sidelines and say, “Hey, you could pitch.” Brooks Carey said that Al Widmar, the pitching coach, teased his own staff by saying, “We’re in trouble. The shortstop has the best stuff on the team.” But I was a player, not a pitcher! I felt I’d been talented enough to be drafted in the second round, and I knew the Orioles weren’t going to waste a high draft choice out of loyalty to my father. I didn’t think I was given any more opportunity or treated with more patience than anyone else. Still, I wasn’t proving my talent, so maybe some people were beginning to wonder. I probably called home once a week that summer, maybe more early on. Dad would ask about the symptoms—popping up; beating the ball into ground—and deliver the appropriate version of the stock answer: get back to basics.
After the first few weeks, I got my feet on the ground in Bluefield and settled down for the final five or six weeks of the short season. Dad got down to see me one game, and Elly saw a couple of games. My final .264 average was okay, with no homers, seven doubles, one triple. I’d hit a homer in our first intrasquad game and thought, Hey, this is easy. I was popping them out in batting practice with regularity, and I did ricochet a few drives off the wall in left and a few others off the top of the wall. But none over it. If just one of those drives had bounced over instead of back onto the field, things would have been a little easier for me in the beginning. I was disappointed by this lack of power, but Dad assured me that power comes with waiting on the ball, and most young hitters have trouble waiting. As it turned out, one of my offensive highlights that summer was the blooper I dropped in off the otherwise overpowering Orosco to win the game on August 24, my eighteenth birthday. The second baseman and right fielder blew their communication on the play. When Jesse joined the Orioles in 1995, I kidded him about that game-winner seventeen years earlier. He remembered it just like I did.
In the field that summer, I started out with a series of multi-error games, so the final fielding statistics were on the ugly side: 32 errors in 63 games. Accuracy on my throws was the main problem, and I was learning when to come in for the short hop, when to lay back, when to do everything. Meanwhile, Bobby Bonner had also joined the Baltimore organization that year. He was a really polished shortstop out of Texas A&M, light-years ahead of me as a fielder, and Mike Boddicker never let me forget it. Like Orosco, Mike was another one of those dominating college pitchers. He came out of the University of Iowa, and I don’t think he gave up a hit in the innings he pitched for us—a man in a boys’ league, literally. He was soon moved up to Double-A Charlotte, and he immediately dominated the Southern League as well. The next year Mike set the league record for most strikeouts in a game, 18, against Knoxville. Eventually he went on to have a great career with the Orioles, and I’m glad he did, but he really teased me for the few weeks he was in Bluefield, saying things like, “You aren’t going anywhere as long as Bobby Bonner’s in this organization. You’re going to die in the minor leagues.”
The thing is, that’s what I thought, too, when I first saw Bonner in the field. I told our manager, Wilbert “Junior” Miner, that it looked like I wouldn’t be playing much shortstop on this team. Junior told me not to worry because Bonner would be leaving for Charlotte soon. He did leave following our mini-training camp, and Mike followed him shortly. But Mike teased me even from Charlotte. When he wrote one of our teammates with shipping instructions for some stuff he’d left behind, he included a postscript: “Tell Cal there’s still hope. Bonner’s on the D.L. with a bad knee.”
Brooks Carey and I were good friends that season and throughout most of my three years in the minors. We shared apartments or were road roomies all the way up, and one year in winter ball as well. In the beginning, Brooks was way beyond me in maturity (depending on how you define maturity). He was a senior out of Florida State, but he was in a different kind of state that summer in the Appalachian League—a state of shock. In a college program like Florida State, you play on good fields and suit up in good clubhouses. Now here he was a so-called professional baseball player warming up in the weeds, as he put it.
“Where am I?” Brooks asked in mock horror one day, probably in Paintsville. “Am I hallucinating?”
In Bluefield, Brooks slept in a bathtub in a motel room for two weeks until he joined me in a boardinghouse when Boddicker moved up to Charlotte. Larry Sheets and Tim Norris, a couple of other players fresh out of high school, also stayed there. Tim was from the Baltimore area. He’d been drafted in the fourth round with great high school stats, and he had a baseball scholarship to Clemson, just in case. We’d met for the first time at Memorial Stadium when the Orioles had a private tryout for local players about a month before the June draft, then for a second time when the team had a Family Night for its draftees. The following morning I joined Tim, his mother, and his girlfriend in their car for the long drive to Bluefield. I guess I wasn’t too excited. I slept most of the way.
As lifelong Oriole fans, Tim and I were a natural match and spent hours that summer analyzing the big league team from a distance. The Orioles were good in 1978. Heck, they were always good, although the Yankees won their third straight American League East title. Tim is also as intense a competitor as I am. In pinball, pool, backgammon, hearts, and bowling we had to beat each other. Whoever won that particular game was the champion of the world.
Our boardinghouse in Bluefield was owned and operated by the elderly Mrs. Short. Her house had three bedrooms upstairs, one with twin beds. There was no air-conditioning, but you didn’t need it because Bluefield is in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, and it’s relatively cool in the summer. If the temperature does get to ninety degrees they serve free lemonade downtown, by way of apology. At least they used to. Mrs. Short placed a fan in every bedroom, and in the living room she set up what she called a wind machine, which might have blown her down if she had tried to stand in front of it. She was a frail little lady even then. I understand that Mrs. Short was still renting her three bedrooms in 1995, at the age of eighty-eight. During the streak coverage some enterprising reporter tracked her down, and she told him that altogether she’s had four hundred, maybe five hundred boarders since she took in her first one after her husband died in 1960. Some of these boarders she remembers, some she doesn’t, others she does remember but wishes she didn’t. She mails Christmas cards to her favorites, and she points to the corner bedroom and tells visitors, “Cal Ripken slept here.”
Tim, Larry, Brooks, and I treated our landlady with respect, and I think she liked us. She said we were the only boarders she had ever agreed to cook for. We asked her if she could have a large meal ready at 3 o’clock, and she said she’d do it until the first time one of us didn’t show up, and then she’d quit. We showed up. We were quiet when we came in late after games or very late after a road trip, although she was usually up anyway, waiting. She never went to our ball games, because of her arthritis, but sometimes she and her dog would join us on the front porch to talk about the game. I think the four of us paid her $25 per person per week, which also covered two loads of laundry. Our take-home pay was about $400 a month, so we actually saved some money.
It might surprise you to learn—it surprised me—that Mrs. Short’s baseball players were better behaved than the college students she sometimes housed. That’s what she said. The only time the ballplayers cut up that summer was on our road trips, especially when we were leaving a town on getaway day. For the last night, management usually packed the whole team into three or four motel rooms to save money. These crowded conditions usually led to all-out wrestling matches. I’ve never wrestled on a team, but I love to wrestle, and I’m tenacious and strong—more so now than when I was eighteen, but I could hold my own with most of the guys even then. We messed up some of those motel rooms, I have to admit, and some luggage got destroyed, although I don’t think we were ever chewed out.
Overall, though, we behaved. For one thing, Junior Miner was strict about beer. The way I figured it, in the minors the beer regulations depended on the manager, and “No beer” was Junior’s rule. One late night on the road we begged him to let us buy just one. “One lousy beer, Junior. Come on.” Finally he gave in, with the understanding that this would be the only time he’d allow it for the entire season. When we walked out of the convenience store, Junior broke out laughing: each of us was carrying one quart of beer. He was a great guy. He was a father-type manager, which is just what rookies need. Junior died in 1990.
Back home in Maryland that fall, I bought a Ford LTD, only to find out that my credit wasn’t good enough for the Texaco credit card I needed to go along with it. Mom wrote a long letter explaining that I’d paid cash for my car and that the Ripken family had supported the company for almost thirty years. A compromise was reached: I could have the card if my parents cosigned.
After just a week or two, Tim Norris and I rolled out of Baltimore again, this time in separate cars heading for our first Instructional League in St. Petersburg. For the next couple of years, we followed each other back and forth between Baltimore and Florida, stopping every time at the same motel in Savannah, a full day south on Interstate 95. The fact that I’d been invited to the Instructional League was a good sign: the organization saw some potential in me. As the name implies, the purpose of this fall league is instruction, so there are usually two guys assigned to each position in the field. You split the playing time in the 45-game schedule and get instruction when you’re not in the game. But that year the other player scheduled at shortstop on my team, “Cat” Whitfield, came down with a sore arm, I believe. Overall, I got a number of good breaks in the minors, including other guys’ bad breaks—injuries—that opened up opportunities for me. I always seemed to be on the right team at the right time. Because of Whitfield’s injury I got to play every inning of every game. My fielding improved, and even though the pitching was better than I’d faced in Bluefield, including pitchers from the high minors working on various things and other good pitchers coming out of rehab programs, something started clicking for me at the plate. When I hit a homer, I never heard the last of it from the guys on the team who had seen me struggle with my power over the summer. After no homers in that bandbox in Bluefield, which was only 365 to dead center—a glorified high school field, really—I hit two or three out of this huge field at the Mets’ former complex, which we called Yellowstone Park. I took as much extra batting practice as I could, and in the field I took millions of fungoes from Tim Norris. Occasionally I even threw BP myself, although the coaches frowned on that.
I met Will George, a pitcher who’d been drafted out of high school in New Jersey by the Orioles the year before. He’d spent 1978 in Miami. Will immediately told Tim Norris and me about his own rooming-house experience in Bluefield the year before we were there. The owner of Will’s house had been an elderly woman in the habit of walking around in her negligee. The next year the team dropped her from the roster of acceptable landladies. But mainly Will, Tim, and I talked about baseball because we had the same desire to make the majors. When I called Dad back home in Aberdeen, Will would listen to my half of the conversation and claim to get a lot out of the partial dialogue. We watched This Week in Baseball and The Game of the Week and talked about everything we saw. We ate, drank, and slept baseball. As a pitcher, Will grilled me about hitting and the thought processes of good hitters. I was a long way from being an expert, but I told him what I knew. About the only thing we didn’t discuss was the notes I’d kept in Bluefield on all the pitchers and their pitch sequences, which I still have in a box somewhere. It was hard to keep track of the names, because we were facing different pitchers all the time, and their names weren’t on the backs of the uniforms, but I tried to be diligent, at Dad’s urging. I didn’t tell the guys about these notes because the subject was kind of embarrassing. No one else was doing this. I kept notes on the pitchers throughout the minor leagues and for the first few years in the majors, until the Orioles’ coaching staff started including the equivalent figures in the information prepared for the media.
That was a solid, beneficial six weeks of baseball in St. Petersburg, highlighted by my dad’s visit for a couple of weeks. We worked on technical things on the field, played golf, ate meals—all in all, spent more time together than we’d ever been able to before. This irony struck me hard: if I made the grade in professional baseball, especially if I made it with the Orioles, the game that had taken my father away so much when I was a kid would bring us back together again as adults.
Back in Aberdeen for the winter, I lived at home and worked as a substitute teacher at my old high school. The pay was $40 a day; I needed gas money. I taught a history class once or twice, and health class, where I thought I did a pretty good job handling the adolescent jokes and remarks during sex education, but mostly I got the gym classes, which was fine with me because I got to play a fair amount of basketball, my second-favorite sport (except when I’m playing, when it comes in first).
The good work in Florida in the fall carried into the following spring, 1979, at my first minor league spring training camp. The Oriole minor leaguers trained at Biscayne College, about twenty miles from the big league camp at Miami Stadium. The college dorms were nice, and so was our locker room, which was used by the Miami Dolphins, but the field was dubbed Iwo Jima. I don’t know whether Senior could have done much for it with his drag. When we weren’t in baseball camp that spring, a group of us—myself, Will George, John Shelby, Willie Royster, Drungo Hazewood, the occasional odd man—would sneak off to play basketball on the outdoor courts in north Miami. This was during March Madness, if it was called March Madness back then, and we were pumped to play hoops. We played on a lot of “dunk courts” with eight-foot baskets. Goal-tending was legal, so those were rough games around the boards, with hands and arms banging against the rim. Returning to camp covered with bruises, we told the coaches we’d been out jogging. If it had come down to it, we could have argued that we were just continuing the tradition started in the early seventies by Don Baylor, who organized a team of Orioles that challenged all comers in the spring.
I was assigned out of spring training to the Orioles A-ball team in Miami. This was the logical next step for me, even though I struggled at the plate the first few weeks in Miami and picked up the same doubtful feeling from Tom Giordano that I’d had in Bluefield. Maybe I was paranoid, and the Orioles scouting director didn’t say anything in so many words, but the feeling I got from him was, I told you so, you should have signed on as a pitcher. But then things started clicking again with the help of another bit of good fortune, not the kind that makes a career, but enough that I remember it distinctly. I’d been swinging M-110 bats from my first day in the minors (in high school, I used Dad’s old wood bats that I’d discovered in the attic; if it was really cold, I switched to aluminum), but for the second half of the season in Miami I received by mistake a shipment of M-159s. I’d never been a big one for experimenting with a lot of different bat models, but this M-159 had a skinnier handle than the M-110, and I liked the feel of it from the first practice swing. In batting practice I was really popping the ball.
The length and the weight of these Louisville Sluggers were the same—thirty-five inches, thirty-two ounces—but in the M-159 more of that weight was in the barrel, and I formed the mental image of a bat that had a little bend in it during the swing, a little snap, almost like with a whippy golf club. I liked the bat and I liked the image, and that same night, July 2, with the game tied 0–0 in the top of the twelfth inning in West Palm Beach, I drove a pitch from Joey Abone over the left field wall. Abone had thrown the entire game and was tired, but so was I. It was my first home run in the minor leagues (Instructional League doesn’t officially count), and the only reason the crowd didn’t go wild was that there wasn’t a crowd. They’d gone home. Then something happened to the lights on the field, and during the blackout I sat on the bench wondering if the homer counted if we didn’t finish the game. Fortunately they came back on, we won the game 1–0, and I had my homer. (And I had my bat. The P-72 I switched to in the majors and still use is basically the old M-159—same handle, slightly bigger barrel. The only difference is I’ve added one ounce to the weight.)
The much bigger deal that season was the wrist injury to Bob Boyce when he was hit by a pitch—another injury to another player that indirectly worked out perfectly for me. Boyce had been the Orioles’ number one pick the previous year and the MVP in the Appalachian League playing for my team at Bluefield. He looked great. He was the organization’s third baseman of the future, but this injury in Miami set him back (as it turned out, Bob never made the majors) and created a problem for the team. We had two shortstops that year, myself and Steve Espinoza, and one of us would have to move over to replace Bob at third. I seemed to be the logical choice—but, again, I don’t think this decision was based on the fact that I was getting taller and heavier every month, and therefore not the traditional image of a big league shortstop. That hadn’t become an issue yet.
At shortstop, I’d still been having some problems putting together all the elements of the play: catching, setting up, and throwing in one more or less continuous motion. With balls in the hole or behind the bag, the shortstop doesn’t have time to break down the play into separate parts; it’s all or nothing, all at once. But at third base, the ball gets to you faster off the bat, and those extra microseconds make all the difference. The required actions can be singled out and separated: catch or block, regroup, throw. You have some time. I played third base very well from the minute I went over there in Miami, and I wasn’t gun shy. Almost immediately I took a ball in the throat, but I shook it off. That move to third base turned out to be natural and I think it was important for me at that stage of my development. When I eventually returned to shortstop, I was ready.
I also became really relaxed at the plate in Miami, got four more home runs in the big ballparks we were playing in, and led the team in most categories. But there were still some whispers that my last name was more important than anything else in my career in the Orioles organization. Here I was almost over the hump, I thought, with a good shot now to make the majors in some capacity, but I still heard some rumblings about the unfair advantage of my last name.
In Bluefield the year before, our gang had saved money at Mrs. Short’s house. In Miami, finances were tight on $700 a month. I shared an apartment with Tim Norris. Tim’s father was a caterer who sometimes sent us crabs from Maryland, and Tim knew something about cooking, but it was strictly meat and potatoes. I had the bunch of recipes my mother sent off with me every time I drove south, but I didn’t use them much. Tim was the cook, I was the bum. The apartment didn’t even have a TV, but we did fine just playing cards, working puzzles, and talking baseball. The recreation highlight was probably the afternoon I bowled a 300 and Larry Sheets a 299. At least, those were the scores on the computerized printout we presented to Tim. He had a difficult time believing this, naturally, since all of us were just average bowlers.
And all of us wrestled, of course. One night I started messing with Brooks Carey on the tarmac outside the stadium. He tried to beg off on the grounds that he was scheduled to pitch the following night against Daytona Beach, but I wasn’t buying that. Before he knew what was happening, I had him down, pinning his arms with my knees, working on his chest. The next day on the bus up to the game, Brooks told me that I’d hurt him. He said his chest was tight. That was his word: “tight.” I told him he’d be okay, but warming up for the game he said his chest was still tight, and he intended to tell Lance Nichols, our manager, that I’d beat him up in the parking lot the night before. Now I was getting nervous and asked Brooks not to tell Lance.
“Throw change-ups,” I suggested weakly, maybe harking back to my own experience two summers before with the Putty Hill Optimists. Nursing a sore back, I threw mostly change-ups in the final playoff game we lost in Texas.
But Brooks said he was going to teach me a lesson. “I’m going to Lance,” he said, “and you’re going with me.”
“Wait a minute,” I countered. “Just go out for one inning and see what happens.”
Brooks agreed to do that, and what happened was . . . not much, from the perspective of the opposing hitters. Brooks struck out about a dozen guys and threw a shutout. After that episode, he somehow figured I owed him, while I had it the other way around. That game was one of the best showings of his young career.
Late that summer I was called up to Double-A Charlotte. If there’s an opening, it’s common for players to be moved up a notch at the end of a season to give them a taste of the next level. It’s a good challenge, but also pressure-packed. You don’t have much time to prove that you’re ready for what may be the real promotion the following spring. I was nervous in Charlotte that month, and I had the misfortune to drive some balls out of my new park in my first batting practice. I say “misfortune” because that success seduced me into uppercutting for homers from then on. I also dislocated my pinkie diving into first base and missed a few games, and I was playing only off and on because Russ Brett was there at third base. Bottom line: a .180 batting average in 61 at-bats over three-plus weeks of games, with 3 homers.
I wasn’t happy, but I wasn’t overly concerned, either, and then, in Instructional League that fall, yet another injury opened up another door. Russ Brett got hurt, and that let me play all these games at third base. In Charlotte the next season, 1980, I had third base all to myself and played every game—144—plus the playoffs, so I figured I had earned the bonus I had negotiated for myself. The way it works in the minors is that the organization mails you a letter in the off-season stating your salary for the coming year—a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. When I received my offer of $900 a month, I thought I deserved a little bonus of some sort. Dad said if that’s the way I felt, I should write Tom Giordano and make my case, and I did, asking for $1,000. After a couple of letters back and forth, the negotiations ended up where they’d started, and I mailed off a final letter expressing my “disappointment.” So I was pretty surprised when I walked into the office in Charlotte to sign the contract and saw that the monthly figure was $1,100.
That was the first time I’d ever started every game in a season, and this was also my breakthrough season, powerwise, although I wasn’t totally surprised. For one thing, I was filling out at the rate of five pounds a year. I was now six-three and 195 pounds, pushing 200 pounds. I was much stronger than I had been the year before, living proof of what Dad always said: “The difference between .240 and .290 is strength.” Actually, I believe the difference can be strength, and it can be other factors as well, such as learning to wait on the pitch, or having a quicker bat. But strength never hurts, that’s for sure. The strong guy can hit the ball off the handle and still muscle it over the infield; the weaker hitter can’t do that. And if the stronger guy hits the ball with the sweet spot of the bat, it has a better chance of clearing the fence, obviously. Also, the fences were shorter at Crockett Park in Charlotte than they had been in Miami, and it seemed to me that the ball carried better, too. Finally, a lot of people in baseball believe a hitter needs at least a thousand professional at-bats before he understands what’s going on and can begin to demonstrate his true level of talent. His first year, a guy is doing what got him drafted in the first place. In Instructional League and his second year, he’s working on new things and might actually be worse statistically than the first year. The third year, he’s beginning to put things back together and should be showing real progress. In the fourth year, he’s almost ready, or maybe he is ready. That’s just about the way it went for me, and this formula for success hasn’t changed, despite the fact that players may now be rushed to the big leagues sooner. Are they bona fide major league hitters before their fourth or fifth year of professional baseball? Not really.
In Charlotte, I hit high gear. I worked hard on waiting, waiting, waiting on the pitch and broke through with 25 homers, breaking Drungo Hazewood’s old team record of 24 from the previous year. However, I didn’t set a new record because Drungo now had 28 home runs himself. Hitting third in the lineup, I had a great deal worked out that season with John Shelby, who was either leading off or hitting second. I told John, “If you get on, I’m taking pitches until you steal.” Then I’d drive him in. I had 78 RBIs that year, and a lot of them were John Shelby, who said I was the first hitter who’d ever taken pitches for him. I probably was, because when you’re still learning how to hit, as most guys are in the lower minors, by definition, you hate to give up strikes and get behind in the count. In addition, pitchers like to throw fastballs with a base stealer on first, and the strategy of swinging “first pitch fastball” has worked well for lots of good hitters. But I was confident enough that year as a hitter to take some pitches and risk falling behind in the count if it would move the runner—Shelby—into scoring position.
John and I also had a contest going for the team leader in doubles. We ended up tied, we thought, but then the media guide distributed during the following spring training had me down for 28, one more than John. Apparently one of his doubles had been discounted, for some reason. When he saw that, he lowered the boom on me, claiming that I’d pulled rank with my last name. He stayed on me about that. Playing basketball in Baltimore years later, he’d make a great play against me and then say quietly, “Payback.” Or maybe it was payback for something else. John and I were always ragging each other. He even got on me at Bluefield when I was making all the errors the first couple of weeks. Generally speaking, you don’t rag a guy about his performance on the field, but John didn’t hesitate to kid me about being tired of all the extra work required of him in center field, picking up the balls that had rolled between my legs.
John’s a great guy, almost always in a good mood. He even came around to liking his nickname, T-Bone, which somebody in Bluefield laid on him. Before that everyone had called him by his middle initial, “T.” Guys ribbed him with the modified “T-Bone,” which had nothing to do with steaks, and John finally accepted it. That’s what his current minor league players call John, who’s managing in Double-A San Antonio after a good career with the Orioles and the Dodgers, mainly.
T-Bone had this thing about shoes. He was very close to his shoes, especially a pair of Converse sneakers he’d brought from home, Lexington, Kentucky. He took care of them like he would a pair of dress shoes. At a beach party in Miami he was trying unsuccessfully to body surf when I tossed one of those sneakers at him. I thought it would float. It didn’t, and he went haywire. When he finally found the one shoe in the surf, I tossed in the other one, which he never found. “Look, I’m not a barefoot man,” he said when he walked out of the surf. “I need my shoes.” He was genuinely unhappy with me, so from that point on I felt some responsibility for keeping him in good cleats—we wore the same size—and I was usually able to deliver, compliments of either my father or Frank Robinson. Overall, John didn’t take to the ocean, but we did have one other beach episode two years later, when we were playing winter ball in Puerto Rico. I’ll never forget this one. John had heard about the undertow off the beach in front of our apartment. People were always being pulled out to sea, T-Bone had heard on good authority, but this day I talked him into trying a modest wave. However, his timing was late and he got tumbled pretty good and slammed down on the bottom. When he finally came to the surface he was turned around facing out to sea, convinced in his mind he’d been dragged a mile offshore to certain death. He started screaming, even though he was standing in water only up to his waist. He was hollering but I was laughing, because I was standing right behind him. John jerked around and saw me, saw the beach, got angry, said “That’s it, I’m out of here,” and went back to the apartment to wait for the game.
John worked as hard at his profession as anyone. A converted infielder playing center field, he spent as much time shagging fly balls as I did fielding grounders. He was one of the very few outfielders I ever saw who would make the pitchers clear out of center field during batting practice so he’d have open territory to shag balls, all the way from left-center to right-center. He felt he needed all the work he could get, and he felt that shagging during BP is the closest you can come to game situations. Fungoes are okay, but different. The ball doesn’t come off the bat the way it does when thrown by a pitcher. Even when he got to the majors, John would leap at the wall during BP, trying to take away doubles and homers. How else was he supposed to practice those plays?
T-Bone was one of my best wrestling and basketball buddies. He was quicker and a better jumper and probably stronger pound for pound, but I was bigger and had a lot of leverage. If he blocked me one-on-one for some payback, I tried to make him pay up double soon enough. Needless to say, he was an excellent guy to have on your side during a brawl. One in particular comes to mind, a story I have to set up with a flashback to Bluefield two years before, when I got hit on the wrist after the previous batter had homered. I didn’t make a move because I was on the ground and didn’t realize the pitch had been intentional, but John charged out of the dugout toward the mound because he did know. This was his second year in pro ball, everyone else’s first year. What did we know about anything? When John found himself out there all alone, he made a sudden ninety-degree turn and headed for home plate, where he pretended to check me out.
Now, two years later in Charlotte, Tommy Smith and T-Bone hit consecutive homers in a game against the Memphis Chicks. When I came up next, the first pitch from Greg Bargar was over my head. Behind my head. By this time I did know the ropes a little bit. After two homers, that kind of pitch is intentional and requires redress. I was going to the mound, help or no help.
I have a temper. That year I threw some bats and I smashed some helmets. I’d already had a fair amount of conflict with the umpires. I was intolerant of what I thought were bad calls; I’d tell the umps what I thought. Some of them didn’t like me, and I don’t blame them, because I did get out of hand once or twice. I was immature and unfairly blamed them for standing in the way of my desire to get to the big leagues. In fact, I’d already gotten in one argument that same game. I was screaming at the home plate ump when Jimmy Williams, our manager, hurried out. I thought he was coming to my defense, but Jimmy had had enough of my tantrums and chewed me out instead. If I got thrown out and fined by the league, he was going to double the amount.
But when Bargar threw behind me, I had no choice: I was on my way to the mound. I got to Bargar about the time the Chicks’ catcher Tom Wieghaus caught up with me. Then the cavalry arrived, led by Shelby and Drungo Hazewood. Someone took a punch at Drungo, a large, perfectly muscled guy who’d won a full scholarship in football to USC, who would play a year in the USFL after his baseball career ended. He was big and fast and something to watch scoring from first on a double. After that punch, the focus of the brawl became Drungo’s attempt to get revenge on the Chicks’ player. He, myself, and four other players—but not T-Bone—were thrown out of the game. In the clubhouse, I was laughing. Lots of fun, nobody hurt, the fans had gotten into it, helped by the fact that it was 25-cent beer night. But Drungo wasn’t laughing. He threw on some street clothes—no shower—and then stopped in front of a display of two bats mounted on hooks on the wall. He grabbed one and snapped it like a toothpick. I saw it happen, but don’t ask me how it happened. I’ve seen replays of guys snapping the bat over their knee, but Drungo didn’t snap this bat across anything, and he didn’t hit it against anything. He just twisted and it snapped like a toothpick. Then he stuck the barrel into his pants and ran down the hallway to the entrance to the Chicks’ clubhouse, where he pounded on the door shouting at the other guy to come out. Two cops were posted, but they did nothing. After a couple of minutes, Drungo went around to another entrance to the visitors’ clubhouse and started pounding and shouting. Someone summoned Jimmy Williams from the game, and Jimmy had to lock Drungo into the owner’s office until he cooled down.
“Outstanding,” John Shelby said. That was his favorite phrase for a good brawl, a good play, a good meal, anything at all. That whole year was outstanding, although the facilities at Crockett Field were certainly not: wooden stands and roof, funky clubhouse, window air conditioner in the manager’s office, a bigger one for the clubhouse, which barely worked. Half the showers barely or never worked, but we didn’t really care. The place had a certain charm, we were good as a team, a lot of us were coming into our own as players, and we had a great manager in Jimmy Williams. Jimmy and his wife now live north of Baltimore, and they play a lot of golf with my parents. Before joining the Orioles organization, Jimmy had played all his baseball with the Dodgers, where, in fact, he’d been a roomie with my Uncle Bill in Dayton in the Triple-I League in 1948. It must have been easy for Jimmy to move from Los Angeles to Baltimore, from Dodger Blue to the Oriole Way, two model organizations.
Jimmy was careful not to give all his attention to the better prospects on the team. On any Double-A or Triple-A team, everyone knows who’s probably going to the big leagues and who’s not, but if a manager is blatant in his favoritism, he’ll lose the rest of the guys. So if Jimmy wanted to work with me or John Shelby, say, he’d make sure that three or four other players were also included in the drill. That’s a little thing, but a smart one. We learned a lot from Jimmy on our bus rides that year with Charlotte. On every team I played on in the minors, the manager traditionally had the right front seat. After a game, someone would usually go up to Jimmy in his seat and ask, “Skip, what did I do wrong here? What happened?” or Jimmy might call someone up and say, “Here’s what you did wrong on that play.” Soon there’d be five guys talking and listening. And sometimes the conversation veered in odd directions, like when Jimmy told us about the three revolutions he’d played in during winter ball in the late fifties, one each in Venezuela, Cuba, and Panama. In Caracas, Jimmy thought the airplanes flying over on New Year’s Day were still shooting off fireworks, but the puffs of smoke were antiaircraft fire. In Cuba, he was in Havana when Castro took over in 1959. After an unscheduled break of a couple of weeks, Jimmy was talking with Camilo Pascual, who was sitting in the stands with a friend during a doubleheader. This friend turned out to be Camilo Cienfuegos, one of Castro’s troika and a big baseball fan. Jimmy and the revolutionary shook hands and Jimmy asked, with the help of Pascual’s translation, how the revolutionary fighters on the beach had felt about the baseball games in Havana. Cienfuegos said that they had wanted to bomb the ballpark, but they couldn’t find a convenient time when no one would get hurt.