Ex-Orioles Reunited at Series

One by one, they’ve cut the strings. Rick Dempsey has made Southern California his year-round home, and John Shelby’s annual winter visit to Baltimore will be briefer than ever.

“It’s time to settle down in one place,” Shelby said. “There’s not that much reason to go back there anymore.”

Likewise, Storm Davis needed less than a week to sell his townhouse in the Baltimore suburb of Cockeysville. He has fallen in love with the Bay Area and will spend the remainder of his winter in his hometown of Jacksonville, Fla.

Mike Boddicker, traded from the Orioles to the Red Sox in July, plans to divide his winter between Boston and his hometown of Norway, Iowa. Baltimore, he said, is a place he used to live.

Don Baylor, older and more nostalgic, said a part of him would always be there, adding, “When they traded me, I knew nothing else was ever going to be the same. They were family.”

What these five men have in common is that they’re all former Baltimore Orioles. All of them played on Orioles championship teams, and Shelby, Dempsey, Davis and Boddicker were on the 1983 World Series champions.

They departed through trades and free agency, some with anger, others with sorrow. They’ve watched the decline of the Orioles with a mixture of sadness and anger, but, in 1988, all wound up on division championship teams.

Of the five, only Boddicker won’t be in the 1988 World Series that begins Saturday night at Dodger Stadium. Dempsey and Shelby--members of the National League-champion Dodgers--will be. Davis and Baylor--members of the American League-champion Oakland Athletics--will be, too.

“It looks funny seeing all those familiar faces in those uniforms, doesn’t it?” Dempsey said. “I wonder if the Orioles think they might have made a mistake on some of us.”

As if 107 losses wasn’t enough to embarrass the Orioles, they continue to have their past mistakes shoved in their faces. They whispered that Dempsey was finished, that Davis would never win and that Shelby didn’t have the right stuff.

Meanwhile, their trades have been for Jay Tibbs and Doug Sisk and Rick Schu, big contributors to one of baseball’s worst teams of the ‘80s.

“I think a change of scenery was good for me,” Davis said. “That must have been tough over there this year, although there’s a lot of guys I don’t even know anymore. Do they think they made some mistakes?”

For instance, with Dempsey. Two winters ago, the Orioles traded Davis to acquire catcher Terry Kennedy from San Diego. In doing so, they turned the catching job over to Kennedy, and told Dempsey, a 10-year Oriole, if he wanted to return he’d have to take less money and agree to be second-string.

“Come on,” Dempsey said, “they knew I wasn’t going to do that. All I wanted was a chance to compete for the job. I knew I could still play. My shoulder was hurting and I should have had surgery sooner than I did. They knew my shoulder wasn’t right.

“They were just so uptight about everything. They continually thought they were one player away from a championship, and I guess they never figured they’d hear from us again.”

Dempsey, 39, played one season in Cleveland, then knocked on the door of Dodger Excecutive Vice President Fred Claire and said he was looking for work.

Actually, he didn’t knock so much as he sat outside Claire’s office at Dodger Stadium waiting to talk to him.

He sat there for two hours, and finally followed Claire into the parking lot pleading his case.

He would accept any amount of money, he told him, if he would just be given a chance.

“Well, listen, I knew about Rick Dempsey,” Claire said. “Our scouts knew about him. Lately, I’ve been hearing he waited outside my office two days.

“That’s not true, but it is true that his wanting to play for the Dodgers had an impact on our decision to invite him to spring training. That showed quite a bit about Rick.

“He came with no guarantees and knew we had a starting catcher (Mike Scioscia) and a veteran backup (Alex Trevino). He knew he could have been released on the last day of spring training and the Dodgers wouldn’t have been out anything.”

Dempsey so impressed the Dodgers with his hustle and work ethic that they paid off Trevino’s $300,000 contract and released him in spring training.

Dempsey became a key member of the Dodgers because he allowed Manager Tom Lasorda to finally give Scioscia regular rest. He also was valuable offensively, hitting 7 homers and driving in 30 runs in only 167 at-bats.

He earned $250,000, about half what the Orioles paid him in 1986. It wasn’t lost on him that the Orioles paid Kennedy $850,000 and that he produced four fewer homers and 14 fewer RBI in 102 more at-bats.

“It just goes to show you that you can’t come in and tear a championship club up as fast as they did,” Dempsey said.

“We’re a good club over here now, but we’re not as good as we’re going to be when people get to know each other and know what to expect.

“We went seven or eight years in Baltimore and won as many games as anyone. We had one bad year, and they just started breaking it up overnight.”

Dempsey said he realizes that Edward Bennett Williams, the team’s late owner, was overly impatient because of his failing health. He added that former general manager Hank Peters (fired by Williams a year ago) also seemed to have an increasingly quick trigger finger.

No one knows that lesson better than Shelby, who came to the big leagues in 1982 as the next star of what had been an outstanding farm system. In the winter before the 1987 season, the Orioles said Shelby would be their everyday right fielder.

They stuck to that philosophy through the winter and spring, then gave him just 20 regular season at-bats (10 strikeouts) before benching him.

“It wasn’t an easy place to play,” Shelby said. “You’d go oh for four and not know if you’d be in there. I hear it’s not much easier now. I just always felt I could still play if I got a chance to play every single day. Sometimes, you just need to throw a guy out there and see what he can do.”

The Orioles, under the illusion they were a contending team, never did.

“I’ll tell you about John Shelby,” Lasorda said with emphasis. “No one ever told him they believed in him. No one ever told him he was a starter and nothing was going to change that. Did anyone ever pat him on the back after both good games and bad? We did that here, and he’s a fine player.”

Davis’ story sounds almost exactly the same. He won eight, 13, 14 and 10 games in his first four seasons, compiling adequate but never outstanding numbers.

Then in 1986, he went 9-12 (with a 3.62 ERA) and the Orioles said privately that he was lazy and that his heart would never match his fastball.

The Orioles surely were surprised to see him go 16-7 for the Athletics and observe that hours of weightlifting have developed a bigger, stronger, more confident pitcher.

“I think about the Orioles a lot,” he said. “Those were good years, but I guess with the comparisons to Cakes (Jim Palmer) nothing I ever did was going to be enough. Don’t forget I was in the big leagues when I was 20, and that when they traded me I was still only 24.