BaltimoreBaseball.com is delighted to be partnering with John Eisenberg, the author and longtime Baltimore sports columnist, whose latest venture is an Orioles history project called The Bird Tapes. Available on a subscription basis at birdtapes.substack.com/subscribe, the Bird Tapes is built around a set of vintage interviews with Orioles legends that Eisenberg recorded a quarter-century while writing a book about the team. Paid subscribers can hear the interviews, which have been digitized to make them easily consumable. The Bird Tapes also includes new writing on Orioles history from Eisenberg, who is the author of 11 books, including two on the Orioles. BaltimoreBaseball.com will publish Eisenberg’s new writing.
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When I went around the country interviewing former Orioles for my book on the history of the team a quarter-century ago, it wasn’t the first time I’d taken on such an endeavor.
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When I was a sportswriter for the Baltimore Sun in 1986, I wrote a series of articles commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Orioles’ stunning sweep of the Dodgers in the 1966 World Series. It was quite an assignment. I interviewed Dave McNally in his living room in Billings, Montana. I interviewed Wally Bunker on an island off the coast of Washington state, where Bunker was making refrigerator magnets. I interviewed Boog Powell at his marina in Key West, Florida, I interviewed Hank Bauer, the Orioles’ manager in 1966, behind home plate during a game at the Kansas City Royals’ stadium, where he worked as a scout for the Yankees.
The series, titled “Spirit of ‘66,” ran for a week during the season. It included a detailed chronicle of the 1966 season, features on what the players were doing two decades later and articles about how much the baseball industry had changed in that time. (I’m going to include some “Spirit of ‘66” articles in the Bird Tapes in the coming months. They fit right in.)
Nearly four decades later, I still recall my interview with Curt Blefary, a feisty son of New Jersey who’d played left field and hit 23 home runs for the World Series-winning Orioles in 1966. I’d found him living with his second wife in a tidy house in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He was a salesman in the plumbing division of a supply company, having worked his way up from driving a truck. He invited me over for dinner, and while he grilled steaks in the backyard, he poured out a tale of woe.
(Note: My Substack posts that include the vintage interviews are available via a paid subscription, which also gives you unlimited access to the archive of interviews. Free subscribers to the Bird Tapes will receive immediate access to my new written work, which will also be published here at BaltimoreBaseball.com on a different schedule.)
He’d peaked as a player in his first years with the Orioles, winning the American League’s Rookie of the Year award as a 21-year-old in 1965 and continuing to play regularly in 1966 and 1967. He wasn’t a plus fielder — Frank Robinson nicknamed him “Clank” for his iron glove — but he could hit for average, hit for power and run, and he added a cocksure attitude to the Orioles’ winning mix, strutting through the clubhouse, refusing to swing until he saw a pitch he liked and admiring his home runs longer than any opposing pitcher wanted.
But he also had a temper, a big mouth and a drinking problem, all of which he readily admitted later, and when his production waned, he balked at being relegated to a part-time role. It was the beginning of a rapid descent.
He irritated Earl Weaver, who became the Orioles’ manager in 1968, and was dealt to the Houston Astros in the trade that brought Mike Cuellar to Baltimore – a lopsided deal if ever there was one. Cuellar would win 143 games for the Orioles over eight seasons, while Blefary lasted just one year in Houston. After a few more stops, his major league career was over before his 30th birthday.
When we spoke in his backyard in 1986, Blefary nursed a scotch-and-water and confessed to harboring bitter feelings about baseball. His career had ended a decade prematurely, he believed. And his ebullient personality and many friends and connections hadn’t led to a post-playing career as a coach, instructor or scout, which he’d anticipated.
“Evidently I did something wrong to somebody,” he said.
Initially, his post-baseball life had spiraled in the wrong direction in the 1970s as he drifted from tending bar to selling insurance to frying fast-food hamburgers to working as a sheriff. None of it excited him, and after he divorced his first wife, he ran so low on cash one year that he had to bet on a pro football game in hopes of having the money to give his kids Christmas presents. (The Dallas Cowboys came through for him, he told me.)
His sister and mother, whom I later interviewed, told me they’d hated seeing the ebullient ballplayer become a brooding, bitter ex-player.
He was doing better when we spoke in 1986. He’d worked for the supply company for five years. His new wife, Lana, had a job as a condominium manager and worked hard to buoy his spirits.
But he still radiated unease.
“I have everything I could want, a beautiful wife, a beautiful home, a prestigious position. I don’t want for anything. Everything is great. But I still miss baseball,” he lamented.
He knew nothing was going to replace it for him. Gazing at his house while he grilled in the backyard, he said, “We want to fix this place up. But I’m not good at doing things around the house. I’m not a plumber. I’m not an electrician. I’m a damn ballplayer. And I’ll go to my grave that way.”
A few months after my article ran, casting Blefary as a man whose life was coming together after many struggles, he quit his “prestigious position” to come to Baltimore for the 20th reunion of the World Series-winning team. My heart dropped when I heard the news. I feared another downward turn. But if anything, he knew himself … a “damn ballplayer.”
In the years after I wrote about him, Blefary settled into a niche of attending fantasy camps and helping coach a high school team. He self-published a manual on how to play the game. It never stopped bothering him that baseball, his one true love, hadn’t saved him when he needed help.
Eventually, he developed pancreatitis, a disease that can result from drinking too hard. When he died at age 57 in 2001, Lana told the Associated Press, “It’s good that his suffering is over now.”
A few months later, Lana called the Baltimore Sun’s sports desk from a campground in Millersville, Maryland. She’d driven up from Florida with Blefary’s ashes in a shoebox-shaped urn adorned with crossed baseball bats and a ball. He’d told her he wanted his ashes spread at Memorial Stadium, where his best moments in baseball occurred.
She’d driven north, staying at campgrounds, only to discover the stadium was in the process of being demolished. She was looking for help and determined to fulfill his wishes.
“I’m going to get in there one way or another,” she said.
Fortunately, she was met with a groundswell of understanding. The Maryland Stadium Authority, which was overseeing the demolition, allowed her inside the construction zone. The contractor agreed to halt work for a memorial service. The Babe Ruth Museum produced the home plate used at the final game at Memorial Stadium and placed it near where it had been situated during games, Lana secured a hospice minister to oversee a service.
Blefary’s ashes were spread at home plate, or where home plate once resided, on May 24th, 2001. He’d told me he’d go to his grave a ballplayer, and sure enough, he did.
Subscribe to The Bird Tapes here: birdtapes.substack.com/subscribe
You’ll receive instant access to vintage audio interviews with Orioles legends, including:
Mike Flanagan
Eddie Murray
Ken Singleton
Brooks Robinson
Frank Robinson
Boog Powell
Cal Ripken, Jr.
Paul Blair
And many more to come, added weekly