Holiday Spoiler: You're Getting a Bird This Year

All Bird Tapes subscribers, free and paid, will be able to hear a vintage interview from the archive on December 23rd. Please participate in a contest to determine which interview gets selected.

Some old sportswriter’s stack of vintage media guides.

The holiday season is here, with gift giving (and receiving) foremost on many minds. I’m so delighted (and flattered) by the response to my Bird Tapes project that I’m giving all of my subscribers a gift — a vintage interview from the archive will be unlocked and available for all to hear on Monday, December 23.

Which interview? Brooks Robinson? Frank Robinson? Davey Johnson?

I’m letting you (and everyone else) make the choice.

Welcome to the Bird Tapes Holiday Gift Contest, a kind of March Madness-style elimination bracket with Baltimore baseball history as its theme.

Below, you’ll see five different polls, each containing five different choices. Over the next three days, please vote in each poll for which one of those figures from Orioles history you’d most like to hear. After three days, I’ll make the results public. The winners of the five polls will advance to a final poll next week, and again, I’ll open a voting window and let you vote for which person you’d most like to hear.

My vintage interview with the winner of the final poll will be posted on December 23rd.

Please vote — the best way to hear the interview you really want is to make your opinion count!

To reiterate:

+ You can vote for one person in each of the five polls below.

+ The winners of each poll will be announced over the weekend.

+ The five winners will advance to a final poll next week.

+ You’ll be able to vote for one person in the final poll.

“ The winner of the final poll will be announced sometime before December 23.

(Note: I tried to divide up the 27 interviews currently in the archive as randomly as possible into five different polls of equal weight. The options in each poll are listed alphabetically. This format forced me to leave out a couple of interviews, and I made those cuts based on how the interviews performed.)

(Note 2: To further the March Madness-style theme, I’m calling each poll a regional and naming it after a figure from the Orioles’ early history. Just because.)

(Note 3: Click here if you want to use this occasion to upgrade to a paid subscription and gain access to the entire archive, which includes my interviews with everyone listed in these polls.)

Enjoy! Hope you have some fun with this.