When Two Ex-Orioles Fought
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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Frank Robinson and Bob Reynolds were never on the Orioles’ roster together. The club traded Robinson to the Los Angeles Dodgers in December of 1971, several months before they acquired Reynolds, a hard-throwing pitcher, in a trade with the Milwaukee Brewers in March of 1972.
The deals occupied opposite ends of baseball’s buzz spectrum. The departure of Robinson, a former league MVP headed for the Hall of Fame, generated major headlines. Reynolds was the infamous “player to be named later,” completing an earlier deal in which the Orioles traded Curt Motton, a backup outfielder, for cash.
But although Robinson and Reynolds were never teammates on the Orioles and resided in different spheres of the baseball galaxy, they were destined to share the stage in a bizarre incident in, of all places, Toledo, Ohio.
If anything, the full story underscores the reality that the typical baseball life is a wandering journey with many turns.
Reynolds, for sure, is an obscure figure out of the Orioles’ past. I’m guessing many fans have never heard of him. But he wasn’t without talent, and for a few years in the early 1970s, he gained manager Earl Weaver’s trust and held an important role in the bullpen.
As a Seattle-area high school star in the mid-1960s, he had electrified fans, and scouts, with a 100-mph fastball, which earned him the nickname “Bullet Bob.” The San Francisco Giants selected him with their first-round pick in the 1966 draft. That stamped him as a real prospect. The Montreal Expos took him in an expansion draft two years later and he made his major league debut at age 22 in 1969.
But Reynolds had issues, one of which was a temper. He also couldn’t command an offspeed pitch to supplement his fastball. It relegated him to years of bouncing around the high minors. By the time the Orioles acquired him, he was a 25-year-old on his fifth organization.
But after spending 1972 with the Orioles’ Triple A affiliate in Rochester, he got his act together in 1973. Baltimore had baseball’s best pitching program under Weaver and pitching coach George Bamberger — the Orioles’ four 20-game winners in 1971 were a testament to that — and it solved how to use such a powerful arm.
On a 97-win team in 1973, Reynolds was one of Weaver’s most effective relievers, pitching to a 1.95 ERA over 111 innings. A year later, he made a team-high 54 appearances and posted a 2.73 ERA. He was a valuable piece of a winning puzzle, but he and Weaver didn’t have the best relationship, and when he struggled early in the 1975 season, the Orioles traded him to the Detroit Tigers.
Reynolds mocked Weaver upon arriving in Detroit. The Orioles were in a slump and Weaver “is starting to panic,” Reynolds said. “He doesn’t know what to do. Pretty soon, the men in the white coats will be coming for him.”
When Reynolds also struggled in Detroit, the Tigers waived him in August of 1975. The Cleveland Indians (now Guardians) claimed him, putting him on a major league roster managed by, yes, Robinson, who at age 39, four years removed from his Baltimore exit, had become baseball’s first Black manager.
After missing each other by mere months in Baltimore, Reynolds and Robinson were together now in Cleveland. A fateful intertwining would soon ensue.
Actually, it was not the first time Reynolds had played for Robinson. Preparing for his next act in baseball, Robinson had managed a winter-ball team in Puerto Rico in 1973 and 1974. Reynolds was on the team.
“I thought we had a good understanding,” Reynolds said later. “I never said anything to him before. In fact, I idolized him.”
But Reynolds was irritated when he didn’t make Cleveland’s roster out of spring training in 1976, and he was further irritated that he learned from a newspaper reporter, not Robinson, that he was headed for the Indians’ Triple A club, the Toledo Mud Hens.
Still seething months later, Reynolds took action on June 20th, 1976, when the Indians visited Toledo for an exhibition game aimed at helping the Mud Hens’ bottom line. Before 5,013 fans on a rainy night, Cleveland took a 5-0 lead early. Hoping to keep the fans interested, Robinson stepped to the plate as a pinch-hitter. (He was a player-manager in 1975 and 1976.) Reynolds, who was on the mound, seized the opportunity to send a message to the manager who’d demoted him without speaking to him. His first pitch flew far over Robinson’s head.
Robinson eventually flew out, and as he jogged back toward the dugout, he screamed at Reynolds, who was near the mound.
“You’re gutless! If you’re going to throw at someone, at least come close enough to knock him down!” Robinson shouted, according to a Society of American Baseball Research account of the incident.
Reynolds barked back: “At least you’re talking to me now! I should take care of you right now!”
Robinson didn’t wait to see if the situation escalated. Before Reynolds could get his glove off, Robinson slugged the pitcher with a left to the jaw and then a right cross. “It happened with a suddenness that left both teams so stunned neither dugout emptied onto the field,” the Toledo Blade newspaper reported.
Years later, Reynolds told a reporter, “He sucker-punched me. It was a big misunderstanding.”
Reynolds left the field with a lacerated tongue and swollen jaw. Robinson was ejected and apologized to the Mud Hens and their fans, but not to Reynolds.
“I don’t think I have to apologize to anyone else because of what happened,” Robinson said. “[Reynolds] tries to intimidate people with his mouth. He’s the one who started it all. He took the cheap shot, trying to look big to his teammates.”
As for Reynolds’ demotion to the minors, which started it all, Robinson said, “I didn’t send him down. He sent himself down.”
Robinson went on to have a long career as a manager and front office executive. He was enshrined in the Hall of Fame in 1982 and died at age 83 in 2019.
Reynolds was 29 when Robinson punched him and never pitched in the majors again. He played in Japan and Mexico before he retired and returned to Seattle to live after spending 15 years in organized baseball, much of it in the minors. Far more galling to him than the punch, in the long run, was the fact that he wound up just 34 days short of five full years of major league service time, which he needed to collect his full union pension.
According to a 2003 article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Reynolds drove a truck for 15 years and later oversaw incoming merchandise at a warehouse. He and his wife raised six children, and today, at age 77, he’s enjoying his retirement with her, according to a Seattle-area newspaper article.
While managing the Montreal Expos in 2003, Robinson called Reynolds when his team was in Seattle for a series. The two hadn’t spoken since their long-ago altercation.
One can assume Robinson was reaching out to clear the air and, possibly, to apologize. But Reynolds was out when he called. They never connected.
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