Lost Voices: Steve Stone’s 25-win season for the Orioles

(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.)

When 31-year-old journeyman pitcher Steve Stone arrived at the Orioles’ spring training camp in February 1980, manager Earl Weaver told him to prepare to spend the season in the bullpen. Stone had produced an 11-7 record in 32 starts for Baltimore the year before, but in 1980, Weaver planned to use a four-man rotation with Jim Palmer, Mike Flanagan, Scott McGregor and Dennis Martinez.

“Can I compete with Dennis for the No. 4 slot?” Stone asked.

“No. Dennis is No. 4. You’re No. 5,” Weaver replied.

Stone shrugged. What could he do? All four of the pitchers in Weaver’s projected rotation were stellar performers. Palmer had won the Cy Young Award three times, Flanagan once. McGregor and Martinez had combined for 59 wins and 53 complete games in 1978 and 1979. (Weren’t those the days?) Stone was capable, but at 31, he had a career record of 78-79 in the major leagues.

“I was very much the weakest” of the Orioles’ starters, Stone conceded when I interviewed him for my book on Orioles history a quarter-century ago.

But as happens in baseball, fate intervened. Flanagan and Martinez suffered arm injuries in the spring, opening a slot in the rotation for Stone. And he did more with the opportunity than anyone could have envisioned.

The Orioles made the wrong kind of history in 1980, becoming the first major league team in 19 years to miss the playoffs despite posting triple-digit wins. But they were a dominant team. And Stone was their ace.

He won 25 games, setting a club record for pitching wins in a season – a record that still stands. Even though Palmer and Mike Mussina are enshrined in the Hall of Fame, neither ever had 25 wins in a season. Neither did Flanagan, McGregor, Martinez, Mike Cuellar, Dave McNally or any of the other top pitchers in Orioles history.

Stone did it all in 1980, logging 250 innings and tossing nine complete games. At one point, as the Orioles chased and ultimately failed to catch the Yankees in the American League East, he won 14 straight games.

He started for the AL in the All-Star Game and threw three scoreless innings. At the end of the season, he won the balloting for the league’s Cy Young Award.

From beginning to end in 1980, a pitcher who was physically unimposing at 5 feet 10 and 170 pounds, with a good-but-not-great fastball and a solid-but-unmemorable curveball, simply was unhittable.

What went so incredibly right for Stone in 1980? What enabled him to post one of the finest individual pitching seasons, if not the very best, in the history of a franchise so rich in pitching?

He’d had a long, successful career as a broadcaster after he played, so he was easy to locate as I amassed interviews for my book on Orioles history in 1999. When we spoke on the phone, he gave a detailed answer to my question about what went so right in 1980.

It was pretty much all in his head, Stone told me:

“My transformation was owed mostly to a set of mental gymnastics that I devised after reading various self-help books, because I was fairly inquisitive about how to better myself as a pitcher. I had a pretty good idea there was a good pitcher in there. I just couldn’t find it consistently. So I took the best of creative visualization, imagery, self-hypnosis and a number of positive-thinking things and boiled them down into a system that worked for me.

“It was also the product of a radical realignment of my thought process as far as concentrating. I used to spend a couple of hours meditating on the day I pitched, visualizing every hitter in the lineup. I went through a number of things, used little tricks to heighten my concentration. I told myself that when the situation got tougher, I’d concentrate better.”

Working with Ray Miller, the Orioles’ pitching coach, Stone also relied far more on his curveball in 1980 than he had in his previous eight seasons in the majors. He’d pitched for the San Francisco Giants, Chicago Cubs and Chicago White Sox before signing with Baltimore as a free agent in 1979.

But in his telling, his mental gymnastics were the primary reason for his sudden success — not that surprising when you consider he was the rare ballplayer of his era with a college degree. He’d gone to Kent State in Ohio, graduating with a teaching degree in social studies.

“It had all started with a meeting Ray Miller set up between myself and Earl in 1979,” Stone told me. “I had a 6-7 record and was struggling, and Ray said, ‘I’m tired of hearing him complain about you and tired of hearing you complain about him.’ Earl had one goal, the proper goal, winning games for the Orioles, and he had 25 guys to do that. He was much less interested in my health and welfare. A lot of players tend to believe, ‘What’s good for me is good for the team.’ That’s not always the case. When I really understood what Earl was trying to do, things came a lot easier. You get a little older, and hopefully, a little smarter. I had to go to the next step. I started using the new [mental] approach after the All-Star break in 1979 and carried it through 1980. I went to the mound 50 times in that time, lost seven games and won 30. We were a really good staff. Palmer, Flanagan, McGregor, Dennis, those guys were great pitchers. I had a good 18 months.”

He paid a price for throwing so many more curveballs in 1980, though, because he developed elbow tendinitis, which limited him to 15 starts and just four wins in 1981. The 25-game winner basically evaporated, and in a bit of a surprise, Stone retired after the 1981 season rather than go to lengths to stay on the mound.

“When my elbow started hurting, I always felt it was the quality of the career that matters, not the quantity,” he said. “I probably could have hung on for a couple more years taking cortisone shots. But I’d started the All-Star Game in 1980, pitched in a World Series in 1979. I was the only pitcher in the ‘80s, it turned out, to have a 25-win season. I got to over 100 wins in my career. Most of the good things that happened to me happened in Baltimore.”

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 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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