I go back the full 70 years with this Baltimore Orioles baseball team, so I’ll drop a name here that some of you won’t know: Paul Richards. All he did was build a foundation that created a dynasty.
Richards managed the O’s from 1955, their second season of existence, through 1961 when they were about to start a 20-year run as the winningest team in all of Major League Baseball.
He started doing this with some more names you might not know: Billy O’Dell, Jerry Walker, Milt Pappas, Dave Nicholson, Jim Pyburn, Wayne Causey, Tommy Gastall, Frank Zupo.
They were called “bonus babies” back then, and a few panned out and most of them didn’t. It took a while to see which ones were any good. By the time we found out, a generation of Baltimore schoolboys had already traded away their baseball cards or lost them in some front-porch flipping competition.
But we haven’t seen such a fulsome collection of kids in Orioles uniforms since those 1950s summers full of promise and disappointment and, ultimately, triumph.
Until now.
The Orioles will open their 2024 season this week with a roster full of kids who look like they just dropped off their prom dates. They’re nurturing along one kid, the highly touted 20-year-old Jackson Holliday, who looks as if he’s still years from needing his first shave.
Holliday is regarded as the top prospect in all of professional baseball, but even he couldn’t make the Opening Day roster. He’s back playing minor league ball, at least for a little while. Then there’s Kyle Stowers, also sent down. All Stowers did this spring was lead the team in home runs.
We can distinguish these kids from Paul Richards’ early “bonus babies.” They look like baseball’s version of the real thing, in a big hurry to show off their exceptional talent. As the weekend arrived, they were 20-and-6 in this spring’s exhibition games.
Stretched over a full season, that computes to an absurd 124 wins. In more than a century of Major League Baseball, no team has ever come close to so many wins.
Nobody will this year either, but it’s nice to dream. As we’re reminded every year, exhibition games don’t count, except that they’re a peek into the rare abilities of some of these new Orioles whose names we’re still trying to memorize, such as …
No, wait, the list is too long. It’s so long that the club sent a whole bunch of these youngsters back to the minors who’d be playing varsity ball for almost any other major league club.
I’ll take it a step further: In all his years of legendary ball clubs here, even Earl Weaver never had a lineup with as much depth of raw talent as this 2024 team, which will have youngsters with potential to hit 30 homers sitting on the bench. (Of course, Weaver had pitchers named Palmer, Cuellar and McNally, and nobody’s making any comparisons — yet — with today’s pitching staff.)
But there’s another new name to add to Baltimore hopes: David Rubenstein. He’s about to take majority ownership of the team from the family of Peter Angelos, who passed away on Saturday at age 94. A Baltimore-born businessman and philanthropist, Rubinstein has deep pockets and so do some of his new partners, such as Michael Bloomberg.
You can’t enter the owner’s box without bumping into a billionaire.
One year ago, the Orioles stunned the baseball world by winning 101 games and the American League East pennant. They drew just under 2 million fans.
Just watch: they’re legitimate contenders for another pennant, and they’re going to draw a lot more than 2 million customers. And this will bring new life to downtown Baltimore.
Young Holliday will be back soon, and so will Stowers. There’s a whole bunch of new names coming to Oriole Park, along with the kind of enthusiasm we haven’t seen around here since the earliest of those Paul Richards “bonus babies.”
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” (Johns Hopkins University Press) and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home” (Johns Hopkins University Press).
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