The Secret to the Orioles’ Success: Baltimore’s Clubhouse Manager
For Fred Tyler, working with the team is all part of the family business.
Fred Tyler has worked thousands of Orioles games, wins and losses and rainouts, from Memorial Stadium to Camden Yards, first a kid helping his neighborhood team and now a baseball lifer in an increasingly technical, professionalized industry.
In short: Tyler has seen everything. But this October will bring him something different.
He’s spent his life working for his hometown team—but almost entirely in the visitors’ clubhouse. Yet after more than 40 combined years taking care of the opposition, Tyler is now the home clubhouse manager, and as the Orioles try to make a deep run in October, they’ll do it with him working not just for them but with them.
“If you’ve got it in your blood, if you’ve grown up around it, your team was always the Orioles,” Tyler says. “I loved every day of the visiting clubhouse. … But over here, you feel more a part of it, and I think it’s more special to me.”
The born-and-raised Baltimorean spent decades as the visiting clubhouse manager, in the unique position of working for one team while helping its competition, assisting with anything the visitors might need while on the road. Tyler nonetheless became one of the Orioles’ most beloved and longstanding employees. And that brought him to a new gig last season—down the hall but, in a sense, a world away. As home clubhouse manager, Tyler has similar duties to his previous ones, but now as part of the team he’s always loved.
Courtesy of Baltimore Orioles
Tyler started working in the visiting clubhouse as a 12-year-old in 1972, picking up towels and hanging up clothes, duties he shared with other boys who lived within walking distance of Memorial Stadium. Getting a job with the team was casual then, “a neighborhood thing,” he says. (Tyler began hanging around as young as 10—he remembers encountering Hall of Famer Johnny Bench in a stadium tunnel during the ’70 World Series—but did not become an official employee until his preteen years.) He worked his way up and never left. Tyler was promoted to visiting clubhouse manager in ’84 and stayed in the job for 38 years. That meant taking care of everything an opposing player might need—running errands, finding anything that might have been misplaced, you name it—and the gig let him make friends across the sport. It didn’t particularly matter to him that all his work was for the other team. “Being around baseball,” Tyler says. “What else could be more fun?” Before last season, however, Baltimore approached him with a potential job change.
How would he feel about managing the clubhouse for the home team instead?
Tyler realized there was nothing he’d love more.
“He’d been on the visitors’ side for so long, but he was always the hardest worker, always the guy if you needed anything you could go to,” says Orioles pitcher John Means, the longest-tenured member of the roster. “When he got the job over here, everybody was so excited. He’s just such a baseball guy.”
Indeed. Tyler is part of an impressive baseball family legacy, and when he says the team is in his blood, he means it as close to literally as anyone could. His father, Ernie Tyler, began working for the Orioles as an usher when the franchise came to town in 1954. He was promoted to umpires’ attendant a few years later and stayed with the team until his death in 2011. Ernie was known for his work ethic—for 3,819 straight home games, he could be found in his seat by the backstop, aiding the umpires and serving as the game’s oldest ball “boy.” That meant that when Orioles shortstop Cal Ripken Jr. retired with the MLB record for consecutive games played, he called the umpires’ attendant on the field and presented him with a jersey he’d signed, “Ernie, we both know who the real Iron Man is.” (Ernie finally broke his streak with a day off in ’07: Ripken invited him to his Hall of Fame induction, explaining that while he knew the value of a streak more than anyone, he’d be honored if 82-year-old would make the trip with him to Cooperstown.) And that was just one piece of the Tyler family’s connection with the Orioles. Ernie’s wife, Juliane, was a team chef who cooked for both clubhouses, and the couple had 11 children, nearly all of whom worked for the team in some capacity.
“When you think of Orioles baseball, you think of the Tylers,” Ripken said before his final game, in 2001. “They have been a fixture in Orioles baseball.”
Most of the 11 Tyler children worked only temporarily for the Orioles, daughters spending a few summers in the ticket office, sons filling in as batboys. But there were two who took up their father’s lifelong dedication to the club: Fred and his older brother Jimmy. Both ended up as clubhouse managers. Jimmy is 13 years Fred’s senior, and, just like his brother, he began working for the club while still a child. (Jimmy’s first paying gig with the Orioles: getting a quarter a day to pick up towels in 1956.) He was promoted to home clubhouse manager in ’79. For a few seasons, Fred helped Jimmy as an assistant, the only time he would spend working in the home clubhouse until 2022. But that came to an end when Fred got the visiting clubhouse manager gig in 1984. And so for the next few decades, Jimmy took care of the Orioles’ clubhouse while Fred took care of the visitors’, brothers doing the same job down the hall from each other.
A few years ago, however, Jimmy took a step back to take over their father’s old job as umpires’ attendant. The plan wasn’t initially for Fred to fill his shoes. But last season, Baltimore realized there might be no better man for the job.
“He took my job,” 75-year-old Jimmy jokes. “But he turned out to be better at it than me.”
What’s the secret to that?
“He listened to me for 40 years!”
Courtesy of the Baltimore Orioles
The job can be intense. A typical day for a clubhouse manager lasts about 14 hours: Tyler arrives at 11 a.m. for a night game and might stay until 1 a.m. He must ensure that each player has the correct uniform freshly laundered and hanging in his locker, that everything in the clubhouse is neat and organized, and that any pregame or postgame nuisances are dealt with. It requires an intimate knowledge of the rhythms of major league life. (One thing about being a clubhouse manager: The laundry never stops.) And it requires learning every player’s preferences and predilections.
“They have to know businesses in town, how to get something sewn in the middle of the night, dry cleaning, all of that,” says Orioles executive vice president and general manager Mike Elias. “They have to anticipate what players and coaches are going to want or need. … It takes a lot of experience and, I think, care for other people.”
Tyler has excelled in the role, Elias says. His flexibility and resourcefulness stand out. So does his passion for the club and the city: “Freddie just absolutely loves Baltimore.”
Means points out that Tyler has impeccable timing. His first season as home clubhouse manager coincided with the Orioles’ first winning season in six years. His second has now coincided with a division title and the No. 1 seed in the American League.
“When he came over, the shift in how the team was doing. Maybe there’s some correlation there,” Means says with a smile.
Tyler, modest and workmanlike, shakes his head at that idea. He turns his focus instead to some of the lessons he took from his father—the value of showing up every day, of taking seriously the idea of service to others, of still never losing sight of how fun it can be to work in baseball. He’d always tried to center those ideals in the visiting clubhouse. But they resonate in a different way in the home clubhouse. This is his home, and it is his team, and he feels the meaning of his work more acutely on this side of the ballpark.
He is no stranger to preparing a clubhouse for a clinching celebration—wrapping the whole room in plastic, moving all the furniture, putting the beer on ice, making sure the championship hats are ready. (The key, Tyler says, is the timing: A clubhouse manager can’t prepare the room too early, lest the team lose, but he can’t wait and risk running out of time, either.) He’d done this work before. Yet to do it this year for the Orioles when they clinched their playoff berth felt totally new to him.
“When you’re watching on the visiting side, you’re just watching,” he says. “This was a different feeling.”
Tyler hopes there will be several more clubhouse celebrations for the Orioles to come this October. But he takes his work one day at a time. And he tries to remember something he took from his father.
“Every day when you come to work and you can enjoy what you’re doing around good people that you enjoy being around, you make your memories, you enjoy your life, and it doesn’t even seem like you’re going to work,” says Tyler, seated in his office, the product of a lifetime of work. “It just seems like you’re going to the game.”