The Orioles thought he’d develop into a star pitcher, but in the end, what his teammates remembered most about him was his funny nickname.
By any reckoning, my oral history of the Orioles, published in 2001, qualifies as a heavy lift. From 33rd Street to Camden Yards weighs in at 494 pages and over 100,000 words separated into 46 chapters. The audiobook is a 19-hours-plus listen.
I would apologize except, hey, I had nearly 50 years of Oriole baseball to cover, so it was never going to be brief.
Anyway, amid that great mass of history, Frank Bertaina has a bit part. At best. He gets mentioned exactly once in the hardcover edition of the book, on page 131, where he cracks a list of notable players the organization signed in the early ‘60s.
That’s it. Not a word about Bertaina otherwise.
He was supposed to have a much larger role. When the Orioles signed Bertaina out of San Francisco in 1961, their scout, Don McShane, called him the best left-handed pitching prospect from the Bay Area since Lefty Gomez — a heady comparison. Commanding an array of pitches, Bertaina had forged a 90-6 record playing high school and amateur ball.
He continued to impress while rising through a stacked Baltimore minor league system. In his first year as a pro, he led a Class C league in strikeouts by a lefty. The Orioles put him on their 40-man roster, a sign of faith in his potential. Pitching for manager Earl Weaver at Double-A in 1964, he won 10 straight decisions to earn a promotion to Baltimore. His major league debut was a start against the Kansas City Athletics in which he pitched seven innings and allowed two runs.
But while his talent was evident, so was the fact that Bertaina was what baseball calls a character. He talked to himself on the mound while constantly fiddling with his socks, cap and uniform, a vision of neuroses. He rode opponents so mercilessly from the dugout that umpires tossed him from games even though he wasn’t playing.
He did it all in fun, which was something Bertaina plainly wanted out of life. Fun. There were other things on his mind besides the arc of his curveball.
A famously dapper dresser, he dated attractive women and eventually married a Playboy bunny. (The marriage didn’t last.) He could hold his own when out with Steve Dalkowski, a minor league teammate and legendary night owl.
One day in the minors, he commandeered the tractor grooming the infield before a game because, well, that sounded like a hoot. One night in Baltimore, he and Oriole teammate Wally Bunker, a fellow Bay Area native, led police on a chase at 2 am. No charges were filed but both players had to apologize.
During the Orioles’ championship season of 1966, Bertaina discovered a kindred spirit in reliever Moe Drabowsky, the legendary prankster. The day after a pennant-clinching party lasted into the night, the two pitchers visited a pet store and brought snakes and mice into the clubhouse, sending their teammates scampering. Back at the hotel, they dragged a decorative Chinese gong from the lobby to a hallway outside teammate Charlie Lau’s room and banged it, awakening many guests.
Bertaina’s teammates gave him a nickname: Toys in the Attic. Meaning a guy with, well, mischief in mind. Or something like that.
“I realize I’ve been a flaky guy and extremist with the clothes I wear and all that,” he said later, according to a Society of American Baseball Research profile of Bertaina. He also conceded he “had the image of a clown” and had been “as free as a bubble, floating around in the sky.”
The only problem with it all was his progress as a pitcher stalled while minor league teammates Bunker, Dave McNally and Jim Palmer became established major leaguers, passing Bertaina by. He could get major league hitters out, but lacked consistency. The Orioles abruptly gave up on him at age 23 in 1967, trading him to the Washington Senators, where he was given a chance to start and had some success but again failed to carve out a lasting role. Two managers told him he just wasn’t serious enough.
His 1968 Topps card, pictured at the top of this post, says a lot. Bertaina doesn’t exactly exude intensity. His cap sits high on his forehead with the bill pointed skyward, as if his workday is done. His eyes gaze into the distance, slightly unfocused, as if his mind is elsewhere. There’s the beginning of a wry smile.
The Senators traded him back to Baltimore in 1969 and he made a few appearances but didn’t crack the postseason roster. He finished his major league career with a 19-29 record.
Years later, while writing my oral history of the Orioles, I didn’t try to track down Bertaina, who had returned to the Bay Area and opened a travel agency. But the teammates of his that I contacted routinely asked about him, usually with a smile forming. Toys in the Attic was one to remember, it seemed.
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