As I’ve noted in earlier Bird Tapes posts, after Paul Richards first joined the Orioles as their manager/GM in 1955, he handled the roster a lot like the dealer in a poker game handles cards. He shuffled the deck again and again.
The Orioles used 31 position players and 23 pitchers in 1955. The next year, it was 25 position players and 23 pitchers.
When I interviewed several Orioles from those years for my book on the team’s history a quarter century ago, they all vividly recalled Richards’ permanently impermanent approach to the roster.
“It was a situation where someone would be there one day and gone the next,” pitcher George Zuverink recalled. “You’d come in and they’d say, ‘Well, Joe was let go.’ Richards would trade for guys, keep them for a few days and then send them somewhere else.”
Zuverink seemed like an ideal candidate to come and go quickly. He was a 30-year-old sidearm sinkerballer with nine major league wins when Richards grabbed him off waivers in July 1955. Three teams had already let him go. How long could he last?
But Richards, a certifiable pitching savant, saw potential.
Tall and thin, Zuverink had a deceptive delivery and threw hard. Hoot Evers, an ancient veteran who’d played with Zuverink in Detroit and was now with the Orioles, told Richards that Zuverink was usually effective for the first few innings of his starts before running out of steam. Richards seized on an idea. He would try Zuverink as a reliever, shortening his outings so they’d end hopefully before he ran out of steam.
The experiment went well. Zuverink started a few games after he arrived in Baltimore but soon was pitching exclusively out of the bullpen, with good success. In the final months of the 1955 season, he won four games, saved four and pitched to a 2.19 ERA.
“When I got with Richards and he told me I was to relieve exclusively, I liked the pattern. It liked me, too,” Zuverink said years later, according to a Society of American Baseball Research profile.
Thus was born the Orioles’ first stellar reliever.
A positional succession that eventually featured late-game specialists such as Stu Miller, Don Stanhouse, Tippy Martinez, Gregg Olson, Randy Myers and Zack Britton began with Zuverink, the finest major leaguer ever to come out of Holland, Michigan, a picturesque, tulip-laden town on the shore of Lake Macatawa, near Grand Rapids and Lake Michigan.
In 1956, Zuverink led the American League in appearances, games finished and saves. A year later, he won 10 games, saved nine, compiled a 2.48 ERA and again led the league in appearances and games finished. (The save statistic wasn’t kept in real time until years later.)
In Baltimore, a city thrilled just to be back in the major leagues and hungry for any successes, Zuverink developed a cult following. Oriole broadcasters Ernie Harwell and Chuck Thompson renamed the bullpen “the Zuve-rink.” Between games of a doubleheader at Memorial Stadium, Zuverink was honored as the “Firemen’s Favorite Fireman” and presented with a helmet by the Maryland Firemen Association. The honor resonated with him. Back home, his father was a captain in the Holland Fire Department.
As a starter, Zuverink had tended to “build up tension sitting around home and waiting for my turn to pitch,” he said. “As a reliever, I find that I never get scared or nervous even though, when I go in, the situation is usually tense. I just crank up, walk in – and feel that I’m gonna get them out.”
Richards favored a technical explanation for Zuverink’s prowess. “We widened his motion and helped him to get a better break on his slider. That’s about all. He’s always had a good arm and a desire to work,” the manager said.
It was heady stuff for Zuverink, a modest Midwesterner. On his first pro contract, he’d written that his goal was simply to be the first player from Holland to play in the majors – a goal he’d achieved. (Only a few other players from Holland have since also reached the majors. Coincidentally, there was another, Grant Wolfram, on the 2025 Orioles and he’s also a relief pitcher.)
On July 1, 1957, Zuverink and a 17-year-old backup Oriole catcher, Frank Zupo, formed the first battery in major league history in which both the pitcher and catcher had surnames beginning with Z — further exhibiting Zuverink’s unwitting but uncanny ability to dig himself a place in history. (This past summer, on the 68th anniversary of the “Z-Battery” feat, MASN trumpeted it on-screen during a game broadcast.)
When I interviewed Zuverink in 1999 for my history book (he died at age 90 in 2014) he fondly recalled his years in Baltimore, although the going was anything but easy in the American League.
“It was fun, although you never knew who was coming or going, and it seemed you were destined to stay in the second division,” he told me. “You had to grit your teeth. There weren’t any free agents. You couldn’t buy any good players. And you figured the Yankees were going to win every year. It was discouraging to compete against that. But you couldn’t do anything about it.
“I lived right in the neighborhood, beyond the center-field fence a couple of blocks. The big thing that happened was when the club would send you out for an autograph session and you’d get 50 dollars. You thought that was pretty neat, ‘Wow, 50 dollars!’”
Zuverink’s run as a top reliever began to wane when he injured his elbow while playing with his dog before the 1958 season. Although he recovered and was fine to pitch all season, he couldn’t carry the same, heavy load as effectively.
He also irritated management when he held out for a better contract that spring, irritated himself by the big contracts going to Richards’ bonus-baby signees.
“I held out for two weeks to get a thousand dollar raise because they were paying guys right out of high school $100,000. That was ridiculous. I was leading the league in appearances. I didn’t think that was fair at all,” he said.
In 1959, as a generation of talented, young pitchers, including Milt Pappas and Jack Fisher, arrived in Baltimore and began to establish themselves, Zuverink was demoted to Triple A, never to return.
After his professional career ended, he settled in Phoenix, Arizona, played slow-pitch softball and sold life insurance. In 1991, the Orioles invited him to participate in the ceremony commemorating the final game at Memorial Stadium. The “Firemen’s Favorite Fireman” donned his Oriole uniform and took the field one more time as fans wept at the memories players such as Zuverink had engineered.
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 via subscription 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.
You’ll receive instant access to vintage audio interviews with Orioles legends, including:
Jon Miller
Davey Johnson
Earl Weaver
Fred Lynn
Al Bumbry
Peter Angelos
Rick Dempsey
Elrod Hendricks
Mike Flanagan
Eddie Murray
Ken Singleton
Brooks Robinson
Frank Robinson
Boog Powell
Cal Ripken, Jr.
Paul Blair
And many more to come, added weekly
