Rest in Peace, Henny

The late Jim Henneman was a walking encyclopedia of Oriole baseball -- and just baseball, period. I'm proud to say he wrote one of his last articles for the Bird Tapes. It's reprinted in this post.

In Year Two of the Bird Tapes, I’m adding a series of interviews with legendary sportswriters who covered the Orioles back in the day. They saw everything and they’re great storytellers.

I had every intention of including an interview with Jim Henneman in the series. He grew up in Baltimore following the Orioles, started covering them in the early ‘60s and never really stopped, becoming such an institution along the way that the team named the press box at Camden Yards after him.

Sadly, that interview isn’t going to happen. Henneman passed away at age 89 last month, prompting an outpouring of emotion from his large and loving family, former Orioles, journalist colleagues and people he knew from his decades in and around Baltimore baseball.

He’d had his share of health challenges recently. I’m just glad he was in relatively good shape last year and able to experience the magnificent honor of having a major league press box named for him.

When I interviewed Brooks Robinson for my book on Orioles history a quarter-century ago, Brooks told me he should copy-edit the manuscript because he knew pretty much every player who’d ever worn an Oriole uniform. It was a quite a statement, and Henneman could make a similar boast. Henny, as he was known, covered pretty much every Oriole since the early ‘60s, giving him such a deep understanding of the team’s history that the team asked him to write a book commemorating its sixtieth anniversary in Baltimore.

His book, Baltimore Orioles: 60 Years of Orioles Magic, was published in 2015, a little over a decade after my oral history of the team, From Thirty-Third Street to Camden Yards, was published.

Having walked the same storytelling terrain, we always had plenty to talk about. I would never begin to suggest I knew more about the Orioles or about baseball, period. Henny’s knowledge of the game was vast. Sitting in a press box and covering a game alongside him was an education and a treat. I did it hundreds of times.

Make no mistake, when he retired from the newspaper business in the ‘90s and the club made him an official scorer, it was a salute to what he knew and had seen.

After I started the Bird Tapes in the spring of 2024, I was delighted to hear from Henny now and then with his thoughts on what I was publishing. My Orioles history project is built around a set of interviews with former players and front office executives and others around the team. Henny knew them all.

We were emailing fairly regularly, and then I had an idea late last year as I was getting ready to post a vintage interview with the late Walter Youse, one of the true lions in Baltimore baseball history. Although I’d interviewed Youse for my book, I didn’t know him nearly as well as Henny. I wondered if Henny would write about Youse for the Bird Tapes, effectively introducing him to a new generation.

Youse coached a powerhouse amateur team for decades, his roster featuring nearly four dozen future major leaguers and even future Hall of Famers Al Kaline and Reggie Jackson. Youse also worked as a scout for the Orioles and other teams, signing hundreds of players. The first prospect he scouted was a 21-year-old catcher named Cal Ripken. Henny actually played for Youse in the ‘50s and maintained a close relationship.

When I asked Henny to write about Youse, who died at age 88 in 2002, Henny graciously agreed to do it. The piece was published in late December, making it among the last of the thousands of articles Henny wrote about Baltimore baseball.

As a salute to Henny, I’m reprinting his article on Youse below. It’s a lovely piece, featuring insight into Henny himself as well as Youse and Cal Ripken.

For the record, before his health declined, Henny was interested in writing another piece for the Bird Tapes. He’d had this idea about pitching coaches and how they got fired. No surprise, the anecdotes he intended to use went back to the ‘60s.

I know it would’ve been great.

Here’s Henny’s article on Youse, originally published in late December 2024:

When One Baseball Lifer Signed Another

By Jim Henneman

Walter Youse was hardly the amateur baseball guru he would become in Baltimore when he got a gig as a part-time scout for the Orioles in 1957. But he was on his way and it wouldn’t take long.

He had already produced a string of state American Legion championship teams, including one that went to the national finals and included Al Kaline, a future Hall of Famer who would go on to lead the American League in hitting at age 20. The Orioles never had a chance to sign Kaline, who graduated from Southern High School in 1953 and signed with the Tigers one year before the St. Louis Browns moved to Baltimore.

But three years later, another outfielder, Barry Shetrone, was following a similar route and his eventual signing with the Orioles resulted in Youse getting the job -- a perceived thank you for his help with negotiations. Youse would go on to sign hundreds, maybe even thousands, of players for the Orioles, Angels and Brewers, the three teams he worked for in his more than 60 years in professional baseball.

I played on Youse’s first high school team at Calvert Hall and also spent one year with his Westport team, where I also filled in as his temporary coaching replacement when he had to surrender that job because of his association with professional baseball, a no-no under American Legion guidelines.

We stayed close throughout our careers and I was playing at what is now Loyola University when Walter signed his first player to a minor league contract. It didn’t have any impact at the time, but I still remember the phone conversation like it was yesterday.

“He’s a little older, a 21-year-old catcher, and I don’t know if he can make it to the big leagues, but they (the Orioles) need a catcher and I think he could be a good organization man down the road,” said Youse, enthused about his first signing.

Little did he, I, the Orioles or the rest of the baseball world have any idea what would come of that signing. In those days, the 21-year-old catcher was known simply as Cal Ripken because there wouldn’t be a Junior for a few more years. The rest, as we know, is history.

To this day, though it couldn’t have resonated with either of us at the time, I think Rip had more of Youse’s traits than anyone who may have played or coached for him. Most O’s fans know, or have heard of, Senior’s legendary no-nonsense approach. Practice sessions for pickoffs, relays and cutoffs didn’t have a time limit, and they were repeated if necessary until done right. Think: “practice doesn’t make perfect, PERFECT practice makes perfect.”

Unless you played or coached for him, you wouldn’t know (or perhaps understand) some of Walter’s rules. For openers, if you were going to earn a uniform, you had to learn how to wear it. And that meant wearing it a certain way, with the pant legs folded precisely between the knee and calf. Just to make sure everybody got the same message, veteran players were assigned to teach the “rookies” how to dress. I often wonder how that would go over today, with ankle-length uniforms the accepted style. Somehow, I think Walter would come up with a compromise that would make his players think it was their idea.

Another rule: if vacations were part of your family’s summer ritual, a decision would have to be made, and it would be either/or, no compromise, until the season was over. Also: the practices and preliminary games for tournaments (which his teams routinely won) were just as important as the tournaments. Another: if you were a pitcher, don’t even think about going to the swimming pool. (That rule that might not pass muster today, but I’m still not sure Walter would give in.)

Like Youse, Rip was more “old school” in both dress and training codes, and there were times he’d take chores on himself – like driving the bus or manicuring the infield if he felt it necessary. He was, as Youse said all those years ago, a good organization man. His reward was managing Cal Jr. and Bill in the major leagues, on the Orioles, even though his dream job couldn’t have come at a worse time, with the organization at an all-time low.

If I had two words to describe these two baseball lifers, the first could be commitment, the second stubborn. And believe me a stubborn commitment is tough to beat.

I always felt it was a mistake on both sides when Youse left the Orioles shortly after Harry Dalton joined the Angels, and then later moved on to Milwaukee with the “Dalton Gang.” It was the beginning of drastic changes for the Orioles’ organization – and the same could be said about the end of Cal Sr’s career.

I’ve often thought about Walter’s prediction when he signed Rip, but we never talked about it at length after he left. As for Cal Sr., I never told him the story, but I know he would’ve liked the comparison.

Too bad they couldn’t have spent their careers together in the organization where they started.