In his decade with the Orioles, Rick Vaughn watched the organization undergo a seismic transformation.
Although they were just one year removed from a World Series triumph when he arrived as a media relations assistant in 1984, they were a veritable mom-and-pop business with a small staff of longtime employees stashed in cramped offices at Memorial Stadium.
By the time Vaughn left his job as the head of media relations a decade later, the Orioles were no longer at baseball’s on-field pinnacle, but they were the toast of the industry in the wake of the opening of Camden Yards. Their new ballpark was sold out every night and they had many more employees devoted to marketing, public relations, sales, ticketing, media relations — the fundamentals for a modern sports franchise.
“It was like going from a typewriter to a computer,” Vaughn said of the organization’s transformation during his time in Baltimore.
The latest episode of the Bird Tapes Podcast, now available to paid subscribers, contains Part 2 of my recent interview with Vaughn. As he did in Part 1, he vividly demonstrates his natural skill as a historian, recounting stories you haven’t heard about Frank Robinson and Johnny Unitas (yes), the last game at Memorial Stadium, his early unease with the Peter Angelos regime and what it meant for the Orioles to change from “a typewriter to a computer.”
He ultimately left for a job with football’s Washington Redskins, an irresistible lure for a DC-area native who’d grown up rooting for the Redskins through their glory years. The job didn’t work out, Vaughn explains, because he became a personal valet to owner Jack Kent Cooke as much as the director of media relations.
His stories about working for Cooke are, in a word, hilarious.
He wound up leaving relatively quickly for another job in baseball with the then-expansion Tampa Bay Devil Rays. It wound up being the ideal job for Vaughn and his family, and he stayed until his retirement in 2020.
But he still roots for the Orioles, he admits, owing to his unforgettable experience with the club during a tumultuous decade.
(Note from John Eisenberg: My conversation with Vaughn is the latest new interview of 2026 that I’ve added to the Bird Tapes Podcast stream, following Roy Firestone, Buck Showalter, Dr. Charles Steinberg, Mike Bordick. Andy MacPhail, Ed Wheatley, Rick Dempsey and Chris Hoiles. You need a paid subscription to hear Vaughn and most of the 64 interviews in the archive. I’ll continue to post new interviews with major figures in Oriole history throughout 2026. A paid subscription gives you 24/7 access to the entire archive of interviews. Click on the “subscribe now” button to survey your subscription options.)
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