In Charlotte, Larry Sheets was back in baseball after a voluntary absence. That’s kind of a famous story, at least in the Baltimore organization. Playing with us in Bluefield, Larry had hit a homer in his first game and led the Appalachian League in power numbers most of the summer, but this performance was almost expected because he was the twenty-ninth pick in the country after playing high school ball in a little town in Virginia. From that kind of school, he was lucky to get any attention at all. The break he got was at the American Legion state tournament where he was MVP, with the scouts watching. He was our best hitter and slugger that year, without a doubt, but then he quit the pros to stay home in Virginia, go to college, and play basketball.
The two of us made for an interesting contradiction: I knew what to expect socially as a minor leaguer and was never homesick, but I had to adjust to the better quality of baseball; Larry was very comfortable playing the game—dominating, even—but he didn’t fit in socially with his teammates. Since he didn’t drink beer, he was often the designated driver when any of his teammates wanted go out on the town. More important, Larry was uncomfortable with what he saw as the cutthroat nature of the baseball business. He got upset when one of the players sneaked into the Bluefield office to find out the signing bonuses everyone had received. I mentioned earlier that some guys in the minors are reluctant to befriend others playing their position. Larry was uncomfortable with this kind of attitude. He saw professional baseball as dog-eat-dog, life-or-death, and he didn’t feel that kind of commitment, even though he was our best player. So he left, and in 1979 Sports Illustrated ran a brief story about the big guy who had walked away from a promising baseball career. They titled it “Safe at Home.”
A year and a half later, in 1980, Larry returned. He’d found out he missed playing the game. The Orioles were happy to have him back and started him at Bluefield again, but then moved him all the way up to Charlotte in Double-A when it became clear he could still hit. The organization also moved him to catcher. That must have been Earl Weaver’s idea. Earl salivated at the idea of a left-hand-hitting catcher with power. Larry also played some left field and some right field—anywhere at all to avoid playing first base, his natural position, because the O’s had a guy named Eddie Murray playing that position on the major league club. In his first three seasons in the majors, Eddie had already hit 79 home runs. In 1980 he was going to add 32 more.
I hadn’t seen or talked to Larry Sheets in eighteen months; he’d missed all those great basketball games in Florida in spring training. But that seems to be the way it is in baseball. Missing friends come and go and come back, and you just pick up your friendship right where you left off. Larry’s arrival in Charlotte was especially timely, because I needed more guys to wrestle. I wanted nothing to do with Drungo Hazewood, my roomie for the month I spent with Charlotte the year before—he could slam me around with ease, football-style—and my roomie in 1980, Will George, was having a hard time getting his strength back after coming down with mononucleosis. He was also trying to rehabilitate his shoulder. Give Will credit, he had pumped iron over the winter, trying to get ready for me in 1980—so he said, maybe only half jokingly—and in spring training I could see the difference in his body. But if he thought he was going to come in and kick my butt, it didn’t happen. I was still able to sandwich him between the box springs and the mattress. What can I say? I was pretty strong, even with the minimal weight work I did at that time, with good leverage because of my height, and I’ve always had energy to burn.
Someone said I had more wrestling holds than Gorilla Monsoon, but that wasn’t really true. I wasn’t a “technical” wrestler. I was just playing around. I had the energy and enjoyed the physical interaction. By coincidence, Will, Larry, and I lived in a two-bedroom suite at the Days Inn in Charlotte where some of the World Wrestling Federation competitors also lived. The owner of the baseball team, Francis Crockett, owned the contracts of a bunch of these guys, who were really nuts. They made the Double-A baseball players look tame. Brooks Carey and a roommate lived next door to us, and the wrestlers were always sneaking into their place through the sliding door, beating them up, tossing firecrackers everywhere. That was a bit more than I had in mind.
On the field in Charlotte, Larry Sheets was unhappy about his hitting. He had pounded the ball in Bluefield, but now we had lots of discussions on the bench after Larry had just gone down swinging on another change-up. I was rolling along pretty good. How could I take the fastball down the middle and then drive the slider on the outside edge to right field for a double? Well, sometimes I took the first pitch so John Shelby could steal, but the main answer was that I had become confident enough to start looking for pitches, and if you’re looking for a breaking ball or a change-up and the pitch is a fastball down the middle, you have to take it with less than two strikes. You have to have that kind of discipline. It’s the only way to hit successfully in big leagues, at least for me.
While I worked on learning the pitchers in the league, I also tried to learn the hitters on the other team. By the third or fourth game of a series, I had a pretty good idea whether they were looking first pitch fastball, whether they were really looking for other pitches with an idea in mind or were just up there guessing. Brooks Carey and I talked a lot about the opposing hitters. If you’re playing third base, knowing the hitters isn’t as important as it is for the shortstop, second baseman, and center fielder, but it still helps a third baseman in certain situations. (In a couple of years, when Earl Weaver returned me to shortstop, my experience in learning the hitters proved to be invaluable while I was getting my feet on the ground in my new position.)
Somehow Dad got away from the Orioles for one of our games in Charlotte and presented me with an award for making the All-Star team with Miami the previous year. With him watching, I made two errors at third base. Figures. In the end, though, we won the Southern League championship that year, beating Memphis 3–0. I homered and Brooks Carey threw the shutout. All around, Charlotte was the best year I had in the minors, and one of my most enjoyable in baseball, period: great team, great teammates, great manager, great fans, and I had a great feeling about my future in the game. I loved Charlotte, but I never wanted to go back there to play baseball.
Now I was flying pretty high. John Shelby, Drungo Hazewood, Bobby Bonner, and Mike Boddicker, who had even started one game for the O’s late in the year, and I were considered among the organization’s best prospects. Larry Sheets had announced that he was going back to college for his junior year. For the second time, he was going to sit out at least a season. Larry says now he isn’t proud of the way he went about things in the minors, but he did what he felt he had to do, and everything worked out. He got his college degree and, eventually, his major league career as well. For myself after the 1980 season, no guarantees, but things looked good. Really good.
Then something strange happened. For some reason I never learned, I didn’t get invited to Instructional League. I was going to Caguas, Puerto Rico, for winter ball under manager Ray Miller, but I could have played a couple of weeks in St. Petersburg before flying to the island. When I’d been in Instructional League my first two seasons, it seemed like most of the winter ball guys stopped over for a couple of weeks on their way to the islands. Maybe the organization had two other third basemen who needed the work more than I did, and it wasn’t a big deal when I wasn’t invited, but I did get a little annoyed. I wanted to play baseball.
Some guys treat winter ball as preparation for spring training in the States, but I took it seriously. I did fly home for Christmas for four days—that long weekend was in my contract—but otherwise I was into the baseball. I was burning to get to the big leagues, that’s not an exaggeration. I felt I was closing in, and this was another opportunity to show what I could do. I played baseball eleven months of the year, maybe even more, cramming in a tremendous number of ball games: over 600 in my three full years of minor league and winter ball experience. This was the way I wanted it, because in my mind playing was learning. For me, there was no other way to reach the majors.
It was unusual for me to be invited to play winter ball because I was coming out of Double-A, while almost everyone else would be Triple-A or big leagues. I felt it was almost an honor to be able to play with Jose Cruz and all the other good major leaguers on our team. Rickey Henderson and a bunch of other great players were in that league—good, good competition. And the owners in Puerto Rico want to win. They make moves really quick. If you’re not doing the job, they bring someone else in. I felt a little heat, and in the beginning I was a little overmatched, but Ray Miller had a trick up his sleeve. After a couple of weeks I realized that Ray had been putting on a lot of hit-and-runs with me, and every time he did I hit the ball hard. After four or five of these plays, I realized that I was getting a breaking ball almost every time. Finally I went up to Ray and asked him why. He laughed and explained that he put the play on with good pitchers on the mound, guys like Eric Show, who would probably want to throw the breaking ball down and away on a hit-and-run count, and who were good enough to put the ball where they wanted to. The hit-and-run always makes the batter concentrate on making solid contact—the play is a good way to help certain batters break a slump, and lots of players put on the hit-and-run themselves, especially against a pitcher who gives them trouble—and Ray wanted to see how I’d handle the must-swing situation against good pitchers. He seemed impressed that I remembered those pitches, but I thought, If you’re paying attention, who wouldn’t remember them?
I said the owners down there want to win. Before the seventh game of the final round of the All–Puerto Rico playoffs against Santurce, I was sick with the flu, and had a temperature of over a hundred degrees. Our owner, Dr. Bonomo, a renowned ophthalmologist with patients from all over, talked me into taking a B-12 shot. I don’t know if the treatment worked, but I played against Eric Show and we won the game. As the winner in Puerto Rico, we normally would have been entitled to go the Caribbean World Series, but they didn’t hold it that year, for some reason. Just as well, maybe, because those playoffs last forever. I flew home instead with the trophy for Most Valuable Player on the team. The trophies they handed out in winter ball were enormous, about four feet tall for team MVP, even bigger for league MVP. (I was third in that balloting.) I was concerned that I might have to buy an extra seat on the flight just for the prize, but the team packed it into three smaller boxes.
My mother didn’t know what to do with this huge trophy. I jokingly said that maybe she could do something with a matched pair. I was pretty cocky at the time: I had my eye on one season in Triple-A, maybe one more season of winter ball, then the major leagues with the Baltimore Orioles. That’s about how it worked out, too: I did win a second team MVP award the following winter, and Mom did get her matched pair of four-foot trophies. Today they stand on either side of the big-screen television in the den.
When I stepped onto the field of my first major league spring training camp in 1981, Bryant Gumbel was standing by with a Today crew to record the Ripkens’ father-son story. This was the first time Dad and I had been on a baseball field together in an official capacity. We played down the event, of course, and saw very little of each other off the field, even though we were staying only four floors apart at the Dupont Plaza Hotel. We had a couple of meals together, but that was about it, because Dad was running that camp. The media flocked to the first intrasquad game in which I played on one team and Dad managed the other one. After I smoked a few pitches, Earl Weaver and my father exchanged barbs about the quality of the pitches. Had Senior instructed his pitchers to serve up fastballs right over the middle, to make his son look good? Earl wanted to know. Not very likely, Dad said, but not in just those words.
Despite a pretty good camp and Jim Palmer’s accolade that I was now the best athlete on hand, I was eventually cut and assigned to the minor league camp, and from there to the Triple-A team in Rochester. I wasn’t disappointed. If you’re going to be shifted to the minor league camp, it might as well be sooner rather than later, so you can be certain to get in your full complement of at-bats. Also, I’d known I wasn’t going to make Orioles straight out of Double-A anyway. It’s true that Eddie Murray had played less than half a season in Rochester at the end of 1976, but I wasn’t Eddie Murray. Also, the club had had openings in 1977, when Reggie Jackson and Bobby Grich left for free agency, and it didn’t have openings in 1981. As far back as I can remember, Dad had sat down one day every winter and listed the roster of the forty players invited to spring training and a second list of the twenty-five players he thought would still be around with the Orioles on Opening Day. He had compiled other lists for the minor league teams. In 1981 I was on the long list for the spring camp, but not on the short one for the final team. There wasn’t a spot for me.
When Earl brought the news, I prepared to go to Rochester, get rid of the nickname Ray Miller had given me (“J.R.,” a reference to my status as a “junior” and also to the character on Dallas), and put up some numbers and give the big leaguers something to think about. You always hear about minor leaguers watching the big leaguers to see if a spot might be opening up, but it works the other way, too. Major leaguers know whether somebody is tearing up Triple-A. When I left the major league camp, Ray Miller said my having a good year in Rochester might help the big club win 105 games. I hoped so.
Before I left that camp to drive north from Miami Stadium to the minor league camp twenty miles away, I asked Earl if I could go into the cage to take some cuts, and he said sure. Right off, I pulled something in my right shoulder, and it really hurt. Minutes after I’d been reassigned, here I was with a serious-looking injury. I’d missed a few games in both Rookie and A-ball because of a shoulder sore from overuse as I tried to correct my throwing problems, but this timing was unbelievable. The trainers put me on a regimen of rest and treatment. No hitting, no throwing. I hated the not-knowing feeling.
In the training room at the minor league camp, I let everyone else go in front of me for treatment because most of them could do something on the field, while all I could do was run. That was my whole day. Therefore I was the last guy on the field for the workout, and I could see that some guys thought I’d pulled an “attitude muscle”—one that hurts mainly because you have an attitude about something and just don’t want to play. You can never be certain in a particular case, but I think I’ve seen some attitude muscles. For myself, though, I wasn’t unhappy being in the minor league camp. Really.
After a couple of weeks, I heard that the organization might put me on the disabled list before the season started. The DL? I went straight to Tom Giordano and objected that this wasn’t part of the deal. I was doing everything the trainers and doctors had told me to do, but this decision was being made before I’d even had a chance to test out the shoulder. I asked the doctors if I could start swinging the bat, just to find out where I stood. They said okay, and in the cage I popped the ball pretty well, and the same guys who thought I had an attitude muscle now changed their minds. After I passed that test, the medical staff decided I could play in parts of three games to see whether I could go north and start the season with the Red Wings. I didn’t hit the ball well in those games, but every grounder had eyes. I was 5-for-7, maybe 5-for-8, which was good, but mainly I didn’t have any pain, so they let me break camp with the team. Then we ran into snow in Rochester before the first game, and I was worried again, this time about my shoulder stiffening up. But we played, and the shoulder felt pretty good. I made an out the first two times, then homered on a line drive over the left field fence—I thought Mike Smithson was coming inside with the pitch, and he did.
Then came one of the biggest surprises of my young career. With the game tied in the ninth inning, Doc Edwards, our manager in Rochester, pinch-hit for me. I didn’t say anything—I couldn’t—but I also couldn’t help thinking, Wait a minute. I hit a home run my last at-bat! I sat on the bench wondering as Tom Chism blooped a hit over shortstop to tie the game, which we went on to win.
Other than the homer, for a week or so I struggled. I couldn’t even hit Doc in BP, and cold weather kept us from getting our usual number of cuts, so one day I said to my roomie Floyd Rayford, “Rafe, if I throw BP for you, would you throw for me?” Sugar Bear—Floyd’s nickname—said sure, so we were out there by ourselves at 1:30 p.m., throwing seventy-five to a hundred balls apiece, then shagging them in the outfield. We lost maybe a dozen a day over the fence, but the club never said anything. The work helped, because I got unbelievably hot. Doc Edwards never pinch-hit for me again. On April 27, I had three homers in one game against Charleston, and I was looking for every pitch from Mike Paxton. The first one was a 2-and-0 fastball, an obvious pitch to look for, at least in Triple-A. The next time, we had guys on second and third, first base open. I looked for the curve on 2-and-1, another obvious calculation because Paxton would remember what he had thrown on the previous 2-0 count. I got the curve. The third pitch was a slider over the heart of the plate.
The next night, I got a standing ovation before my first at-bat, but when I struck out on a check swing on a slider in the dirt with men on base, I heard a few boos. That got my attention. In Charlotte they never booed the home-team players. In Rochester they did—one difference between the North and the South, I guess. The fans up there are knowledgeable, love their baseball, and sometimes can be kind of hard, but fair enough, because they’re used to good baseball. Sometimes you hear that Triple-A is a holding station, the way the game is organized now, with many roster-filling guys joining the real prospects. That’s true to an extent, but organizations want their legitimate prospect at shortstop, say, to play with a quality second baseman, even if they don’t have a legitimate major league prospect at second. So the roster fillers need to be good, and that’s why you get guys who have played in Triple-A for six, seven years. They’re good ballplayers who provide a good example and competition for the prospects. Triple-A is like a summer job for these guys, who perform a valuable service in the scheme of things.
I had no more problems with my shoulder. Looking back at that first and last injury of any significance in my career, I think it might have actually helped me. It was probably a signal of overuse; I might have needed that two-week rest coming off winter ball and what had been a three-year program to make the big leagues. This accelerated pace had worked for me, but it didn’t work for everyone. Allan Ramirez is an example. Allan had a great year for us in Charlotte in 1980, and for the first two weeks in Puerto Rico he was all-world. Then his arm gave out. He got to the big leagues for a cup of coffee in 1983, but that was it, and I’ve often wondered whether Allan pitched too many innings in 1980, from which his arm never recovered. That’s the danger of winter ball, and baseball people are divided about sending pitchers to winter ball to strengthen their arms. I believe a pitcher has only so many innings in his arm. While I was in Puerto Rico, the Braves sent Gene Garber to get in work as a starter. That was fine, because Garber had been a reliever during the season, pitching fewer than 100 innings. But many starting pitchers have blown out their arms after throwing a lot of innings in the States, then a lot more down in winter ball.
Nineteen eighty-one was the year of the first long strike by the major league players, starting June 12 following some court actions, and overlapping the famous strike by the air traffic controllers. In baseball there was talk about maybe using replacement players if the major leaguers didn’t get back to work soon. In Rochester we continued to play, and one afternoon I got a call from Mark Belanger, who was nearing retirement with the Orioles and was active in players’ issues. I knew Mark from all my years around the O’s organization. He told me that I would be an obvious choice as a replacement player because I was, by then, maybe the most prominent minor league prospect for the Orioles, and he wanted to know what I would do if the organization asked me to play. I told Mark not to worry, that I wasn’t going anywhere. I would never be a replacement player, and that was that.
The way that strike in the big league turned out, not making the Orioles was another break for me. If I’d been with Baltimore when the rosters were frozen for the strike, I’d have been stuck for almost two months with no organized games to play. According to the rules, I couldn’t have gone back down to play in Rochester, and my development would have stalled. Plus I would have missed the world-famous thirty-three-inning game in Pawtucket on April 18. The temperature was in the thirties, the wind was blowing straight in, nobody could reach the commissioner, apparently, and I guess the umpires didn’t know there was a curfew in the International League. Pawtucket tied the game with a sacrifice fly in the bottom of the ninth, then they tied it again in the bottom of the twenty-first on a fly ball that was blown all the way back to the infield. We had guys who’d been pulled out by Doc Edwards at 10 o’clock and had time to get drunk and sober up twice. That was my teammate Brooks Carey’s joke, anyway. It became so cold it was practically impossible to play. Someone procured an empty oil drum and built a fire in one end of our dugout. Finally, and after we had a guy thrown out at the plate in the top of the thirty-second, the umpires stopped the game after Pawtucket’s at-bat. We had played for eight hours and seven minutes. Two months later, on June 23, the two teams picked up where they’d left off, now playing in front of TV crews from all over. I singled in the top of the thirty-third (making me 2-for-13 for the game) but didn’t score, and Dave Kokza won it for Pawtucket with a single in the bottom of the inning. Good riddance.
Meanwhile, back in the major league strike, the two sides finally settled after fifty days and 712 canceled games. I wasn’t following those negotiations. I understood they could affect me in future years, but my main concern was getting to the major leagues in the first place. It’s sad, though, to look back at Mark Belanger’s widely quoted remark to Lee MacPhail, president of the American League, at the 6 a.m. press conference on July 31 that announced the settlement. Mark said, “Lee, we can never let this happen again.”
On August 8, Doc Edwards told me in the clubhouse that I’d been called to Baltimore. The major league clubs had been allowed to expand their rosters by two players. Jeff Schneider and I were the choices for the Orioles. I knew about the new positions, of course, and I’d been hopeful because I was playing well, but still it was a surprise. A few of us had a little celebration after that last game in Rochester, and the next morning I loaded my LTD and was out of there. Mom and Dad were excited, of course, and so were Billy, Fred, and Elly. They knew how hard I’d worked for this chance. For the rest of the year, I lived at home and commuted to my new job with Dad.
Nothing special was said on the way to work the first day, a Sunday, just “play within yourself.” At Memorial Stadium, Jimmy Tyler, the O’s clubhouseman who had known me my whole life, conspired to hang my uniform with the number 8 in Dad’s locker on Coaches’ Row, and Dad’s uniform with the number 47 was on some hooks off on the wall. Some guys are particular about their number, but I didn’t care. I was just happy to have any major league uniform with any number. In the minors I’d worn 16, 7, 12, and 5, respectively. If I’d thought about it, which I didn’t, I might have preferred 7 with Baltimore, because that was Dad’s number throughout his years managing in the minors, but Dad also preferred that number, which he got in a few years when Belanger retired. And really, the number made no difference to me. I just wanted a big league jersey with any number at all.
When everyone quit laughing at Jimmy Tyler’s joke, reporters asked my father if this was a dream come true for him. I knew what Senior would say, and he didn’t disappoint me: “I don’t dream. People say you have to have dreams, but what’s the use of dreaming if you can’t do the job?” And he insisted, as he always had, that the father-son relationship is not a factor in the big leagues. In Little League, yes, if the dad is the coach, but not here. If I hadn’t known, I learned that lesson the hard way when I called Dad just that—“Dad”—within earshot of some players, who then had a mocking refrain of their own every time the two of us were together. “Dad! Oh Dad!”
They teased me pretty hard, and at the ballpark “Dad” immediately became “Senior” or “Number 47” to me.
My first big league action? Trotting out to second base as a pinch runner for Kenny Singleton in the twelfth inning against Kansas City. I’d never been on that kind of stage before. A minor league stadium isn’t even close to the same experience. It was a thrill, but at least I didn’t lose my head over the situation, because second baseman Frank White put on a pickoff play immediately. The umpire said “Safe!” and Frank said, “Just checking, kid.” John Lowenstein immediately drove me in with a drive down the right field line, and I was a happy kid, still not twenty-one years old.
At the same time, I was afraid this wasn’t “for real.” The Orioles didn’t have a place for me to play, not full-time, which was what I wanted. Doug DeCinces was the third baseman, and a very good one. His back had been a problem that year, and so had his shoulder, and no one could be sure he’d be ready to play after the strike layoff, but I wasn’t likely to push Doug aside if he stayed healthy. As it turned out, he played great, and I mean great, while I was miserable sitting on the bench chewing my sunflower seeds. Earl Weaver had always been excellent about defining the role of every player and making every player feel he’s part of the team. But I wasn’t even a “role player.” I was just additional infield insurance. I can’t imagine anything worse than coming to the ballpark unsure what I was going to be doing that night, and that was exactly my situation when I was called up in 1981. Those were the innings when I began to think that if I ever got in the lineup, I wasn’t coming out.
After September 4, I had no plate appearances at all because we were in a pennant race, and I guess Earl Weaver didn’t trust me enough. That was the year of the split seasons, and in the American League East, the Orioles had finished two games back of the Yankees in the first half, before I showed up, and with me watching we finished two games back of Milwaukee in the second half, tied for fourth. We had the second-best overall record, but we were knocked out of the playoffs by the format. In the National League, neither Cincinnati nor St. Louis, the two teams with the best overall records in their divisions, made the playoffs.
The whole time, I felt somewhat a part of the team. The other guys on the bench quickly enrolled me in their various games and pranks, and I gladly went along. It was something to do. Still, would I have been better off playing in Rochester than mostly watching in Baltimore, especially if I wasn’t watching for some good reason? I wondered. After the ’81 season, and even though I was no longer with Rochester, I was voted rookie of the year and top major league prospect in the International League. In Baltimore, I had 5 hits in a grand total of 39 at-bats, with 1 walk, no extra-base hits, no RBIs. Playing in the field in parts of 18 games—12 at shortstop, 6 at third base—I made 3 errors. My instructions from the organization were to return to Puerto Rico for a second time and play some shortstop.
By this time my confidence was sort of beaten down. It had been a couple of years—Charlotte at the end of 1979, my second year in the minors—since I’d had a period of uncertainty. It was important for me to have some success somewhere, and I also knew the club might give me a look at shortstop in spring training the next year. I knew Earl wanted to see what I could do. That position was a whole lot more open than third base, because Mark Belanger was thirty-seven years old and hurting, and the two main candidates, Lenn Sakata and Bobby Bonner, were young guys with whom I might end up competing. After all, Earl had even started me nine times at shortstop, out of the blue. I wasn’t completely cold at the position because I’d played a few games at short in Rochester when Bonner had come up for Sakata before the strike, but I wasn’t exactly up to speed, either. I’d be able to do the job, I felt, but my choice at that time would have been third base. I was totally comfortable there. In Puerto Rico, I’d try to become more comfortable at shortstop, too.
Ray Miller was our manager in Caguas again, and he knew I was supposed to play some shortstop, but he had me playing third base, third base, third base for the first couple of weeks of the season. Finally I said, “Ray, I thought I was going to get a chance to play a little shortstop here. That was one of the reasons for coming down, wasn’t it?” He said, “Don’t worry about it, kid.” At the time, I was a candidate for the Triple Crown in Puerto Rico, and someone must have made the decision that I was ready for the big leagues, because, if I remember the timing right, the day after I asked Ray what was happening with shortstop, the Orioles traded third baseman Doug DeCinces to California for Dan Ford, an outfielder. Ray must have known what was up. Jeff Schneider, who had come up with me from Rochester, was also in that trade. He never made it into a game with the Angels. The twenty-four innings he threw for Baltimore in 1981 turned out to be his entire career.
Doug DeCinces always felt there was more to that trade than met the eye, going back to his role in the strike as the player representative for the American League. Looking at what happened to the other players who figured prominently in the strike, you have to believe Doug’s analysis may have been right. Bob Boone, catcher for the Phillies and the National League representative, was seldom played by Dallas Greene in the second half of the ’81 season, then he was traded to the Angels. Mark Belanger, American League pension representative as well as the Orioles’ player representative, signed with the Dodgers as a free agent. DeCinces was traded to the Angels. Of the four main players associated with the strike, only one, Steve Rogers of Montreal, the National League pension representative, wasn’t with a new team the following year. But Steve Rogers was one of the best pitchers in the league; he’d win the Cy Young Award in 1982.
After the ’81 season, Earl Weaver had told Doug that he respected him for standing up for the players, that he had no hard feelings, and that Doug would play third for the Orioles in 1982, with me at shortstop. Two hours after the trade was announced a month or so later, Earl called Doug on the phone, and Doug brought away from that conversation the conclusion that management had made that trade, not Earl. What’s more, Doug believes, Earl had already decided then, way before the 1982 season started, that he was retiring after the season. The day after the trade, some glitch threatened the deal, and Doug got a call at home from Edward Bennett Williams himself, the first conversation they’d had since the settlement of the strike. EBW, as we often called our owner, wanted to assure Doug that he’d be the starting third baseman if the deal didn’t go through, but Doug knew, from his talk with Earl, that the team wanted me to play third base. So Doug politely suggested to Williams that he make the trade work. He did.
All in all, a baseball career can’t fall into place much better than mine did. The trade was good news in another way, too, because now I wouldn’t have to compete with Doug for the third base job. If Earl had moved me to shortstop, I wouldn’t have had to compete with him, but I wasn’t sure Earl was going to move me. And if he did, I would have had to compete for shortstop.
Doug and I went back a long way. My father had been his manager for two years in the minors, first at Dallas, then at Asheville, and considered him as yet another son, which made him like my stepbrother. Most famously, he was the player who grabbed me in Asheville and hustled me into the dugout when a kid with a rifle fired a wild shot from beyond the center field fence that whistled past us while we were playing pepper.
Rumors of competition between Doug and me had started almost the day I arrived in Baltimore in August. He was particularly sensitive to the situation because of what he went through when he took over when Earl benched Brooks Robinson in 1976. Brooks was revered in Baltimore, of course. His replacement—Doug—was booed when his name was announced; he got hate mail; he had to change phone numbers. Doug didn’t want me to feel we were in competition, and he knew how much he’d learned from Brooks, and he knew the importance of teaching. In Baltimore, veterans had often helped mold the guys they knew would eventually take their jobs. Lee May took Eddie Murray down the first base line to work on pop fouls. So as the rumors circulated, Doug told me, in effect, “Don’t listen to these guys. Just play your game. Whatever happens, happens.”
I appreciated Doug’s attitude, and he continued to help me every way he could. However, our relationship may have changed just a little when I came up, with a little tension added because I represented at least a minor threat to his position. Or maybe that was just my perception. Anyway, as I’ve said, he played great and gave me no chance, and this performance raised the distinct possibility that I might have lost any competition between us the following year. And Doug himself had been returned to Rochester twice before he finally took Brooks Robinson’s job. Don Baylor and Bobby Grich had lingered for at least one extra year in the minors with great numbers, waiting for an opening on the Orioles. I knew all these stories, so even though I was sad to see Doug leave the Orioles, I also knew the trade was a huge opportunity for me. One way to look at it: third base was now mine to lose. When I got the news of the trade from Ray Miller, I wasn’t going to get all sentimental about Doug. My first thought was, It’s my position now.