The Bird Tapes Interview: Ron Hansen

Playing alongside his friend Brooks Robinson, he became the first Oriole to win a league award when he was voted the American League's Rookie of the Year in 1960.

When the Orioles fielded an American League pennant contender for the first time, in 1960, the left side of their infield was a revelation.

Twenty-three-year-old third baseman Brooks Robinson batted .294, drove in 88 runs, won a Gold Glove and finished third in the balloting for the league’s Most Valuable Player award. Twenty-two-year-old shortstop Ron Hansen clouted 22 home runs, drove in 86 runs, finished fifth in the MVP balloting and won the league’s Rookie of the Year award.

Robinson and Hansen. Hansen and Robinson.

They were two peas in a pod.

Each had signed with the Orioles out of high school — Robinson from Little Rock, Arkansas in 1955 and Hansen from California’s Bay Area in 1956 — and they’d become close friends while rising through the club’s minor league network.

“We got along great, liked the same things,” Hansen told me in a 1999 interview, available below to paid Bird Tapes subscribers.

They even lived together while they wore out American League opponents in 1960, renting adjacent rooms in a family’s house near Memorial Stadium. On a typical day, they’d walk together to the ballpark with teammates Chuck Estrada and Skinny Brown, who also rented rooms in the house. They’d eat lunch at the Run Inn on Greenmount Avenue, head to the ballpark, and then, later, walk home together after the game.

“I was a kid in a world I’d never imagined I’d be in,” Hansen told me.

Standing six-feet-three and weighing nearly 200 pounds, he didn’t fit the mold of a typical shortstop of that era. Before the likes of Robin Yount and Cal Ripken Jr. came along, teams only cared about the defense they received at shortstop; any offensive production was deemed a bonus and certainly wasn’t required. The typical major league shortstop was a diminutive defensive wizard. Willy Miranda, a career .221 hitter, started more than 500 games for the Orioles at shortstop from 1955 until Hansen took over.

Hansen actually had signed as a third baseman and started out there in the minors, playing alongside a slick college shortstop named Gary Robin. But when Robin broke his leg, the Orioles moved Hansen to shortstop.

“It was a lucky break for me,” Hansen said. “If I’d stayed at third, where Brooks was, I might never have made it to the major leagues.”

Robinson had signed as a second baseman and started out there in the minors before being moved to third. In the end, after all that positional hopscotching, Hansen and Robinson were lined up beside each other in Baltimore in 1960, and given how they performed, it seemed the Orioles were set for years on that side of the infield.

But while Robinson continued to soar, Hansen initially was unable to replicate his stellar rookie season. He hit 10 fewer homers and drove in 35 fewer runs in 1961, and then he tried to play in 1962 while stationed at Fort Meade in the Army Reserves. His production plummeted and the Orioles included him in a trade with the Chicago White Sox after the season. Luis Aparicio, among the players they received in the trade, became their shortstop.

Hansen played far better in Chicago than he did in his last season in Baltimore, exhibiting the combination of power and solid defense he’d shown as a rookie. The White Sox nearly won the American League pennant with him hitting 20 home runs in 1964, and he played in 162 games in 1965. A back injury curtailed his production after that, but he continued to play in the major leagues through 1972 and then had a long post-playing career in the sport, serving as a minor league manager, a major league coach and, finally, a respected scout for many years.

When I asked him in 1999 to put on his scouting hat, look back and assess his friend Brooks as a prospect back in the 1950s, he smiled.

“A lot of scouts today wouldn’t sign a kid like that. He didn’t have a great arm. When he’d throw the ball across the infield, I’d yell, ‘Tag up!” Hansen said, kidding that Robinson’s throws resembled a sacrifice fly.

Among the many former players I interviewed for my book on Orioles history a quarter-century ago, Hansen was among the easiest to find. Although he’d only played for the Orioles for a few years, he’d married a woman from Baltimore and they’d settled in the area to raise their family. In the 1990s, he was working for the Yankees as an advance scout, a job that brought him to Camden Yards for many games.

We spoke in the media dining room before a game — a crowded, loud space. The audio engineer assisting me with the Bird Tapes (a very good one) endeavored to soften the background noise and make Hansen easy to understand. I hope he is discernible, and either way, I’ve added detail to the accompanying listener’s guide, also available below, to help you follow along.