When Bobby Grich was first called up to the major leagues in 1970 after percolating in the Orioles’ farm system for three years, Earl Weaver didn’t exactly greet him warmly.
Grich knocked on the Oriole manager’s door in the clubhouse one afternoon upon arriving at Memorial Stadium from Rochester, where he’d been playing Triple-A ball. He found Weaver seated at the desk.
Famously volatile, the manager looked up and growled, “What do you want?”
Grich was taken aback. “I just wanted to let you know I got here,” he stammered.
“Well … is that all?” Weaver asked.
Recalling the moment in our recent interview, the second part of which is available to paid Bird Tapes subscribers with this post, Grich said, “I’m 20 years old. I get called up to the big leagues, anybody’s dream, and that motherfucker wouldn’t get up off his chair to come shake my hand and greet me and congratulate me and say, ‘Welcome to the fucking team.’ He said, ‘Is that all?’ Yeah, that’s all. And he didn’t talk to me again until, I think, around 1972.”
As you can tell, Grich never forgot it.
The unenthusiastic greeting was so seared into his memory that he brought it up to Weaver during warmups before a game some six years later.
“It was 1976,” Grich said. “We were in the outfield. We were just talking, and I said, ‘Earl do you remember my first day when I came to the big leagues?’ I told him the story. He said, ‘I didn’t do that.’ I told him, ‘That is the exact welcome you gave me.’ He couldn’t believe it; couldn’t believe he’d done that.”
By then, Grich was established as one of the key players on a perennial contender. But his time in Baltimore was almost up. After the 1976 season, he was among the first class of players to become free agents. Wooed by the Yankees, Angels and Orioles, he signed with the Angels, his hometown team. And he never regretted it.
“I gave the Orioles 10 years — four in the minors and six in the majors. I played my ass off for them,” he said.
He played his ass off throughout his 17-year career, during which he played only for the Orioles and Angels, made six All-Star Game appearances and won four Gold Gloves. Offensively, he had a .371 career on-base percentage, scored more than a thousand runs and hit for both power and average. On defense, as a second baseman, he had exceptional range and a strong arm.
Near the end of our interview, I asked him about the Hall of Fame. He’d received votes from just 2.6 of the electorate in his one year on the ballot back in the ‘90s, but Bill James, the father of sabermetrics, had argued relatively recently (in 2019) that Grich was, in fact, a worthy candidate deserving of serious consideration. Grich’s stunning career wins-above-replacement figure of 71.1 — one of the highest figures of any player not in the Hall of Fame — certainly hints at his worthiness.
“It kind of came out of the blue,” Grich, now 76, said of the affirmation of his abilities courtesy of advanced analytics.
He knows his chances of making the Hall remain microscopic. But as anyone would, he appreciates the renewed respect for what he accomplished.
“I was a really good player to have on your team,” he said.
(Note from John Eisenberg: Published here as a podcast, Part 2 of my interview with Grich can be downloaded to your preferred device and/or consumed on apps such as Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Click on the “subscribe now” button to upgrade from free to paid and gain access to my entire archive of interviews with former Oriole players, front office executives, scouts, managers, broadcasters and beat writers.)
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