It was the best of baseball. It was the worst of baseball.
On the 9th day of the 10th month of the 66th year of the 20th century, it ended—the subject being the World Series between the Baltimore Orioles and the Los Angeles Dodgers. Baltimore emerged as champions, triggering elation throughout the metropolis named for Cecil Calvert, Second Lord Baltimore—the first Proprietor and Proprietary Governor of the Province of Maryland. It was not supposed to happen. At lest it was not supposed to happen the way it did, with the Orioles blanking the vaunted Dodgers squad for a 4-0 sweep—three games were shutouts:
- Game 1: 5-2
- Game 2: 6-0
- Game 3: 1-0
- Game 4: 1-0
In turn, the Orioles elevated their status in Baltimore’s sports hierarchy. “This season’s feats of the Orioles, who leaped from crisis to crisis and still won the pennant, and who brought the exciting Frank Robinson to the city as a counter attraction to the demigod Johnny Unitas, balanced the ledger more than a bit. The Colts may not have lost their eminence, but the city’s fans and newspapers have learned that there is another team in town,” wrote Shirley Povich, whose words in the Washington Post started the day for sports fans in the Baltimore-Washington corridor.
Ushered to Baltimore in a trade with Cincinnati after the 1965 season, Robinson swatted his way through American League pitching in his first year as an Oriole:
Led Major Leagues
- Runs Scored (122)
- Home Runs (49)
- Slugging Percentage (.637)
- On-Base + Slugging Percentage (1.047)
- Total Bases (367)
Led American League
- RBI (122)
- Batting Average (.316)
- On-Base Percentage (.410)
- Sacrifice Flies (7)
Robinson won the American League Most Valuable Player Award and the World Series Most Valuable Player Award. It was a vindication, of sorts. “I wanted to have a good year especially to show the people in the front office there [in Cincinnati] that I wasn’t washed up, and I wanted to show them by having a good year,” said Robinson in an Associated Press article published in the Baltimore Sun on October 10th.
“And I wanted to show the people, the officials, the city of Baltimore they were getting a guy who still could play baseball.”
For the Dodgers, blaming and shaming arrived with gusto. Los Angeles Times sports columnist Jim Murray, for example, lobbed verbal grenades spiked with sarcasm, as was his wont. Murray’s piece titled “The Dodger Story: A Classic Case of Ineptitude” brought forth a wheelbarrow full of bon mots.
On the Dodgers’ hitting woes: “Their batting average cannot be seen with the naked eye or figured under the decimal system. Guys who weigh that little get to ride horse races.”
On Don Drysdale: “He deserved better, but the Dodgers’ invisible attack, the worst exercise in offensive futility since Mussolini’s invasion of Greece, left him like a guy who thinks his whole platoon is crawling through the brush with him until he whispers and gets no answer back. The Dodger ‘attack’ would have to be twice as loud to be dignified as ‘whispering.’ They hit the ball as if it was a cantaloupe.”
On the Dodgers’ post-season Japan trip: “They are now taking the act to Japan where, when the Japanese get a load of them, they may want to reopen World War II.”
Stocked with blue chips nearly as strong as the Dow 30, the Dodgers suffered a downturn that was unavoidable, arguably—Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Tommy Davis, Ron Fairly, Maury Wills, Wes Parker et al. faced an opponent that needed to be quashed before taking on the O’s. In his 2006 book Black and Blue: Sandy Koufax, the Robinson Boys, and the World Series That Stunned America, Tom Adelman posited that exhaustion—or something close to it—affected the Dodgers after a merciless pennant race. “Unlike the Orioles, they’d [sic] had no chance to adjust to the idea of a post-season contest—to catch their breath, raise their sights, and ready themselves for a fight,” wrote Adelman, who interviewed several players from both squads. Ron Fairly, among others, confirmed the toll created by the quick turnaround from the end of the season to the beginning of the World Series.
That is not to take anything away from the Orioles, managed by Hank Bauer, who knew a thing or two thousand about winning—he played for the Yankees during the Mantle era, which saw World Series titles in:
- 1949
- 1950
- 1951
- 1952
- 1953
- 1956
- 1958
American League pennant flew unaccompanied in the Bronx in 1955 and 1957.
Bauer won the Associated Press Manager of the Year Award and the Sporting News Manager of the Year Award in 1966.
A version of this article appeared on www.thesportspost.com on January 23, 2017.