The Bird Tapes Interview: Steve Barber (Part 2)

In the second half of his vintage interview, the Orioles’ first 20-game winner recounts the off-field shenanigans for which he and several teammates were known.

Few comments in the Bird Tapes canon have made me laugh harder than Harry Dalton’s droll summation of the starting rotation for the Orioles’ Class D affiliate in the Florida State League in 1959

It included Steve Dalkowski, Bo Belinsky and Steve Barber, three left-handers who threw hard and were known to — how to put this — also occasionally inhabit establishments where alcohol was served.

“There’s a holy trinity for you,” recalled Dalton, the Orioles’ farm director in 1959, about Dalkowski, Belinsky and Barber.

In the first half of his Bird Tapes interview, posted last week, Barber singled out Dalkowski for both throwing and drinking the hardest. One night, Barber said, he encountered Dalkowski sitting at a bar with 24 scotch-and-waters in front of him. “And he was pitching the next day,” Barber added.

Belinsky was also an infamous carouser. “Bo has more fun off the field than on the field,” a teammate said of him. Taking advantage of the headlines he generated by throwing a no-hitter for the Los Angeles Angels in 1962, (the Angels had plucked him from the Orioles in a minor league draft), Belinsky dated a succession of Hollywood actresses. Eventually, he married and divorced a Playboy Playmate of the Year.

In Barber’s telling, he was the lightweight of the three Florida State League teammates in 1959. “I wasn’t really drinking then,” he said in Part 1 of his vintage interview from 1999, posted last week. But in the second half of the interview, available below to paid Bird Tapes subscribers, he recounts a series of what are best described as “drinking tales,” in which he takes the mound for the Orioles after over-indulging.

It’s the kind of storytelling you never hear from active players in 2024, not least because they want to exhibit professionalism and protect their astronomical salaries. Also, Barber’s heyday unfolded in a different era, when a comedian or entertainer could base an entire career around pretending to be drunk. Many people stopped thinking that was funny a long tine ago, but t it worked then.

In any case, Barber, who died in 2007, was unflinchingly honest throughout our interview, willingly recounting stories in which he errs as well as shines. I couldn’t help but admire both his humility and his bluntness. Like Harry Dalton with the comment about the wild-and-crazy 1959 Class D rotation, Barber also made me laugh. His thoughts on Milt Papas, his longtime teammate?

“I couldn’t stand him. No one could,” Barber declared.