Rebirth of the Oriole Way?

March 29, 2021 Michael Olesker

Cal Ripken Jr. in the 1980s (Photo from PressBox courtesy Jerry Wachter/Baltimore Orioles)

Somewhere during the summer of 1955, in the heart of a neighborhood baseball game around Groveland Avenue, I dived for a grounder and came up full of dust. A neighborhood old-timer witnessed this and called over to me.

“You’re playing like an old Oriole,” he cried.

He intended this as a compliment. I wasn’t afraid to get a little dirt on me, he was implying. But as happened, I had no idea what he meant.

The “old” Orioles, who were they? I only knew about the brand “new” Orioles, the big leaguers who had arrived the summer before and were just now beginning to piece together not only a winning team but an absolute dynasty to dominate major league baseball for years to come.

The “old” Orioles were the likes of Wee Willie Keeler, who “hit ‘em where they ain’t.” They were Hughie Jennings and John McGraw and Uncle Wilbert Robinson, Baltimore teammates who won three straight pennants.

Only I’d never even heard of them in my 10 years on earth.

Because those “old” Orioles played half a century earlier, which might as well have been three centuries earlier, on some distant planet, for all I knew at that moment.

And I mention this for a sense of perspective.

To the old-timer in my neighborhood, those “old” Orioles were as fresh in his mind as yesterday, much as the “new” Orioles of the mid-‘50s are still vivid to me and my generation.

So we come now to the truly new Orioles, who open their 2021 season this week, with every baseball maven in America predicting rough times. Last place, everybody predicts.

So let me offer a word about my own “old” Orioles, who are only old to those with no memory, or no sense of history.

I speak of the Orioles of Paul Richards.

After Baltimore’s first summer back in big league baseball, 1954, Richards became the Orioles manager (and, for several seasons, general manager as well.) And he created what became a phrase, and a legacy.

The Oriole Way.

Some of us remember a bunch of those O’s stumbling through some rough times back then before finding their way. But when they did come of age, it led to a run of two full decades in which Baltimore had the best overall record in all of major league baseball.

I’m telling myself we’re now watching the rebirth of the Paul Richards era around here.

Beginning in 1955, Richards was the guiding hand behind the farm system that became the envy of baseball. It produced people named Brooks Robinson and Boog Powell, Jim Palmer and Dave McNally, Mark Belanger and Don Baylor, Eddie Murray and Cal Ripken, and on and on.

Build from within, Richards said, and stress the fundamentals.

This is the same game the Orioles are trying to play today, and it comes partly from being smart and partly from necessity.

We can’t spend like the big boys, not at today’s prices. But we can build from within, and stress the fundamentals.

Back in the Paul Richards era, we didn’t call them the “old” or the “new” Orioles.

We called them the Baby Birds.

But we watched them grow into champion Orioles, and we witnessed that process called the Oriole Way. And maybe that’s what’s starting all over again now, if only we give it a chance.

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.