Four years after starring in the 1958 All-Star Game as a member of the Orioles, Billy O'Dell received a belated thanks from Casey Stengel.
O'Dell, then with the San Francisco Giants, was warming up on the practice mound near the Giants dugout when out of the other dugout came Stengel, who was managing the New York Mets in their 1962 maiden season.
"I wondered why he was walking toward me," O'Dell said. "He said, 'Mr. O'Dell, I never had the opportunity to thank you for the job you did for me in the 1958 All-Star Game.' Casey was well into his 70s then, and I was surprised he remembered something that happened four years before."
In the first All-Star Game played in Baltimore, before a crowd of 48,829, the largest since the city returned to the major leagues in 1954, O'Dell retired nine straight batters on 27 pitches to preserve a 4-3 win over the National League.
Only minutes before O'Dell came on in relief, Stengel, the New York Yankees manager directing the AL, incurred the wrath of the Baltimore crowd in the bottom of the sixth inning because he dared to lift starting catcher Gus Triandos of the Orioles for his own Yogi Berra as a pinch hitter.
The boos rained down on Stengel and Berra. Fans waved white handkerchiefs. When Berra popped up, the fans applauded derisively.
"I knew I was going to get it when I sent up Berra for their catcher," Stengel, who pronounced Triandos as "Tryandus," said after the game. "Poor, old Berra. I send him up there, and he's got to go because I said so, and they give him the business."
"I knew I was going to get it, too," Berra said then. "They boo us all over the league, but I believe they do a better job of it here than anywhere else."
Triandos, who had a single in two at-bats, said he was surprised by the crowd's response. He was mildly annoyed the year before, when he was named to the AL squad and Stengel didn't play him.
"I figured the crowd booed mainly because they hated the Yankees," Triandos said.
Stengel had intended to use Billy Pierce in the seventh, but the Chicago White Sox left-hander's arm tightened in the bullpen. The call then came for O'Dell, who recalls he "never needed much of a warm-up."
When O'Dell began walking in from the bullpen, the boos turned to an appreciative roar. "The fans went crazy as I walked in along the first base line," O'Dell said. "Each pitch I threw, the roars got louder and louder."
