The 1983 Baseball Season: It’s Best Teams & October Battles

The Baltimore Orioles were in the first year of the post-Earl Weaver era and it took a little time for them to find their footing. Once the Birds got rolling though, there was no stopping them. They won 98 games, the American League pennant, and eventually the World Series as they captivated their home city under the auspices of “Oriole Magic.”

TheSportsNotebook.com has produced a compilation of articles that tell the stories of not just the Orioles, but the four other consequential teams of the 1983 baseball season.

Baltimore’s championship season, keyed by an MVP year from Cal Ripken and Eddie Murray finishing as the runner-up, was the highlight of an 1983 baseball season that included the following…

*The arrival of Tony LaRussa as a managerial force. LaRussa reached his first postseason as skipper of the Chicago White Sox. They won 99 games, the most in the majors and then staged a tough ALCS fight against Baltimore.

*The Philadelphia Phillies brought together key parts of Cincinnati’s old Big Red Machine—Joe Morgan, Tony Perez and Pete Rose—and woke up the echoes with a run to the NL East title and ultimately the World Series. The biggest star was none of the above, but Cy Young Award winner John Denny.

*The NL West featured a good race between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Atlanta Braves. The two teams had the best records in baseball for the first half of the season. Both played erratic baseball in the second half, but the Dodgers found more consistency then the Braves. L.A. won the division before falling to Philadelphia in the NLCS.

This blog compilation contains articles on all five teams, along with game-by-game narratives of the League Championship Series and the World Series. Each article exists individually on TheSportsNotebook.com and has been pulled together and edited for this compilation. Taken as a whole, they tell the story of the 1983 baseball season through the eyes of its best teams.

DOWNLOAD THE STORY OF THE 1983 MLB SEASON FROM AMAZON TODAY