The Bird Tapes Interview: Joe Foss

I interviewed him for my book 25 years ago because Peter Angelos initially turned me down. Foss, the Orioles' chief operating officer at the time, artfully provided the owner's side of many issues.

When Peter Angelos bought the Orioles in 1993, he still had a law firm to run. He hired Joe Foss to oversee his baseball team’s day-to-day business.

A banker in Washington DC, originally from Minnesota, Foss was new to baseball. But he brought a honed business sense to the job and rode a steep learning curve as the Orioles’ chief operating officer during the first years of Angelos’ ownership.

It was a heady and tumultuous time. Camden Yards had opened, giving the Orioles renewed stature after a decade of decline. And thanks to nightly sellouts, they suddenly had enough revenue to lure top-tier talent.

A series of highly public, controversial dramas ensued. Though also new to baseball, Angelos was opinionated. He ran through managers and hired a World Series-winning GM, Pat Gillick, then prevented Gillick from making a pair of trade-deadline deals aimed at bolstering the club’s faltering minor league system. He failed to retain a popular broadcaster, Jon Miller, and parted with a manager, Davey Johnson, who’d just led the Orioles to their first division title in 14 years.

It was all fascinating and exhausting and Foss was right there for all of it as the club’s second-in-command to Angelos.

Near the end of the ‘90s, I set out to write a book about the history of the Orioles going back to their origins in Baltimore nearly a half century earlier. My goal was to interview anyone who’d ever done anything for the club and was still alive, and I succeeded to some extent, banking nearly 100 interviews.

But I didn’t succeed with Angelos, at least not at first. I was a columnist for the Baltimore Sun at the time, and Angelos loathed my newspaper’s coverage of his team, believing he’d been unfairly depicted as meddlesome and inappropriately singled out as the bad guy in several controversies.. He wouldn’t speak to me whenever I called his office seeking a comment for a column, and not surprisingly given that, he also initially refused to be interviewed for my book.

As I approached the deadline for turning in the manuscript, I was unsettled. A handful of my sources had criticized Angelos in their interviews. I didn’t want to publish the book without including his side of the various situations that had produced headlines and drama. That wasn’t fair.

I called Foss. He could explain Angelos’ thinking, I thought.

Fortunately, Foss was good-natured and levelheaded; we’d always gotten along even though I’d ripped him in the paper a few times. When we met for lunch and I explained what I needed, he immediately grasped the situation. I turned on my recorder and Foss proceeded to detail Angelos’ rationales for the moves he’d made. I turned in the manuscript with Foss effectively standing in for the owner – a reasonable Plan B, I thought.

His contribution became less vital when Angelos abruptly consented to an interview and was able to speak for himself in the book. But Foss had been so interesting on so many subjects that he still made the final draft.

All these years later, listening to my vintage interview with Foss, available below to paid Bird Tapes subscribers, is like stepping into a time capsule. It’s the late summer of 2000. Camden Yards is still packed for every game, but the Orioles are finishing up a third straight disappointing season – an ominous foretelling in hindsight, as years of losing lay just ahead. Foss covers all of the controversies that seemed so colossal at the time. Angelos overruling Gillick’s trades in 1996. Angelos disapproving of how Johnson fined Roberto Alomar for spitting on an umpire — a situation that ultimately led to Johnson’s resignation in 1997 on the day he was named American League Manager of the Year. The increasing tumult in the organization. The firing of Frank Robinson, a franchise legend who’d been in the front office for 19 years.

Naturally, there’s plenty of business talk. “The asset has appreciated” thanks to the opening of Camden Yards, Foss says, referring to the Orioles, “but our motivation is not profit.”

Certainly an interesting comment to hear all these years later.

Foss, who would remain with the Orioles for another seven years after this interview, does exactly what I wanted him to do: give ownership’s side.

I’m quite sure it’ll stir some reaction.