"If I charged money, people would stop sending 'em," he said. "I'm just glad to be remembered."
At 76, O'Dell remains a man of simple pleasures: a pickup truck, some fried bologna and a good woman (Joan, his wife of 55 years).
"I just piddle around here now," he said.
His idea of heaven? Catfishing on the banks of the Saluda River, down the road a piece from O'Dell's 100-acre spread in Newberry (pop. 10,500).
"I'll just prop my [fishing] pole on a forked stick and lay back with a Pepsi in one hand and some peanuts in the other, like an old Huck Finn," he said.
Anonymity suits O'Dell, who won 105 games in the majors and who pitched for San Francisco in the 1962 World Series. Most mornings, you'll find him having breakfast with a group of geezers at Bill and Fran's Restaurant on Route 34. There, come 7 a.m., the old-timers eat the country ham and chew the fat.
"We talk about everything from weather to sports to world problems that we can't solve," said Reggie Brigman, a retired septic tank repairman and one of O'Dell's closest friends. "You never hear Billy brag about his baseball career. He's proud of it, and he don't mind talkin' about it, but he'll talk about the bad times as quick as he will the good ones."
Several weeks ago, said Brigman, O'Dell told them of his recent return to the mound.
"He'd gone to some [stadium] where they'd asked him to throw out the first ball," Brigman said. "Billy did it, but he said the ball only got halfway to the plate before it bounced.
" 'Boys,' he told us, 'that's what's left of an 85 mph fastball.' "
Savvy, not speed, forged O'Dell's success with the 1958 Orioles. Buoyed, perhaps, by his All-Star effort, he finished 14-11 with a 2.97 ERA for the seventh-place club in an eight-team league.
"Billy was a crafty little pitcher," said Orioles Hall of Famer Brooks Robinson, who played with him from 1956-1959. "Like Tommy John, he was a battler - not overpowering but, once you'd gone 0-for-4, you wondered how he'd gotten you out."
Though selected for the team by Stengel, O'Dell seemed an unlikely All-Star hero. In 3 1/2 years with the Orioles, he had won all of 13 games. Yet there he was on the big day, riding to Memorial Stadium in a 50-car motorcade beside Ted Williams and Mickey Mantle, waving to crowds and throwing plastic baseballs their way.
