(Another in my series of conversations with sportswriters who covered the Orioles on a beat basis. In my interview with Rosenthal, the Fox Sports baseball insider, he chronicles his years as a young beat writer and fiery columnist in Baltimore.)
It takes an entire paragraph to list Ken Rosenthal’s roles in today’s baseball media. Most prominently, he provides interviews and insights as a field reporter on Fox Sports’ televised broadcasts of events such as the World Series and All-Star Game. He also is a columnist at The Athletic and hosts a popular podcast, Fair Territory with Ken Rosenthal.
Given that standing and the love for baseball that oozes in so many journalists who cover the sport, it’s surprising to hear Rosenthal reveal that he was neither a “baseball guy” nor hellbent on becoming one when he was growing up on Long Island.
“I didn’t know how to calculate an ERA,” he told me recently in an interview available with this post to both free and paid Bird Tapes subscribers.
It’s the latest in my series of interviews with legendary former Baltimore Oriole newspaper beat writers. My conversations with Richard Justice and Dan Shaughnessy are already posted in the Bird Tapes archive. A Tim Kurkjian interview is coming soon, with more to follow. I like the Oriole storytelling in these interviews so much that I’m making them all available to both free and paid subscribers, just to ensure that they circulate as widely as possible.
After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984, Rosenthal didn’t need a job in the baseball media to fulfill a dream.
“I just wanted to cover a team in a city. It could have been any team in any city,” he said. “It didn’t matter to me, football, basketball, baseball. I would’ve been thrilled to cover University of Florida football.”
He didn’t pick baseball; it picked him, essentially, when the Baltimore Evening Sun hired him to cover the Orioles in 1987. Rosenthal was all of 24 years old, with work experience to that point consisting of stops at the York (Pennsylvania) Daily Record and Camden (New Jersey) Courier-Post.
“It’s almost frightening to think about how green I was,” he said.
Suddenly and literally, he was in the major leagues, competing with Kurkjian and Justice, both of whom were far more experienced, in search of news about an Oriole franchise entering a steep decline after years of success. He didn’t break many stories at first, and although he laughs about it now, he admits, “It was a really difficult time.”
But Rosenthal’s time was coming.
He stuck it out on the beat, learning that good things happened when you dug harder and deeper for stories and fresh angles. He developed an edgy, distinctive voice traceable to his roots in the New York area, and that voice served him well when he was promoted to columnist — a job he held for nearly a decade at the Evening Sun, and after it folded, at the Baltimore Sun.
As a columnist, he earned a reputation for taking tough but important (and interesting) stands, such as asking whether Cal Ripken Jr.’s streak really was in the Orioles’ best interests. He also challenged many of the moves made by Peter Angelos, who’d bought the team in 1993 and often responded angrily to Rosenthal’s criticism, seeking to discredit it.
At the time, some fans resented Rosenthal for what they perceived as his Oriole-bashing, but he only wrote what he believed, and as it turned out, he was hardly wrong in surmising that the franchise wasn’t headed in the right direction.
“All I knew how to do, or all I was capable of doing, was throw 95 mph at someone’s head,” Rosenthal said, using a baseball analogy to describe his column style in the ‘90s. “Looking back, there was no nuance. Maybe I could’ve used different speeds. It is what it is.”
Full disclosure, Rosenthal and I were colleagues, sharing the column duties at the Baltimore Sun, an arrangement that helped forge a great friendship, which continues to this day. We both eventually left the paper, in no small part out of frustration with where it was going. He left in 2000, taking a job with the Sporting News before catching on with Fox. (I left the paper in 2007 to write books.)
Although he has gone on to bigger things, Rosenthal still recalls his days covering the Orioles in crisp detail. We discussed the team’s infamous 0-21 start in 1988, Ripken’s historic streak, various Angelos-driven controversies, a Mike Mussina-driven controversy at the 1993 All-Star Game and much more. Those were the years and experiences that formed him as a reporter and writer, helping point him toward where he stands today, at the pinnacle of baseball’s media ecosystem.
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A listener’s guide to what Rosenthal discusses in the interview:
Growing up on Long Island, he was a Mets fan who rooted for hockey’s New York Islanders and St. John’s in college basketball. He didn’t know how to calculate an ERA. It wasn’t his goal to cover baseball. He just wanted to cover a team in any sport for a newspaper.
The Baltimore Evening Sun hired him to cover the Orioles in 1987. The competition was very tough — Tim Kurkjian at the Baltimore Sun and Richard Justice at the Washington Post — but he learned from both.
The first Oriole manager he covered was Cal Ripken Sr., who was “endlessly” patient with him, Rosenthal says. He recalls the night in Toronto in September 1987 when Oriole pitchers gave up 10 home runs in an 18-3 loss and Senior ended Cal Jr.’s streak of consecutive innings played. Junior didn’t like Rosenthal’s story about the end of the streak, which Rosenthal pinpoints as perhaps “the beginning of the end” of the possibility of them having a close relationship. Rosenthal recalls approaching Senior the next day and asking if he feared his job was in jeopardy.
Rosenthal was on hand for almost every game in the season-opening 21-game losing streak in 1988. The streak was remarkable he says, because there were good players on the team. The dismal season set up the success of 1989, which Rosenthal calls “maybe the most fun year I’ve ever had covering baseball.” He developed a close relationship with Frank Robinson, who managed the club in 1988 and 1989. He never wrote that Ripken’s consecutive-games streak wasn’t a good idea, just asked the question: Was it a good idea? Needless to say, Ripken didn’t like that. When ESPN ran a segment calling Ripken “the prisoner of the streak” because there was so much scrutiny, Rosenthal wrote that if Ripken was in fact a prisoner, he’s the first prisoner who ever had the key to his cell. Because he could’ve ended the streak at any moment had he chosen to do so.
Rosenthal says he had a stormy relationship with Larry Lucchino, the Orioles’ president in the ’80s and early ’90s. He had no relationship with Eli Jacobs, the owner whom Rosenthal calls “a recluse.” Rosenthal was on hand in 1993 when the Orioles were auctioned off in a New York bankruptcy court. He’d written beforehand that the judge was probably a Yankee fan, and the judge called him out by name as the proceedings began — in jest, it turned out. Peter Angelos, who bought the club that day, was initially perceived as a savior for having put the team back in the hands of Baltimore ownership. Rosenthal eventually became a fierce critic of the owner, who fought back, making the spat public. What no one knew was Rosenthal’s father-in-law was friendly with Angelos, and in fact, had served as the campaign manager when Angelos ran for citywide office (and lost) in the 1960s.
In hindsight, Rosenthal smiles about his hard-hitting column style, suggesting he could’ve used a different tone in some columns, but he didn’t have the nuance at the time. It is what it is, he says, not apologizing. He loved Mike Mussina as a pitcher and fondly recalls the controversy that arose out of the 1993 All-Star Game at Camden Yards, when Cito Gaston, managing the rival Blue Jays, refused to pitch Mussina in the game, and Mussina warmed up on his own, inciting the crowd and showing up Gaston. Rosenthal ripped Gaston that night, and as he left the press box, he ran into a Toronto baseball writer who said he had just ripped Mussina.
Despite his uneasy relationship with Ripken, Rosenthal recalls covering 2,131 as the highlight of his career. Baseball has changed so much since then, he says, that he is confident Ripken’s record will never be broken.
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