Bird Tapes Podcast: "I Was Going To Run For Mayor of Rochester, New York.”

When I spoke recently to the Orioles’ most recent 20-game winner to add his important voice to the Bird Tapes archive, he didn’t mince words on the subject of baseball circa 2025.

“To me, the game is boring,” Mike Boddicker told me.

Really, boring?

“Hard to watch,” he continued.

The issue, he believes, is the over-application of math and analytics, a revolution that values raw power — both at the plate and on mound — at all costs while devaluing some of the fundamentals long held dear by purists.

“You don’t get it, do you? You have no idea. You’re looking at numbers. It’s clueless,” Boddicker said, growing palpably angry. “Moving a runner over, bunting … there’s such lost arts in the game. Now it’s all about getting up and swinging, launch angle, trying to hit home runs and striking people out. That’s all it is.”

Given how he became a star for the Orioles, it’s really no surprise he’s disappointed in what he sees.

Now 67 and living in Kansas City, Boddicker was a successful high school and college player, but he didn’t have the kind of raw talent that infatuated scouts. He was under six feet tall. He didn’t have a blazing fastball.

“I wouldn’t even get drafted today,” he said.

It forced him to rely on qualities that couldn't be quantified on a spreadsheet. He worked hard. He used his head. He made the most of the subtle skills he did possess, the ability to command his pitches and deceive hitters with breaking balls.

In our recently-recorded interview, available to paid Bird Tapes subscribers, he poignantly chronicles his rise from small-town Iowa to the pinnacle of the major leagues. A constant factor in the story is another quality he possessed that couldn’t be quantified. Determination. In abundance.

Growing up, he “wasn’t even close” to being the best player in baseball-mad Norway, Iowa, which fielded a high school powerhouse despite its small size. After the Montreal Expos drafted him (as a third baseman) with an eighth-round pick in 1975, he turned them down and went to college because the money offer wasn’t that good. Three years later, the Orioles took him with (drum roll) a sixth-round pick. When he reached Rochester, home of the club’s Triple-A affiliate, he pitched there for five years before the Orioles called him up.

Five years!

“I was going to run for mayor of Rochester, New York,” Boddicker said.

Determination. In abundance.

It’s what develops when you spend your childhood summers mowing cemeteries, digging graves, baling hay and detasseling corn to help make ends meet. Boddicker’s father passed away when he was 10. His mother was debilitated by arthritis.

His determination paid off when an opportunity finally opened up for him in Baltimore in 1983. Hank Peters, the Orioles’ GM, initially told him not to give up his apartment in Rochester, but that issue soon became moot. Boddicker won 16 games that season and delivered magnificently in the playoffs as the Orioles rolled to a World Series victory.

After the Orioles lost the opener of the American League Championship Series to the White Sox — a tense best-of-five series in those days — Boddicker struck out 14 and pitched a shutout to win Game 2. Similarly, after the Orioles lost the opener of the World Series to the Phillies, Boddicker tossed a three-hitter to win Game 2.

The next year, “pitching as well as I possibly could pitch,” he won 20 games and “could have won 25 or 26,” he told me. At the time, no one blinked. Oriole pitchers had been churning out 20-win seasons for two decades. Boddicker seemingly was just the latest product to emerge from baseball’s best pitching laboratory.

But nothing is ever thus and the Orioles haven’t produced another 20-win season since Boddicker’s. And given that a fundamental change in the game is starters being pulled earlier and earlier to make way for hard-throwing relievers — there’s that math again — Boddicker just might be the club‘s last 20-game winner.

“It’s been 40 years, that’s the amazing thing,” Boddicker said.

Forty-one years, actually. And yes, it IS amazing.

Boddicker pitched for the Orioles until 1988, when they traded him to the Red Sox, receiving Brady Anderson and Curt Schilling in return. His major league career ended up lasting 14 years. during which he won 134 games and posted a fine career wins-above-replacement figure of 31.3 — a quantifiable testament to his value that he’d surely just shrug off. (I didn’t bring it up.)

His unsurprisingly humble take on it all was this: “It’s amazing I pitched that long with the crap I was throwing up there.”

(Note from John Eisenberg: With a paid subscription, my podcast interview with Boddicker 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.)