By the time Woodie Held reached Baltimore in 1966, he was hardly a fresh-faced prospect. He had already logged more than 1,300 major league games and belted nearly 200 home runs, which makes the misspelling on his Topps card feel almost like a punch line.
Held was one of 34 players to appear for the Orioles during that championship season, but his role was a small one. The 34-year-old, brought in from the Washington Senators before the year, got into only 56 games, managed one home run and scored six runs. Later, he joked that sitting on the bench gave him a perfect view of the Orioles rolling to the American League pennant and then sweeping the Dodgers in the World Series.
That light workload in Baltimore doesn’t tell the full story of his career.
Held, a California native, was originally signed and developed by the Yankees during their peak years. He was a compact power hitter with speed, a combination that stood out to evaluators.
Yankees manager Casey Stengel once said of him, according to a Society of American Baseball Research profile, “He’s a very good player. The ball sings coming off his bat,”
After New York dealt him to Kansas City in 1958, he hit 20 home runs in 92 games for the A’s and proved he could play at the major league level. Another trade sent him to Cleveland, where he became an everyday player with the Indians in 1959 and went on to hit 127 home runs over the next six seasons while moving around the diamond in both the infield and outfield.
He struck out a lot, but he also drew walks and posted a strong on-base percentage. His bat and his ability to handle multiple positions kept him valuable. After Washington picked him up before the 1965 season, Senators manager Gil Hodges said, “We haven’t had a player like him who can fill in at so many spots,”
That versatility is part of why the Orioles brought him aboard, even if they weren’t expecting him to be a centerpiece. They wanted another power bat, and Frank Robinson had not yet been acquired from the Reds when Held arrived. That deal came weeks later, and if it had never happened, Held likely would have seen much more action in 1966.
The card itself offered its own oddities. When I pulled Held’s 1966 Topps card from a decades-old collection, his blue eyes jumped out immediately, along with my own childlike marker work on the front.
At age 10, I had crossed out his listed position, “outfield,” and written in the number 2. It would have made sense only if he had ever caught, even in an emergency, but he never did.
The bigger mistake was the name. Topps called him Woody, with a “y,” instead of Woodie.
His full name was Woodson George Held, and he was known as Woodie everywhere that mattered, especially on baseball-reference.com. Still, the card companies never seemed to settle on one version.
Some cards said Woodie. Others said Woody.
Held apparently never made much of the confusion. He moved on from baseball and built a full life afterward, racing snowmobiles, settling in Wyoming and running a dude ranch. When he died in 2009 at age 77, he left behind 15 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren.
Back in 1986, while writing a series of Baltimore Sun stories on the players from the 1966 Orioles, I tried to find him. In the pre-internet days, that took some work, but I eventually tracked him down in Wyoming and was told to leave a message for him at a bar.
I did.
Woodie, not Woody, never called back.
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