The Bird Tapes Interview: Dick Hall (Part 1)

It took him years to find the right path in pro baseball, but once he did, he used his astoundingly good control to become an elite relief pitcher on a winning club.

During my 1999 interview with Dick Hall, one of the Orioles’ top relief pitchers from the ‘60s and early ‘70s, he offered the simplest of explanations for how he lasted 16 years in the major leagues without a dominant repertoire of pitches.

“I didn’t walk anybody,” he said.

It wasn’t hyperbole. Hall literally almost never walked anyone.

During the Orioles’ World Series-winning 1966 season, he faced 268 batters over 66 innings and walked just four unintentionally. (Four of his season total of eight walks were intentional.)

Even more absurdly, he unintentionally walked just seven of the 672 batters he faced over a three-year period beginning in 1969.

Indeed, he literally walked almost no one.

“That’s how I survived,” Hall said in Part 1 of his interview, which is available below to paid Bird Tapes subscribers. (I’ll post Part 2 next week. Hall, who lived in Baltimore and worked as a CPA after he retired, was so observant and engaging on so many subjects when we spoke that my recorder just ran and ran and ran.)

Hall was the first to admit he didn’t have a dominant fastball or jaw-dropping off-speed pitches. But he did have pinpoint control. When he aimed his pitches, he hit his desired locations precisely and continually.

Enhancing that control with a herky-jerky, neo-sidearm delivery (really more front-arm) that the tall, lanky Hall once described as resembling “a drunken giraffe on roller skates,” he threw strikes, worked ahead and frustrated an entire generation of batters who strode to the plate thinking they could hit him .. until they didn’t.

“How can you be out there with that garbage?” Johnny Bench reportedly yelled at Hall from the Cincinnati Reds’ dugout during Game 2 of the 1970 World Series, according to a Society of American Baseball Research profile of Hall.

Standing on the mound, Hall just grinned back at Bench. He was in the middle of what, for him, was a typical outing. Having entered the game in the seventh inning with the Orioles up by one run, he retired seven batters in a row to earn a save as the Orioles took a 2-0 lead in a Series they eventually won.

Hall was 39 that day, the oldest player in the American League. He’d started late in pro baseball years earlier, at age 24, because he was busy earning an economics degree (with minors in history and political science) from Swarthmore College, an elite academic institution, where he excelled at football and basketball and even track as well as baseball. From that start, Hall went on a long, winding journey in the game, experiencing his share of failure, before emerging as an unparalleled control master for the Orioles in the ‘60s and early ‘70s.

Early in his career, the Pittsburgh Pirates, who’d signed him, viewed him as an everyday player. They tried him at first base, third base, shortstop and the outfield. One year in winter ball, he set a home run record. In 1954, he appeared in 112 games as an outfielder, hitting .239.

But he struggled to hit curveballs (“I couldn't hit” was Hall’s frank assessment years later), and meanwhile, while playing winter ball in Mexico, he worked on his pitching. The Pirates saw enough potential to give him 24 starts in 1955 and 1956.

Eventually, though, he experienced persistent arm pain, which impacted his performance and prompted his return to the minors. In 1960, the Pirates traded him to the Kansas City A’s, who traded him to the Orioles a year later.

Hall arrived in Baltimore after a season in which he’d made 28 starts for the A’s, going 8-13, and Orioles manager Paul Richards initially saw him as a starter, too. But his arm began to hurt again, and Richards moved him to the bullpen — a critical move that extended Hall’s career.

Carrying a lighter load of innings out of the bullpen, Hall not only pitched without pain, but also pitched more effectively. He became a late-innings specialist, called upon only in close games largely because he didn’t beat himself with walks.

“I was kind of a set-up guy. I’d come on in the seventh, there or in extra innings,” Hall said.

He was a mainstay in the Orioles’ bullpen from 1962 through 1971 except for a two-year period (1967 and 1968) when he was with the Philadelphia Phillies. Overall, he finished 175 games in Baltimore and pitched to a 2.89 ERA over 770 innings with a 65-40 record.

According to baseball-reference.com, he ranks fortieth all-time among all major league pitchers for issuing the fewest walks per nine innings.

“We always said he could hit a little thimble on the outside corner because he had great control,” Jim Palmer said when Hall died at age 92 in 2023.

In 1999, I interviewed Hall at his condo in Baltimore County. He and his wife, whom he’d met in Mexico while playing winter ball, had raised their kids and downsized and were enjoying being grandparents. Mostly retired from his post-baseball career as a CPA, Hall was playing a lot of golf (very well, no surprise).

Talking about the old days, the former economics major told stories with a wry grin and a keen eye for detail. Among many things, he told me about the only time in his career that he grooved a pitch; how easy it was to talk manager Billy Hitchcock out of pulling him; and why the Orioles kept Memorial Stadium’s infield rock-hard.

He was a pure pleasure to interview, and all these years later, he’s a pure pleasure to listen to, a superb oral historian and guide through the Orioles’ best years.