The Bird Tapes Interview: Rick Dempsey

Earl Weaver rode him mercilessly but played him day after day for years. In an interview from 2000, the popular catcher recalls a glorious era and laments that he never managed the club he loves.

Rick Dempsey in 1977

In most cases, I can easily recall the story behind the vintage interviews being published a quarter-century later here at the Bird Tapes. I remember where and when they took place and whether anything distinctive marked the occasion, such as the birds chirping outside the window of Frank Cashen’s living room on the Eastern Shore.

But for the life of me, as I recently re-listened to my interview with Rick Dempsey, I couldn't recall any of those details. Hey, it was a long time ago.

Finally, near the end of the interview, which is available below to paid Bird Tapes subscribers, the light bulb came on for me. I spoke to Dempsey in Vero Beach, Florida, in the lunch room at Dodgertown, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ spring training site for decades (long since abandoned). It was the spring of 2000 and Davey Johnson was the Dodgers’ manager. Dempsey was one of his coaches.

Now I remembered the details. On one very busy morning in Vero Beach, I interviewed Johnson, Dempsey and Gregg Olson, the Orioles’ former closer, who’d joined the Dodgers — all for my then-forthcoming book on Orioles history, which was published in 2001 and is still available. (I posted the Johnson interview last month. Olson is coming soon.)

Recalling the timing of our interview helped me understand why, to my ears, a touch of melancholy marked Dempsey’s mood as he answered my questions about his one-of-a-kind career with the Orioles. After he’d retired from playing, he’d worked as a minor league manager for the Dodgers and Mets, reaching as high as Triple A. That put him on the cusp of the majors, and the Orioles had interviewed him twice when their managerial job was open. But they’d hired other candidates both times (Phil Regan in 1995 and Mike Hargrove in 2000) and Dempsey was bitterly disappointed about it.

In his case, “the door is closed to the organization,” Dempsey told me that morning in Vero Beach, describing the situation as “the hardest pill to swallow,” because while he'd played for five other teams during his 24-year playing career, he’d experienced his highest times as the Orioles’ catcher on a series of championship-caliber teams in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Fans in Baltimore loved him. He wanted to try to rekindle that winning spirit, if possible, as the manager of his favorite team.

He later interviewed for the job again, losing out to Lee Mazzilli in 2004, and was mentioned as a possible candidate when Dave Tremblay got the job in 2008. For whatever reason, Dempsey-as-manager was an intriguing possibility that never launched in Baltimore.

Fortunately for his state of mind, he did return to the organization as a coach under Sam Perlozzo and eventually had a long run as a studio host on local television broadcasts, helping repair his association with the club. Today, he oversees a youth academy bearing his name in Columbia and can be found in the seats at Camden Yards, where he mingles with fans and basks in his standing as an eminence.

In our interview in 2000, he pinpointed why the fans in Baltimore liked him so much. Though he was smart and instinctive behind the plate and blessed with a powerful arm, he wasn’t spectacularly gifted. He had to work hard to forge his career. “I was a blue-collar player down in the trenches with everyone,” Dempsey said. “We had a lot of scrappy times together.”

When the Orioles acquired him from the Yankees in June of 1976, there were no guarantees he’d become their top catcher. At 26 years old, he was seven years removed from having been drafted by the Minnesota Twins in the fifteenth round — not a starting point from which frontline players usually bloom. The Orioles were his third club. He’d never been a frontline player in the majors.

In 1976, the Orioles were relying on a veteran catcher, Dave Duncan, and as Hank Peters explained in his Bird Tapes interview, posted last week, manager Earl Weaver initially preferred Duncan to Dempsey. Peters had to sit Weaver down and explain that Dempsey should start playing because Duncan wasn’t going to be with the Orioles much longer. Weaver got the message. Dempsey began to play more, took command of the starting job in 1977 and wound up catching more than a thousand games for the Orioles through 1987.

Throughout their long association, Weaver was hard on Dempsey, as Dempsey vividly depicted during our interview. Unfortunately, I later recorded over a few minutes of the conversation, including that part. (Apologies. I was busy. Probably too busy.) I can’t identify the person whose interview replaced Dempsey’s, but in any case, Dempsey’s comments about Weaver were in my book and they’re worth reprinting here:

“He tried to humiliate me every day. When he got tired of yelling at the pitchers, he came looking for me. Every single day. I mean, he pounded on me as hard as anyone ever pounded on me. He always said things to me so that the pitchers and other players could hear him. It took me eight years to figure it out. He wasn’t mad at me; he just wanted to make a point to everyone and he knew I could take it. Like, he would complain about guys giving up hits on certain pitches: ‘Jimmy Christmas, why’d you call that fastball? You can’t call a fastball to that guy. I’ll get someone else in here if you can’t call the right pitches.’ Well, he wasn’t really mad at me. He wanted the pitchers to hear that and think, ‘Hmm, maybe I should have thrown something else.’ But he knew I would never give up. I would fight him tooth and nail to the end. We had battles. We had physical battles.”

One day before a game, according to Dempsey, things got so hearted that Dempsey threw his bat at Weaver, who picked it up and came toward him, saying, '“If you weren’t in my lineup today, I’d crack you with this thing.”

But despite it all, as the recorded portion of our interview begins below (click here to subscribe to the Dempsey interview and gain access to the entire Bird Tapes archive), Dempsey salutes Weaver for putting aside the relentless criticism and playing him just about every day for a decade.

One of the most unusual but successful careers in Orioles history resulted. Dempsey batted just .238 for the club over a dozen seasons, but look closer. He led the American League in percentage of base stealers thrown out for five straight years (1976 through 1980). He led the league in fielding percentage in 1980 and 1981. He repeatedly rose to big occasions, hitting 65 points higher in the postseason than during the regular season. He caught two Cy Young Award winners (Jim Palmer and Steve Stone) and three other starters who posted 20-win seasons (Mike Flanagan, Scott McGregor and Mike Boddicker).

And forget all those numbers … he just played hard.

“I might dive into the grandstand or dive into the dugout to catch a ball. I never played it safe,” he told me that day in Vero Beach. “A lot of the things I tried to do, climb screens and such, you’d never see it now.”

True enough. It was no wonder the fans loved him.