Spirit of '66: Eddie Watt

A taciturn Midwesterner, he was effective for many years out of the Orioles' bullpen but still became a target for boos. The post includes my narration of a feature story I wrote about him.

Years ago, when the Baltimore Sun sent me around the country to write about former Orioles from the World Series-winning 1966 team, I made a special trip to the Pacific Northwest to interview Wally Bunker. He’d pitched a shutout to win Game 3 of the World Series that year, and two decades later, he was making a nice living selling refrigerator magnets. Unable to pass that story up, I flew to Seattle and drove to an island off the coast of Washington, where Bunker lived.

While I was in the area, I picked up a second interview strictly by chance. Eddie Watt had been a rookie relief pitcher on the 1966 Orioles, and now, at age 45, he was the pitching coach for the Tucson Toros, a team in the Pacific Coast League. They were playing a series in Tacoma, not far from where Bunker lived. I found out where they were staying and contacted Watt, who invited me to interview him at his hotel one morning.

The fact that I stumbled onto the interview, instead of planning it, summed up Watt’s place in Orioles history. “I was a supporting character,” he told me that day in Tacoma. “Palmer, Blair, Boog, McNally, they all had more flair than me, public image-wise. I was conservative, not the fair-haired cover boy some were.”

His supporting role didn’t mean he was unimportant. Watt carried a major load out of the bullpen from 1966 through 1973. Few relievers last that long with any club, but Watt was effective and consistent. Short and chunky with a wad of Red Man bulging in his left cheek, he threw hard with nice command and compiled a 2.74 ERA over 363 appearances spanning 615 innings.

Between 1966 through 1971, when the Orioles were at their best, winning four American League pennants and two World Series titles, Watt made more appearances and earned more saves than any pitcher on the club.

“I did pitch well,” he told me.

A classic Midwesterner, Watt had thrown newspaper routes as a youngster in Iowa to help his working-class family make ends meet, according to a Society of American Baseball Research profile of him. His strong arm eventually opened doors. He became the first person in his family to attend college, and while pitching for Iowa State Teachers College, later known as Northern Iowa University, he was noticed by major league scouts when his team reached an NCAA tournament regional final.

The St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago White Sox made offers, but he signed with the Orioles when they offered $50 more per month.

“It turned out to be one of the best moves I ever made,” Watt said.

Coming through the Orioles’ minor-league system, he played under Earl Weaver and Cal Ripken Sr., and teamed with Andy Etchebarren and Jim Palmer, among many. Harry Dalton, the farm director, put him on the 40-man roster, noting his potential. Once he arrived in Baltimore, he never left.

After his playing career ended in the mid-1970s, he became a minor-league pitching coach — a job well suited to his out-of-the-spotlight nature. (He spent his offseasons in North Bend, Nebraska, a small town where he lived on a farm and worked in a popcorn factory.) Seeking to help unvarnished prospects move closer to the major leagues, he’d spent more nights in motels than he could count, to the point that he didn’t always know where he was when he awoke in the morning.

“I’m so tired of hotel rooms,” he told me.

He’d brought me to his room for our interview, enabling me to view a classic still-life portrait of a minor league coach’s life. A cartoon played on the television with the sound muted. A portable alarm clock, half-empty bottle of scotch, can of foot deodorant and newspaper crossword puzzle sat on his bedside table.

“I know some people think I’m crazy to live like I have, all this time in hotel rooms, all this moving around,” Watt said, “but I don’t think I would like a normal 9-to-5 life. I like baseball and I feel it has given me a good career. I’ve seen the world. I’ve never been a millionaire or owned a Cadillac, but I’m happy. I couldn’t be happier.”

He was a baseball lifer, which made it all the more unfortunate that he was one of the few Orioles from his era whom fans targeted for abuse.

It was all because of one pitch — yup, just one out of the thousands he threw in Baltimore over the years. He relieved Palmer in the top of the eighth inning of Game 4 of the 1970 World Series, with the Orioles up on the Cincinnati Reds, 5-3, and in need of just six more outs to complete a sweep. Orioles manager Earl Weaver hoped Watt could finish the job after the first two batters of the inning reached base on Palmer, but the first batter Watt faced, Lee May, clubbed a three-run homer, and the Reds won the game. Even though the Orioles completed the sweep the next day, Watt heard boos throughout the rest of his time in Baltimore.

One fan from those years told me the fans turned on him because they blamed him for the Orioles not sweeping the Reds four years after they’d swept the Dodgers in the 1966 World Series. The city was hoping for a pair of sweeps, apparently.

In any case, fearing it was a sore subject, I waited until near the end of my conversation with Watt to bring it up. He just shrugged.

“I never did understand it entirely,” he said. “I guess I was the easiest one to dislike. But the booing hurt my children more than it hurt me. I hold no grudges against the people of Baltimore. I have a lot of friends there.”

(Click below to hear my narration of the article I wrote about Watt years ago, which was part of a Baltimore Sun series titled “Spirit of ‘66,” about the players on the Orioles’ first championship team.)