Bird Tapes Podcast: The Al Bumbry Interview

Al Bumbry was more than just a mainstay for the Orioles. He made his debut at the end of the 1972 season and was still roaming the outfield at Memorial Stadium a dozen years later — a period spanning four American presidencies. Only nine other players have appeared in more games for the Orioles than Bumbry.

That’s not just a mainstay, that’s … well, let’s see … 1,428 games … that’s part of the architecture.

And that permanence is why it’s so surprising to look back and see that Bumbry was a longshot even to play baseball professionally, let alone in the major leagues, let alone in the major leagues for so long and so well.

Bumbry was a basketball player in college, at Virginia State. A darting point guard, he didn’t give baseball the slightest thought. In my recent interview with him, now available to paid Bird Tapes subscribers as a podcast, he explains that he took baseball up as a senior only because the college brought in a new athletic director who re-started the baseball program, which had been dropped. That sheer coincidence altered the course of Bumbry’s life.

Disappointed to go unselected in the pro basketball draft, he was ready to become a teacher; he’d earned a degree in physical education. But then the Orioles selected him in the eleventh round of the 1968 major league draft. He’d batted .578 in his lone college season, and more importantly, played summer ball in the Shenandoah Valley League on a team managed by Dick Bowie, a former semi-pro player who drove a milk truck and patrolled the Mid-Atlantic as a low-level bird-dog scout for the Orioles.

(Bowie eventually became a full-time scout, and a good one. Assessing Cal Ripken Jr. coming out of high school, Bowie suggested that he should play shortstop, not pitch, as a pro. Future major leaguers Larry Sheets, Ken Dixon and Jesse Jefferson also were among the players Bowie signed. But when Bowie went into the Orioles’ Hall of Fame in 2024, his Bumbry signing was recognized as his career highlight. Bowie died of a heart attack at age 57 in 1981.)

In the beginning, Bumbry was hardly a prized prospect; he was a good athlete but raw on the diamond. He batted .178 in his first pro season, which was cut short by the start of his tour in Vietnam, where he was an Army platoon leader in charge of 45 men. Resuming his baseball career after that searing experience, he hit .345 at two levels of the minors in 1972, but even that didn’t impress the Orioles’ front office; he was already 25, on the verge of aging out as a prospect. The club didn’t send him to an instructional league after the 1972 season, a slight Bumbry perceived as disinterest in his development.

It still rankles him a half-century later.

“That motivated me,” he told me.

But he’d shown enough promise to merit an invitation to major league spring training in 1973, and he took advantage of that opportunity, making the club as, initially, the last position player, helped by the fact that the American League instituted the designated hitter that year. Then he hit .337 with 73 runs scored in 110 games that season — a performance that earned him the American League’s Rookie of the Year award — and his career took off.

In an era when the Orioles consistently ranked among the sport’s elites, manager Earl Weaver fell in love with Bumbry’s speed and eye for contact at the plate. The Orioles had never really had a player with his skillset. Even though he never posted high stolen base totals because Weaver didn’t want him getting thrown out on the bases ahead of the sluggers batting after him, he became a fixture at the top of the order. In the outfield, Bumbry started out in left and later moved to center, and wherever he played, he ran down any ball “as long as it stayed in the park,” he told me.

In our interview, Bumbry dove deep into what it was like to play for Weaver, why he had his best season in 1980, what made the Orioles so good in his era and why he made Baltimore his home after he retired. He also recalled his time in Vietnam, where, he said, he was a cautious platoon leader because his overarching goal was for his men to survive.

Still going strong — at age 77, he mentors young players in hitting clinics — he looked back with evident pride at his Orioles experience, which he never foresaw until it was already happening.

“I had a very successful career,” Bumbry told me.

No one would argue.

(Note from John Eisenberg: Published here as a podcast, the Bumbry interview 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.)