For a few years when I was a kid, I spent more money on baseball cards than anything else. I rode my bicycle to the 7-Eleven with a dollar or two in my pocket and came away with a stack of packs.

I was too excited to wait until I got home to find out what, or who, was inside; sitting on the curb outside the 7-Eleven, I tore into the packs and surveyed my latest “gets.” Only after I’d drained a Slurpee did I pedal home.

Pretty soon, my card collection grew to the point that I needed a place to house it. One of my grandfather’s empty Cuban cigar boxes was the perfect solution.

This was in the late 1960s, and fortunately, when I was gone from my parents’ home years later, they did NOT make the classic mistake of tossing out the cigar box during a cleaning binge. I reappropriated it on a visit and it has been in my possession ever since because, well, I guess I just felt like it should be.

I’m not a collector. I haven’t bought a baseball card since the Orioles made Earl Weaver their manager in 1968. But when I started the Bird Tapes, the fact that I’d collected cards back in the day suddenly mattered. I realized that cards purchased decades ago were an excellent way to illustrate Substack posts about players from decades ago.

I dug into my office closet, searching for the Cuban cigar box filled with cards. Conveniently, it was right beside the shoebox filled with plastic microcassettes containing quarter-century-old interviews with former Orioles — the interviews I’ve digitized and posted here at the Bird Tapes.

(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.)

I dumped the cards out onto my desk — there were hundreds — and started searching for Orioles. Initially, it was a disappointing task. There were lots of Giants and Reds and Dodgers. But then, bingo, I found a Brooks Robinson card. And a Boog Powell. And a Jim Palmer.

My Orioles collection grew. There was a Milt Pappas, a Luis Aparicio, a Mark Belanger. But honestly, the collection grew mostly because I kept finding the cards of two Orioles whom I didn’t plan on highlighting in any Bird Tapes posts.

Larry Haney. 

Sam Bowens.

As I went along, I found one of each in my collection. Then another. Then a third of each!

When I was done scouring, I graded my Orioles collection as, honestly, kind of meh. I had a Brooks but not a Frank, a Palmer but not a McNally, a Boog but not an Earl.

I did, however, have enough Haney and Bowens cards to fill out an entire batting order.

Five Haneys. Four Bowens.

If they were Hall of Famers, I’d be in the money.

But of course, they weren’t.

Who were they, though? Staring at my haul of their cards, I had to know.

Haney, it turns out, was a prized prospect coming out of a high school near Charlottesville, Virginia, in the early ‘60s. A stellar all-around athlete, he’d accepted a scholarship to play quarterback at Virginia Tech when, according to a Society of American Baseball Research profile, the Orioles offered him a $60,000 signing bonus that changed his mind. That was a big bonus in those days.

He rose through Baltimore’s minor league system with Davey Johnson, Curt Blefary, Tom Phoebus and Steve Dalkowski. A catcher, he made his major league debut at age 23 in 1966 and was on the Orioles’ World Series roster that year.

He stuck with the club through 1967 and 1968, but he didn’t hit much, didn’t play much, and the Orioles lost him to the Seattle Pilots in an expansion draft before the 1969 season. He lasted almost another decade in the majors with the A’s, Cardinals and Brewers. Although he hit just .215 with 12 home runs during his career, he earned two World Series rings (with Baltimore in 1966 and Oakland in 1974) and had a long post-playing life in the game as a coach and scout. His son, Chris, pitched in the majors in the ‘90s and early 2000s. Haney is 82 now and living in Virginia.

Bowens also was on the World Series roster in 1966. A fleet outfielder, he actually was a fairly well known Oriole. One of the club’s first Black prospects, he was signed in 1960 by Jim Russo, reportedly for $5,000, and spent four years percolating in the minors, where he regularly encountered racism, according to a 2023 story in his hometown newspaper, the Wilmington (N.C.) Star-News.

He debuted with the Orioles in 1963 and seemingly established himself as a regular in 1964, playing in 139 games and batting .263 with 22 home runs and 71 RBIs — nice numbers. He never produced at that level again, though, and became a reserve rather than a starter. Years after the fact, Bowens said he was never the same after getting beaned in the head by a pitch in Boston. Nonetheless, he accumulated more than a thousand at-bats for the Orioles between 1963 and 1967. After the Orioles let him go, he finished up his career playing for the Washington Senators for a couple of years. He died in 2003.

Bowens. Haney. As anyone who collects cards with random purchases knows, your bounty tends to be long on such players. I recalled that as I searched my collection from decades ago. I didn’t possess that many Hall of Famers, but I did have enough Earl Wilson and John Boozer cards to populate an entire starting rotation and a bullpen. (Wilson was a pitcher for the Tigers, Boozer a pitcher for the Phillies.)

I also had a ton of Ralph Houk cards from when he managed the Yankees. And if you need a Bob Aspromonte card from when he played for the Astros in the late ‘60s, I’m your guy.

From searching my collection, I also learned that I’d collected football cards back in the day, though not nearly as many, and in a development I’d completely forgotten, I also started (and seemingly quickly stopped) collecting cards featuring U.S. presidents. I had drawn a pencil-thin mustache on the Zachary Taylor card I’d found. Sorry, I was 11.

Aside from Haney and Bowens, I had the cards of other obscure Orioles such as Woodie Held and Gene Brabender, and also, Dave May and Dave Leonhard together on a rookie card. But Haney and Bowens dominated. I’m sure I didn’t linger long over them when I first pulled them from a pack decades ago. But then you get older and a little wiser about sports and how things work, and you understand that anyone good enough to play in the majors and have a baseball card was something special.

 

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.

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

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