The Bird Tapes Interview: Joe Hamper

He worked for the Orioles for 37 years, the last 25 as their chief financial officer. The job enabled him to see how the owners operated, and when we spoke, he held nothing back when discussing them.

A quarter-century ago, when I told a longtime Orioles employee that I planned to chronicle the team’s history in a book, he told me, “You can’t do that without talking to Joe Hamper.”

I was stumped. I knew I couldn’t write the book without interviewing Brooks Robinson, Earl Weaver and dozens of others. But who was Joe Hamper?

I’d written continuously about the Orioles for years, had their recent history memorized cold and knew many front office employees. But I couldn't tell you what Hamper looked like or what he did. And this was someone I HAD to talk to?

Talk about embarrassing. It turned out I did need to interview Hamper if I wanted my book to include a fully-drawn, nuanced depiction of the Orioles’ owners and finances through the years.

An accountant by training, Hamper had joined the front office in 1954, before the Orioles played a game, and worked through 1991, retiring shortly after the last game at Memorial Stadium. He operated strictly behind the scenes, somehow achieving anonymity in a highly public realm, but for the last 25 of his 37 years with the club, he was the vice president of finance — the guy in charge of the books.

He saw and knew pretty much everything about the Orioles in their Memorial Stadium years, and fortunately, when I sought him out in 1999 for an interview for my book, Hamper, at 73, was healthy, sharp and happy to sit in his Baltimore County living room and go back over what he experienced.

From my standpoint, as someone trying to write history, he was pure gold.

My vintage interview with Hamper, available below to paid subscribers, is an important and unique addition to the Bird Tapes collection. Instead of discussing pitching and defense and offensive strategy, he delved deep into the Orioles’ finances and how the various owners operated through the years.

“We made money most every year. There were a couple of years when we didn’t,” Hamper told me at one point.

Wait, what? The Orioles didn’t always make money?

Silly (younger) me, I didn’t ask him to elaborate.

Along similar lines, Hamper also confirmed what, in my view, is one of the fundamental explanatory themes of the Bird Tapes collection — that the arrival of free agency for major league players in 1975 was a fateful and troubling development for the Orioles because they lacked the attendance and income to compete for talent with teams in larger markets.

Before free agency, a team’s ability to scout, draft and develop talent had a lot to do with its success or failure on the diamond, and the Orioles excelled, their excellent developmental pipeline enabling them to field a succession of contenders and winners from the early ‘60s on. It wasn't an accident that their dominance ebbed and they began to lose within a decade of the arrival of free agency — the importance of having money had begun to equal or exceed the importance of player development.

“When free agency came along, the Orioles just didn’t have the money,” Hamper said.

A Baltimore native, Hamper served in the Army during World War II and was captured by German forces at the Battle of the Bulge. Held prisoner for three months, he was liberated in 1945 by Gen. George S. Patton’s 3rd Army. After the war, he resumed his education at Johns Hopkins and became a CPA in the early ‘50s.

Catching on with the Orioles shortly before their first game in 1954, he became a close observer of the owners — a group of local businessman in the beginning. Clarence Miles, the attorney who’d led the effort to buy the team from Bill Veeck and move it from St. Louis to Baltimore, was the first club president, but according to Hamper, he actually had little money invested and soon was forced out by the men who did have money invested — Joseph Iglehart, James Keelty and Zanvyl Krieger most prominently.

Jerry Hoffberger, president of the National Brewing Company, was a minority owner until CBS purchased the New York Yankees in 1965. Hoffberger thought corporate ownership was bad for baseball, preferring to see teams remain in the hands of longtime baseball-centric families such as Chicago’s Comiskeys and Boston’s Yawkeys. According to Hamper, Hoffberger’s opinion put him at odds with Iglehart, who was chairman of the Orioles’ board of directors and also on CBS’ board of directors. Their conflict led to Iglehart selling his shares of the Orioles to Hoffberger, Hamper said.

Hoffberger, according to Hamper, created a more businesslike organization as the team began to win pennants in the late ‘60s. But in Hamper’s view, that success was mostly due to what had been the strength of the organization since it came to Baltimore — the scouting and player development departments.

“The minor league department worked harder (in the early years) than anyone I ever saw. I saw more innovation, more dedication and more competitive drive and ability than I’ve ever seen since,” Hamper told me.

If you’d always thought the Orioles’ very nature changed after Hoffberger sold them to Washington attorney Edward Bennett Williams in 1979, well, Hamper confirmed it.

Hoffberger had always sought the opinions of his various department heads before making important decisions, giving rise to the notion that the Orioles were a collaborative organization. But that ceased once Williams took over.

“What Williams wanted to do was what was done. You never felt like what you had to say had any meaning at all,” Hamper said. “There was no organization. Everything was done out of Washington.”

But Eli Jacobs, the New York financier who bought the team after Williams died, was the owner who most amazed Hamper.

“He didn’t pay a penny for the ballclub,” said Hamper, who died at age 84 in 2010. “My eyes really popped when I saw how (Jacobs) operated (relying on large personal and mercantile loans). You almost forgot it was a ballclub when there was so much emphasis on the finances.”

Hamper’s interview explains a lot about the Orioles in the years they played at Memorial Stadium. I’m proud to add it to the Bird Tapes archive.