The Spirit of ‘66 | The Bird Tapes

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 via subscription 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 ago while writing a book about the team. Paid subscribers can hear the interviews, which have been digitized to make them 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 the Orioles won the World Series for the first time, in 1966, I was 8 years old and a long way from Baltimore, living in Texas. But 20 years later, I was a sportswriter for the Baltimore Sun and my editor gave me a plum assignment — write a series of articles commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Orioles’ historic victory.

As I mentioned in an earlier Bird Tapes post, I traveled all over the country interviewing players from that team, gathering their recollections and catching up with what they were doing now. Dave McNally owned a car dealership in Billings, Montana. Wally Bunker was selling refrigerator magnets on an island off the coast of Washington state. Moe Drabowsky was the Chicago White Sox’s pitching coach. Boog Powell owned a marina in Key West, Florida, and was starring in beer commercials.

I told you it was a plum assignment.

It took me months to pull everything together, and the articles ran over a period of a week in the middle of the 1986 season. The newspaper thought enough of them to reprint them together in a special section that was handed out at Memorial Stadium on the day the Orioles brought the team back to celebrate the anniversary.

At the end of the year, the series was recognized by the Associated Press Sports Editors as one of the year’s best.

The central piece of the series was an article about the 1966 season itself. That was the reason my plum assignment existed, after all — because that year the Orioles rolled to the American League pennant, winning 97 games, and swept the favored Los Angeles Dodgers in a truly stunning World Series.

The article took readers back through the memorable elements of that season, highlighting the Frank Robinson trade, the fast start, Robinson hitting a ball entirely out of Memorial Stadium, the legendary pennant-clinching celebration and the sweep of the Dodgers.

A search of my home office closet — yes, the same closet where the Bird Tapes sat in a shoebox for two decades — produced a copy of the special section published 38 years ago. A few months ago, I put up a post that included an audio file of me reading the feature story I wrote about Hank Bauer, the manager of the 1966 team. That generated a nice response, so I’m producing more recordings of me reading the articles from the series, which was titled “The Spirit of ‘66.”

In the wake of the 2024 Orioles’ disappointing playoff loss, I thought it’d be nice for everyone to hear about a much happier time. Here’s my account of the 1966 season:

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Mike Flanagan
Eddie Murray
Ken Singleton
Brooks Robinson
Frank Robinson
Boog Powell
Cal Ripken, Jr.
Paul Blair

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