A Maryland native and proud Terp, he covered the Orioles in the ’80s and did it so well that it launched him to the pinnacle of the baseball media world, where he still resides.
The mid-1980s weren’t glory days for the Orioles. They were on their way down after residing among the game’s elite for two decades. Players, front office types and fans, all accustomed to winning, were coming to grips with the discouraging reality of losing.
But while it was a forgettable time on the field in Baltimore, the mid-1980s were very much a glorious time for newspaper coverage of the Orioles — and for the sportswriters who produced that coverage.
The sport was wide open for beat writers who covered teams. Clubhouses opened hours before games and stayed open until near the first pitch — unlike today, when the access window is short. Players were always at their lockers, available to take questions. Managers met with reporters before games in the dugout, not in an antiseptic media room.
A good reporter could spend hours sussing out stories. Plenty of great storytelling ensued.
“I would sit on the bench with Earl Weaver [before a game]. One of the great managers of all time! Sometimes I’d get a half-hour with him. We’d just be talking about baseball on the bench,” ESPN’s Tim Kurkjian told me in a recent interview — a classic conversation about his time on the Oriole beat, now available to Bird Tapes subscribers (both free and paid).
The enviable access was necessary due to the demands of covering a team, which had changed. The Boston Globe’s Peter Gammons had started a revolution in the 1970s with his exhaustive coverage of the Red Sox — coverage that included multiple bylines every day, game stories, notes, details and nuance, and then, an entire page of notes from around the sport on Sunday. Soon enough, sports editors across the country wanted their own Gammons and their own biblical coverage.
It was against that backdrop that Kurkjian arrived in Baltimore in 1986, hired by The Sun to cover the Orioles.
It was a homecoming of sorts. He was a Maryland native and proud Terp. But he was coming from the Dallas Morning News, where he’d covered the Texas Rangers, a nice job at a nice paper except that football was very much king in Texas and the mediocre Rangers were quickly forgotten as soon as Tom Landry’s Dallas Cowboys opened training camp in July. That was not the case in Baltimore. In fact, the opposite was true. Baltimore’s beloved pro football team, the Colts, had stunningly bolted for Indianapolis a few years earlier, leaving the Orioles as the only major league team in town. Suddenly, the Orioles were the unquestioned star of The Sun’s sports section.
“I had an entire page every Sunday for my notes column. I’d give them everything I had and they’d say, ‘Do you have anything else?’” Kurkjian told me.
The paper’s need for Orioles content meshed neatly with the era’s coverage demands and wide-open access, creating a mountainous workflow. Kurkjian gladly took it on, working the Oriole beat like no one had ever seen it worked before, writing story after story after story, breaking news, providing the detail and nuance fans now expected.
It was Gammons on the Chesapeake Bay.
“Tim was just so good,” Fox Sport’s Ken Rosenthal, a competitor on the Oriole beat in those days, said in his Bird Tapes interview.
Kurkjian covered the Orioles for The Sun through 1989 and was “so good” that he shot straight to the pinnacle of the baseball media landscape. Sports Illustrated hired him — the plum job of all plum jobs in those days. Eventually, he went to ESPN, where he has been an insider and analyst for nearly three decades.
But while his audience eventually widened far beyond Baltimore, his favorite years were his years on the Oriole beat.
“The beat writing days were the greatest days of my entire life,” he told me. “They were by far the most exhausting days [and it was] by far the hardest job I ever had. I just thank goodness that I was that young and that mobile. I didn’t have any children. I don’t know how I could have possibly done the beat the way I felt I had to do it, and [also] had children, I couldn’t have done both, I would’ve been a terrible dad or I would’ve been a terrible beat guy. I couldn’t have put up with either of those. But that’s just what the job called for.”
Everything worked out wonderfully. Kurkjian, who has lived in Montgomery County for years, eventually had two children with his wife and they now have a growing brood of grandchildren. Kurkjian is still at ESPN, working live broadcasts, working sources for information, going into clubhouses. He was elected to the Hall of Fame’s media wing three years ago.
But as much as anyone, he understands how the nature of covering baseball has changed — and not for the better.
“You go in [to the clubhouse] at 3 [o’clock] and they whisk you out at 3:45,” he said. “It’s really a shame that the access isn’t what it used to be. And the people who really suffer are our readers and our listeners because there aren’t as many great stories today because the writers don’t have nearly the access.”
(Note from John Eisenberg: My interview with Tim Kurkjian is the fourth in my series of interviews with former sportswriters who covered the Orioles on a beat basis back in the day. I’ve also posted interviews with Richard Justice, Dan Shaughnessy and Ken Rosenthal. (More are coming.) All interviews in the series are unlocked and available to all subscribers, both free and paid. You can listen right in Substack or download the episodes to a device and listen on Apple Podcasts or other podcast apps.)
Here’s a listener’s guide to what Kurkjian discusses in the interview:
He grew up in Bethesda as a fan of the Washington Senators. not the Orioles. In fact, he hated the Orioles because they always beat the Senators. Early in his career, he lost two newspaper jobs in two months before he landed at the Dallas Morning News, where he covered the Texas Rangers. He experienced a seminal moment in 1982 when Don Zimmer, managing the Rangers, scolded him for looking downcast because the Rangers were losing. You should just be happy you’re covering major league baseball, Zimmer told him. But he wanted to cover baseball in a place where the sport wasn’t overshadowed by football, as it was in Dallas. That was Baltimore, it turned out.
Arriving in 1986, he expected to cover a winning team because Earl Weaver was back. Kurkjian thought Weaver and the Orioles were going to win their division in 1986 until they completely collapsed in August. Kurkijian says the 1987 and 1988 Orioles had the worst outfield defense he’s ever seen. It was so bad that the Baltimore pitchers were afraid to throw the ball over the plate, he says, because they knew anything hit would not be caught.
The improvement of the outfield defense was a key component of the Orioles’ turnaround in 1989, he says.
Kurkjian talks about playing basketball in the offseason with Cal Ripken Jr., a habit he kept from his editors because it could be perceived as a conflict of interest. He did it anyway and it helped cement his strong relationship with Ripken. Nothing could help his relationship with Eddie Murray, who wouldn’t talk to the media. That was too bad, Kurkjian says, because Murray had a lot to say.
Kurkjian does not blame the disasters of 1987 and early 1988 on Cal Ripken Sr., who was dealt a bad hand before he was fired. The players were humiliated by the 0-21 start in 1988. Kurkjian will never forget Fantastic Fans Night, the Orioles’ first home game after they ended the streak, when Memorial Stadium was filled and plans for a new stadium at Camden Yards were announced. That night was a great testament to the loyalty of fans in Baltimore, Kurkjian says.
Then-owner Edward Bennett Williams told Kurkjian early on that he’d never move the team to Washington, as many feared in the ‘80s. Everything changed on Opening Day in 1989, Kurkjian says, when the Orioles beat Roger Clemens and the Red Sox, beginning what he called his favorite year of covering the Orioles. He recalls the wild pitch that Gregg Olson threw that cost the team in a key loss on the final weekend of the 1989 season, when they had still a chance to win the division.
Kurkjian talks about the amazing access he had to players and managers in the ‘80s, which is one reason he recalls his beat writing days as the best years of his career. He would sit on the bench with Weaver before games and the two of them, alone, would talk baseball for half an hour. That kind of access no long exists, he says, and it’s a shame because it means there are no longer as many great baseball stories.
Kurkjian says he was/is shocked by the Orioles’ poor performance in 2025. He has met new owner David Rubenstein and hopes the necessary amount of money is spent to make the Orioles better going forward. He is amazed at how well Camden Yards has held up as one of the game’s great stadiums.
Subscribe to The Bird Tapes here: birdtapes.substack.com/subscribe
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
Dennis Martinez
Harry Dalton
Ernie Harwell
And many more to come, added weekly