McLaughlin vs. Richards | The Bird Tapes

BaltimoreBaseball.com is delighted to be partnering with John Eisenberg, the author and longtime Baltimore sports columnist, whose latest venture is an Orioles history project called The Bird Tapes. Available on a subscription basis at birdtapes.substack.com/subscribe, the Bird Tapes is built around a set of vintage interviews with Orioles legends that Eisenberg recorded a quarter-century while writing a book about the team. Paid subscribers can hear the interviews, which have been digitized to make them easily consumable. The Bird Tapes also includes new writing on Orioles history from Eisenberg, who is the author of 11 books, including two on the Orioles. BaltimoreBaseball.com will publish Eisenberg’s new writing.

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For a few years in their first decade in Baltimore, as they sought to establish themselves in the American League, the Orioles were the scene of an outright civil war.

It unfolded behind the scenes, out of the public’s view, but it raged.

On one side was Jim McLaughlin, director of the Orioles’ farm system. His rival was Paul Richards, the Orioles’ manager and GM.

They couldn’t stand each other.

The only front office employee who’d come east with the franchise from St. Louis in 1954, McLaughlin was a true believer in the power of signing and developing young talent. His goal was to see the Orioles soar with a roster of homegrown stars.

An effective department manager, McLaughlin had a system for his scouts to use to judge players. Each player was assigned a circle with a line across the middle. The upper half consisted of running, throwing, hitting — the tools you could see. The lower half consisted of attitude, determination, intelligence — attributes you couldn’t see. Ahead of his time, McLaughlin believed the lower half of the circle was just as important as the upper half.

McLaughlin’s staff of scouts included Fred “Bootnose” Hofmann, a former major league catcher who’d played with Babe Ruth; and Jim Russo, who would rise through the ranks and become a key member of the front office. They came with him from St. Louis. He also hired and trained a crew of young men who would help build winning teams in Baltimore in the coming decades. They included future GMs Hank Peters and Harry Dalton; future managers Earl Weaver and Cal Ripken Sr.; and coaches George Bamberger and Billy Hunter, who became managers elsewhere.

But just as McLaughlin finished setting up his department, its power was undermined when the Orioles hired Richards away from the Chicago White Sox in 1955 and gave him control of the entire baseball operation — yes, farm system included. McLaughlin’s scouts continued to sign players, but Richards brought his own lieutenants, whose eyes and opinions suddenly mattered more when the Orioles were deciding which highly ranked prospects to sign.

“It was a conflict, plain and simple,” Walter Youse, a longtime scout, told me in a 1999 interview for my book on Orioles history.

(Note: My Substack posts that include the vintage interviews are available via a paid subscription, which also gives you unlimited access to the archive of interviews. Free subscribers to the Bird Tapes will receive immediate access to my new written work, which will also be published here at BaltimoreBaseball.com on a different schedule.)

Richards gave the Orioles credibility and made them better during his six years in Baltimore, but on the developmental side, he wasted a lot of money on prospects who didn’t pan out, eschewing opinions from McLaughlin and his scouts. Ownership finally took away some of Richards’ authority in 1959, hiring Lee MacPhail away from the Yankees to become the GM.

Richards remained the manger, and when the Orioles contended for a pennant in 1960, it seemed the franchise was on the rise. But MacPhail saw the Richards-McLaughlin conflict as a hindrance and fired McLaughlin early in the 1961 season.

“I hated to do it,” MacPhail told me in his 1999 interview for my book. “But I had to do something.”

By the end of that season, Richards also was gone. A native Texan, he jumped to the new National League franchise in Houston as the GM.

Ironically, though the feud between McLaughlin and Richards was personal and heated, the Orioles benefited. Richards whiffed on some prospects, but he also signed many future major leagues, as did McLaughin. By the late ’50s and early ’60s, the Orioles had such a loaded farm system that they couldn’t keep everyone. Dean Chance, a future Cy Young Award-winning pitcher, departed in an expansion draft. In 1962, the Orioles lost an astounding 18 players in a multi-tiered minor league draft.

But while they lost a lot of talent, they became a contending team on the shoulders of players who were signed as Richards and McLaughlin feuded — Brooks Robinson, Boog Powell and pitchers Milt Pappas, Steve Barber, Jerry Walker and Jack Fisher, among many.

Richards and McLaughlin may have disagreed on who knew more about talent and baseball, but their tense chemistry helped produce a winner.

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