The Bird Tapes Interview: Barry Shetrone

He was the first Baltimore native to play for the Orioles, and at one point, drew comparisons to another Baltimore native, Al Kaline. But his career petered out.

It was unfortunate for the Orioles, to say the least, that Al Kaline graduated from Southern High School in 1953, the year before the St. Louis Browns moved to Baltimore. The Orioles still might not have signed Kaline, reared in their new hometown and destined for the Hall of Fame, but they never even had a chance because they didn’t exist when he turned pro.

Kaline, of course, signed with the Detroit Tigers and quickly became one of the game’s top players, winning a league batting title with a .340 average as a 20-year-old in 1955. It drove the Orioles nuts, and when another young player from Baltimore came along soon after, drawing comparisons to Kaline, they weren’t about to let him get away.

That player was Barry Shetrone, who followed Kaline’s path almost exactly, attending Southern High School, playing for Walter Youse’s stellar amateur team and drawing raves from the many scouts following him around. Shetrone could drive the ball at the plate and run, really run. He’d starred in basketball, exhibiting rare athleticism.

Maybe he’s the next Kaline, it was said — an unfair comparison, for sure. But after Shetrone signed with the Orioles in 1956, he initially hinted that he might live up to it. He hit .371 in his first full season in the minors, then hit .267 as a 19-year-old at Triple A in 1958. He was hitting close to .300 in Triple A in July of 1959 when the Orioles called him up. He was 20. Here we go.

In Shetrone’s first major league at-bat, against the Tigers in Detroit, he hit a bloop into shallow left field and blazed around the bases when the ball fell between two outfielders. Ending up on third, he inspired a rare burst of hyperbole from Orioles manager Paul Richards, who didn’t easily dole out praise. “I never saw his feet touch the ground,” Richard said of Shetrone’s sprint around the bases.

Fans in Baltimore were thrilled. It seemed the hometown kid was about to make big things happen.

But instead … nothing happened.

Richards was comfortable with veterans Bob Nieman, Willie Tasby, Al Pilarcik and Gene Woodling handling the outfield duties on his club. Shetrone didn’t hit well enough in his few opportunities to barge his way into the rotation.

“For the most part, I just sat there. I wasn't used to it. It was really disheartening,” Shetrone told me when I interviewed him for my book on Orioles history in 1999.

In the interview, available below to paid subscribers, Shetrone methodically unspools his classic tale of unfulfilled promise, a staple of baseball’s storytelling canon. He ended up hitting just .205 as a fringe player in the majors over parts of five seasons, four with the Orioles and one with the Washington Senators. He never hit another triple and was gone for good from the majors before he turned 25.

Basically, Shetrone’s career was a fairytale right up to the moment when he seemed ready to make it all come true, but the fairytale fractured fast, and in our conversation years later, Shetrone didn’t try to gloss over it.

“Broke my heart,” he said.

I interviewed Shetrone for my book because he was a Baltimore legend in the ‘50s, and also, because he symbolized a Richards-era narrative as a touted Orioles prospect who didn’t live up to his hype. There were many others, including pitcher Bruce Swango, who couldn’t perform in front of crowds, and sluggers Bob “Tex” Nelson and Dave Nicholson, who piled up more strikeouts than home runs.

Shetrone, in his telling, never had a real chance to show what he could do in the majors after he’d lit up the minors. He did admit in our interview that his attitude quickly soured, he didn’t throw well and injuries and a military commitment got in the way, all problems for a young outfielder trying to make it.

At least he became the answer to a good trivia question: Who was the Orioles’ first Baltimore-born player?

Fortunately, once he was done with baseball, he went into the insurance business and thrived, enabling him to look back at his baseball experience good-naturedly rather than bitterly. That was just his nature, too; he had a terrific sense of humor. When, sadly, he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, just a few years after I interviewed him, he told friends, "I don't mind having Lou Gehrig's disease, but I sure wish I had his batting average."

He died at age 63 in 2001.