The Real Steve Dalkowski: Orioles’ hardest thrower lived a hard-luck life

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, 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 when he was introduced, Dalkowski’s poignant story having long ago been 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 the 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.

(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.)

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. Click below to hear my audiobook-style narration of the article.

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:

Mike Flanagan
Eddie Murray
Ken Singleton
Brooks Robinson
Frank Robinson
Boog Powell
Cal Ripken, Jr.
Paul Blair

And many more to come, added weekly

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