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1 week ago | 
baltimorebaseball.com | John Eisenberg
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The Bird Tapes archive currently consists of 41 interviews with former Oriole players, front office executives, managers, scouts, broadcasters and sportswriters. I started my Orioles history project on Substack by posting my vintage interview (circa 1999) with Brooks Robinson over a year ago. My conversation with legendary Orioles newspaper beat writer Richard Justice, recorded in 2025, is the most recent to get posted.
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2 weeks ago | 
baltimorebaseball.com | John Eisenberg
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As a manager back in the day, Earl Weaver helped push Baltimore’s baseball franchise to the forefront of the American conversation. The Orioles never basked in the limelight more than when Weaver was in charge, leading them to four pennants, a World Series victory and a long run of winning seasons between 1968 and 1982. Now, more than a decade after his death, Weaver is again bringing attention to the Orioles — the history of the Orioles.
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3 weeks ago | 
baltimorebaseball.com | John Eisenberg
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Years ago, when the Baltimore Sun sent me around the country to write about former Orioles from the World Series-winning 1966 team, I made a special trip to the Pacific Northwest to interview Wally Bunker. He’d pitched a shutout to win Game 3 of the World Series that year, and two decades later, he was making a nice living selling refrigerator magnets.
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1 month ago | 
baltimorebaseball.com | John Eisenberg
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(One in a series of articles highlighting former Orioles whom I interviewed for my oral history a quarter-century ago, but only on the phone, depriving me of a recording that I could play now as part of the Bird Tapes.)Robert Richard Boyd could hit a baseball. His numbers tell that tale. While playing in the Negro leagues after World War II, he never hit less than .352 in a full season.
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1 month ago | 
baltimorebaseball.com | John Eisenberg
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In 1953, the year before they moved to Baltimore and became the Orioles, the St. Louis Browns had one Black player — the legendary Satchel Paige, who’d pitched for pay since he was a skinny teenager in the Negro leagues in 1927. Working mostly out of the bullpen more than a quarter-century later, he was still effective enough to make the American League All-Star team in 1953 as, in theory, a 46-year-old.
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1 month ago | 
baltimorebaseball.com | John Eisenberg
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Forty-one states and nine countries. By my count, that’s where my work travels took me during my 23 years with the Baltimore Sun. I was lucky. My time at the paper (1984-2007) coincided with a golden era for sportswriting, an era when editors at major newspapers didn’t blink at sending reporters and/or columnists to faraway places in search of good stories.
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2 months ago | 
baltimorebaseball.com | John Eisenberg
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Coming off a long road trip, Orioles manager Paul Richards scheduled an offday workout at Memorial Stadium on September 20th, 1956. In fact, he scheduled two workouts, one in the morning and one after lunch. He wanted his players in the right mindset for a strong season-ending push. The day dawned sunny and warm, giving way to perfect conditions for the morning workout. But strong winds began to gust around midday, prompting Richards to cancel the afternoon practice.
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2 months ago | 
baltimorebaseball.com | John Eisenberg
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When the Orioles were at their very best as an organization in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Bobby Grich and Don Baylor exemplified just how superior they were. Smack in the middle of a six-year run in which Baltimore’s roster of All-Stars and future Hall of Famers won four American League pennants and two World Series titles, the club drafted and developed two of the game’s most outstanding prospects.
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2 months ago | 
baltimorebaseball.com | John Eisenberg
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When I debuted the Bird Tapes nearly a year ago, I had a shoebox full of plastic microcassettes containing recordings of rare interviews with figures from the history of the Orioles. The figures ranged from the legendary (Brooks, Earl, Frank, etc.) to the not-so-famous (Barry Shetrone) and also included front office executives, a broadcaster (Ernie Harwell) and even an owner (Peter Angelos).
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2 months ago | 
baltimorebaseball.com | John Eisenberg
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In the chapter on Steve Dalkowski in my 2001 book on Orioles history, I quoted numerous people who’d played with or seen the legendary fireballer. Boog Powell, Steve Barber, Milt Pappas, Barry Shetrone, Earl Weaver, Walter Youse, Harry Dalton and others eagerly recalled him and told stories. Their memories of Dalkowski still burned bright. But one voice was absent from the chapter. There wasn’t a single word from Dalkowski himself.
