Willy Miranda could hit from either side of the plate, theoretically an advantage. But he batted just .221 with six home runs in more than 2,100 plate appearances during his nine-year career as a major league shortstop.
“The joke was he hit left, right and seldom,” Ernie Harwell, the Hall of Fame broadcaster who handled play-by-play for the Orioles in the ‘50s, told me years ago in an interview for my book on Orioles history.
But as woeful as the Cuban-born Miranda was at the plate, he was that good with his glove. His quick feet, sure hands and strong arm gave the Orioles’ infield an anchor for several seasons in the late ‘50s.
“Great arm, covered a lot of ground,” Dick Williams, who was Miranda’s teammate in Baltimore and later made the Hall of Fame as a World Series-winning manager, told me in his interview for my book.
Soon after Paul Richards joined the Orioles as their manager/GM following the 1954 season, he engineered a 17-player trade with the Yankees that included Miranda in the incoming haul. Billy Hunter, who’d played shortstop for the Orioles in 1954, was sent to New York, opening the job for Miranda, who was 29 and had never been a frontline player. But playing every day for the Orioles in 1955, he led the American League in putouts, assists and double plays. According to baseball-reference.com, he also led the league in range factor, an advanced metric calculated in hindsight.
His defensive wins-above-replacement grade, another advanced metric calculated in hindsight, was even higher in 1956.
The Orioles didn’t have a whole lot to recommend them in their first years in Baltimore, but to quote an old piece of baseball slang, Miranda could really “pick it” at shortstop, routinely making fancy plays and seldom missing the easy ones. Tommy Lasorda, a future Hall of Fame manager, played with Miranda on a winter-ball team in Cuba and later called him the best defensive shortstop he’d ever seen.
Miranda’s glove work turned him into a fan favorite in Baltimore, so popular that he never heard a boo while enduring an 0-for-41 slump at the plate in 1956. Richards even went so far as to credit him with saving the franchise in an interview years later.
“In the years we were trying to build a team in Baltimore, the fans didn’t have much to entertain them. From 1955 to 1959, Miranda kept the interest alive. I always felt, in some ways, he helped save the franchise in those formative years,” Richards said, according to a Society of American Baseball Research profile of Miranda.
Not surprisingly, Miranda’s glove was among his prized possessions. He even gave it a nickname — Old Faithful. Miranda had bought it as minor leaguer in 1949 and so loved its stiff feel that he continually patched and restrung it and performed various surgeries that enabled him to continue to use it. Years later, sports columnist John Steadman, writing in the Baltimore News American, revealed that Miranda had used illegal means to keep the fingers stiff, inserting tongue depressors and cut-up sanitary socks. The umpires never knew.
Miranda’s 1957 Topps card, pictured above, provides a wonderful view of Old Faithful, a classic artifact from the Orioles’ early years.
Teammates as well as fans got a kick out of Miranda. Sadly, he’d passed away by the time I was collecting interviews for book on Orioles history in the late ‘90s. But almost everyone smiled and told a story when his name came up in conversations.
“Great shortstop, didn’t hit much, but what a fun guy,” catcher Joe Ginsburg told me. “Richards would get on him about something and turn around and go back to his office, and Willy would stand up and imitate Paul. He was a good mimic only, of course, he didn’t speak the language too well. You can imagine this little guy from Cuba imitating a tall guy from Texas.”
He’d learned English by going to the movies — as many as four or five shows a day, Harwell recalled. Meanwhile, he taught Ginsburg how to swear in Spanish.
“Gosh, he made us laugh,” Ginsburg said.
Milt Pappas recalled that Miranda was the only Oriole who spoke to him when he joined the club in 1958 as a high-priced bonus baby, irritating the veterans. “Quite a nice man,” Pappas said. Ron Hansen agreed. Although he replaced Miranda as the Orioles’ shortstop in 1960, Hansen received nothing but help from his predecessor.
“I’d been up some in the prior two years and Willy really helped me a lot,” Hansen told me. “He was really good and showed me some little things. I was there to take his job, but I guess he felt he was at the latter part of his career. He was very good to me.”
During most of his career, Miranda went home to Cuba to play winter ball during the major league offseason. At the end, with Fidel Castro taking over, he had to escape. When he was finished playing baseball, he settled with his family in the Hamilton section of Baltimore, where he lived until his death in 1996.
“What a personality. I really liked him,” Harwell said.
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