O’s fans to party like it’s still 1966

Tonight, at the Murphy Fine Arts Center on the campus of Morgan State University, Baltimore baseball fans will embrace a team that may be more important and cherished now than it was 40 years ago, when it gave the city its first World Series championship.

The 1966 World Series team will be honored with an anniversary celebration, presented by the Babe Ruth Museum, of that team’s stunning four-game sweep over the Los Angeles Dodgers.

It was the start of the golden years of baseball in Baltimore. From 1966 to 1983, the Orioles won six American League pennants and three World Series titles and only finished worse than third in the league or the division once.

As Baltimore baseball suffers through its ice age — nine straight losing seasons and counting — the proud history of the franchise is all Orioles fans have to care about, all there is left to cherish.

The names still are more recognizable to fans today than the ones on the 2006 Orioles roster. Boog Powell, Brooks Robinson, Paul Blair, Andy Etchebarren, Jim Palmer and Luis Aparicio are among those scheduled to be in attendance to remind baseball fans in Baltimore of when they cheered their team and didn’t walk out of the ballpark in protest of it.

“It was a wonderful celebration in Baltimore when we won the 1966 Series,” Powell said. “The town partied, and it was something different, because it was a football town. It still is.”

It wasn’t, for a while, when the Colts left town in 1983 and the Orioles had it all to themselves. They squandered that opportunity and now play second fiddle again to football, this time to the Ravens. But tonight, in October, baseball in Baltimore will be celebrated again.

“We had a great bunch of guys,” said the manager of that team, Hank Bauer. “I thought we had a good chance to win it. When you have good players, you don’t have to manage. They manage themselves. When you have bad players, that’s when managers get fired.”

Bauer speaks from experience, fired in the middle of the 1968 season and replaced with Earl Weaver, who would preside over nearly all of the remainder of the golden years, save for the 1983 World Series championship team that won under Joe Altobelli.

Unfortunately, two very important figures in the success of that 1966 team won’t be on hand — Frank Robinson and the late Moe Drabowsky.

Museum officials said former Nationals manager Frank Robinson — who won the Triple Crown that year by leading the American League in home runs (49), RBI (122) and batting average (.316) was not going to be in attendance because of a scheduling conflict. But there was clearly a falling out between the Hall of Famer and the museum that everyone is reluctant to talk about. That’s a shame, because when you talk to nearly any member of that 1966 team, the first words out of their mouth are usually “we knew we would win when we got Frank,” or something along those lines, after Frank Robinson came to Baltimore in a trade with the Cincinnati Reds.

Powell: “When you go back to spring training, and when Frank showed up, I think we all felt then that it was going to happen, that nobody was going to beat us.”

Blair: “We felt that we were a pretty good team in 1966, and Frank Robinson sort of solidified the team and made us the team that we were. We didn’t fear anybody. We could play with anybody.”

Dick Hall: “When we saw Frank in spring training, we felt like we were on our way.”

The other key absentee is Drabowsky, who died in June of multiple myeloma at the age of 70.

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