Lost Voices: Gus Triandos

The slugging catcher was the Orioles' first recognizable star, so popular he had a street named for him in Baltimore County. But he wasn't always awash in warm nostalgia during our 1999 interview.

(One in a series of articles highlighting former Orioles whom I interviewed for my oral history a quarter-century ago, but only on the phone, depriving me of a recording that I could play now as part of the Bird Tapes.)

Conventional baseball history generally sees the Oriole as the losers in the 17-player deal with the Yankees that manager/GM Paul Richards engineered after the 1954 season. Baltimore gave up a lot of quality pitching. Bob Turley won a Cy Young Award for the Yankees. Don Larsen pitched a perfect game in the World Series. Those two starters combined for 127 wins in pinstripes.

But that conventional analysis misses a key point. The Yankees were on top, trying to find pieces that could help them keep winning the World Series. The Orioles’ needs were entirely different. They were at the bottom of the American League, effectively starting from scratch after having moved from St. Louis the year before. They had nothing, Zero. Just veterans on the way out and youngsters who needed seasoning. They needed players with whom they could at least start building a foundation and gaining some traction in their new hometown. And the trade provided that.

It produced their starting shortstop for the rest of the decade, Willy Miranda, as well as a veteran outfielder, Gene Woodling, who would solidify the lineup, earn an All-Star appearance and become an effective coach in Baltimore. (Note: The Orioles traded Woodling in 1955 but got him back.)

But most importantly, the big trade brought Gus Triandos to Baltimore. A burly slugger, he soon emerged as a star and the first true Oriole, in a sense — the first to be celebrated as a good player who was “our own.”

The Yankees gave him up because they already had a catcher, some guy named Yogi Berra. Triandos wasn’t going to get on the field in New York. But he became the Orioles’ starting catcher as a 24-year-old in 1955 and kept the job for the next eight years while hitting 142 home runs and earning three All-Star selections.

Mike Klingaman, my Baltimore Sun colleague for many years and a superb chronicler of the old Orioles, described him as “burly, brooding and slow-footed.” His lack of speed was legendary. And he hit just .244 over his career.

But he was a solid presence behind the plate at 6-feet-3 and 215 pounds. And he could hit with serious power. At his peak in 1958, he slugged 30 homers and started for the American League in the All-Star Game at Memorial Stadium. The crowd roared when he singled in his first two at-bats and booed AL manager Casey Stengel when Berra pinch-hit for him in the sixth inning.

Triandos made the All-Star team again in 1959. Although his production began to decline after he suffered a hand injury and he started hearing boos when he struggled to corral Hoyt Wilhelm’s knuckleball, he was still popular enough that a Baltimore County developer named a street after him in 1962 when Triandos moved his family into a new development in Timonium.

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The Orioles traded Triandos to the Tigers a year later, and he also played for the Phillies and Astros before his career ended.

Without memories and insight from Triandos, my oral history of the Orioles, published in 2001, would have been incomplete. He had endured the team’s early years, hit a ton of home runs, mentored Brooks Robinson and Boog Powell.

I found him in San Jose, California, where he and his wife had lived and raised a family after his playing career ended. He was 69 years old and retired from the mail delivery business he’d operated.

I didn’t travel to California to interview former Orioles for my book, so I spoke to Triandos on the phone. He was affable, happy to discuss the old days, but not always awash in warm nostalgia. It was evident some aspects of his Baltimore experience still rankled him.

“I wasn’t sorry to get traded (to the Orioles). I wasn’t going to play in New York with Yogi there. And Casey wasn’t crazy about me because he didn’t think I could hit to the opposite field. I think the only he liked about me in the end was I helped him get Turley.

“Richards was trying to build the thing (in Baltimore). He had a lot of ideas and he made some mistakes, and personally, I didn’t like it. The park was big. Kept homers in. Richards signed some young kids and some worked out and some didn’t. He was in the process of building a team. It was a hell of an undertaking. You couldn’t open your mouth. We signed year to year.

“I hit 30 homers in ‘58 and was going for an even better year in ‘59 when I got hurt. If I’d been hitting in Camden Yards or Memorial Stadium after they shortened the fences (n the 1960s) I would have hit a lot more. It probe cost me five to 10 homers a year, playing in Memorial Stadium. But then I took a foul tip right on the back of my hand and I came back too fast, couldn’t hold the bat right and ended up getting calcium deposits. Still hit 25 homers. And then your contract (for the next season) comes in the mail and they’re offering you a fifteen-hundred dollar cut. They just waited you out. The way we were going, who was going to mss me?

Triandos caught Wilhelm’s no-hitter against the Yankees in 1958, hitting a home run that made the difference in a 1-0 win on national television.

“Hoyt’s knuckler was consistent. It was good all the time. Skinny Brown (another Oriole pitcher) threw one that would come in and kick down, but Hoyt’s would stay alive, stay up, and you’re waiting for it, and boom, all of a sudden, you’re booting it. He had control of it, too, great control. It was pretty amazing.”

In the long run, catching Wilhelm became a struggle. Triandos and the Orioles’ other catchers set records for passed balls and heard boos. The situation grew so dire that Richards designed an oversized glove for Triandos and the others to use and found a company to produce them. Baseball eventually outlawed it.

Dick Williams, the former Oriole who became a World Series-winning manager, told me in his interview for my book, “Gus used to get madder than hell. You had to use the Paul Richards-model glove. And when you were through with it, you had to give the glove back to Paul and he’d give you another one to break in. I think catching Wilhelm hurt Gus. He was as negative as you could find. Having to catch Wilhelm and use Richards’ glove bothered the hell out of Gus.”

Joe Ginsberg, who backed up Triandos for five years, told me, “Wilhelm was hard for every catcher. It really bothered Gus. He didn’t like it. Didn’t want to do it.”

Triandos recalled:

“It was very tiring, very hot, and a long way back to the backstop to get passed balls. You caught 98 percent of the knuckleballs, and then two or three would get by you in clutch situations and they’d boo the piss out of you. When I first started, I could do the job. The more I caught (Wilhelm), the worse I got. Everything gets to you, you know? If I dropped one, they’d boo, so I tensed up. We tried a bunch of things. The big glove helped, but the only problem was you didn't know where the ball was and guys started running on you because you couldn’t get the ball out of your glove.”

At the end of our interview, he laughed.

“When the Orioles got Gentile, Brooks and Boog, they started doing well. I was glad they didn’t win it all as soon as I got out of there, though, so at least no one could say, ‘Look they got that jerk out of there and started winning.’”

Despite his frustrations and the wry nature of his recollections, he understood that he’d filled an important and positive role in Baltimore, giving fans a reason to cheer when he pounded balls over Memorial Stadium’s distant fences. His favorite memento was the original green-and-white “Triandos Drive” street sign, sent to him by a local official when a new sign went up.

When he died at age 82 in 2013 after dealing with congestive heart failure for a decade, his daughter told Klingaman, “He talked about the Orioles with great fondness.”