The Real Steve Dalkowski Story
Listen to my audiobook-style narration of an award-winning Baltimore Sun story I wrote in 2003 about the minor-league legend, who threw as hard as anyone in baseball history.
In the chapter on Steve Dalkowski in my 2001 book on Orioles history, I quoted numerous people who’d played with or seen the legendary fireballer. Boog Powell, Steve Barber, Milt Pappas, Barry Shetrone, Earl Weaver, Walter Youse, Harry Dalton and others eagerly recalled him and told stories. Their memories of Dalkowski still burned bright.
But one voice was absent from the chapter. There wasn’t a single word from Dalkowski himself.
I didn’t include him in the round of interviews I conducted for the book because recent newspaper articles about him being rescued from homelessness had noted that he had dementia. Although he was reportedly sober, quite content and relatively conversational, I didn’t feel it was right for me just to show up and ask him a million questions about the old days. It might make him uncomfortable.
But on a whim several years after my book came out in 2001, I got in touch with his sister, who had orchestrated his return home to New Britain, Connecticut, after years of wandering. She encouraged me to come and interview him because he was doing so well. When I explained the situation to my editors at the Baltimore Sun, they also encouraged me to go to Connecticut and interview him. The newspaper had never published a longform article about Dalkowski, one of the truly original figures in Orioles history. The time had come for me to correct that.
That Dalkowski was doing better was immediately clear when I arrived at the nursing home where he lived in New Britain. I had to get in line to speak to him. He was behind closed doors in a meeting room with a crew from ESPN, which wanted to include him in a piece about the fastest pitchers in history.
When my time came, I sat down with him in the meeting room, turned on my microcassette recorder and spoke with him for about 45 minutes. Smiling and affable, Dalkowski didn’t speak with granular specificity, but he did recall the nights when he’d take the mound and strike out 18 and walk 15. He understood why he was a baseball legend.
While I was in Connecticut, I also interviewed Dalkowski’s teammates and friends from high school, who helped flesh out his one-of-a-kind story. Dalkowski’s sister was enormously helpful, detailing their blue-collar upbringing with a father who drank heavily with his son. I came home and wrote the story, seeking to separate fact from fiction in the outrageous tale of a pitcher who threw hard and lived harder.
Published in February 2003, the article ran in the Sun under the headline, “Lost Phenom Finds His Way.”
The Orioles found it moving and invited him to throw out the first pitch before a game at Camden Yards later that year. Dalkowski made the trip to Baltimore with his sister and walked slowly to the mound before a game against the Seattle Mariners on a sunny Sunday afternoon. There was little reaction from the crowd, Dalkowski’s poignant story having long ago been mostly lost in the mists of history. But being on ESPN helped revive it, and a few years after he was in Baltimore, the Los Angeles Dodgers also invited him to throw out the first pitch before a game. Overweight and mostly wheelchair-bound, he rolled out to the mound that day.
Incredibly, Dalkowski, whom many had predicted would die young, lived until he succumbed to the coronavirus at the outset of the pandemic in 2020. He was 81.
Last year, when I opened up the shoebox in my closet that housed the recordings of my interviews for my book from a quarter-century ago, I found the microcassette with my Dalkowski interview. I had it digitized, listened to it and decided it wasn’t appropriate to post the interview as part of my Bird Tapes project. Although it’s great that Dalkowski was well enough to sit for an interview all those years ago, his responses were brief and not always easily discerned. Honestly, I did most of the talking. Having recently experienced dementia impacting a close member of my family, I just felt that, out of respect for Dalkowski, our conversation was best kept out of the public realm.
I did, however, dig through the Internet and find the story I wrote about Dalkowski for the Baltimore Sun in 2003. It’s a detailed biographical profile that won awards. Today, instead of posting a vintage interview with a figure in Orioles history, I’m posting my audiobook-style narration of the story, which I wrote after I interviewed Dalkowski more than two decades ago. It’s available to all subscribers.
Just click on the “play” button below.
Enjoy.