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BALTIMORE BAYS--NORTH AMERICAN SOCCER LEAGUE

The original Baltimore Bays were a short-lived pro soccer team that was owned and operated by the Baltimore Orioles of Major League Baseball. Orioles owner Jerold Hoffberger was one of ten founding members of the National Professional Soccer League in 1967. The NPSL was an effort to capitalize on moderate American interest in the 1966 World Cup, which was broadcast on U.S. television for the first time. The league featured a number of heavy hitter owners from Major League Baseball and the NFL, including the Hoffberger, the Rooney family in Pittsburgh, Bill Bartholomay in Atlanta and Los Angeles Rams’ owner Dan Reeves.

The Bays won the NPSL’s Eastern Division with a 14-9-9 record. Defender Badu DaCruz, midfielder Juan Santisteban and forward Art Welch were named to the All-NPSL 1st Team. The Bays advanced to the two-leg NPSL championship series against the Western Division champion Oakland Clippers. The Bays won the first match 1-0 at home before 16,619 fans at Memorial Stadium on September 3, 1967. But they were stomped 4-1 in the second leg in Oakland on September 9th and lost the series 4-2 on aggregate.

Following the 1967 season, the NPSL merged with the rival United Soccer Association to form the 17-club North American Soccer League (NASL). The Bays dipped to 13-16-3 and missed the playoffs in their second season.

The NASL collapsed in late 1968 as investors lost hope in soccer’s potential with the American audience. The 17-team membership shrank to just five clubs for the 1969 campaign. The Bays were one of the five survivors, but they gave up on 50,000-seat Memorial Stadium, where the club averaged only around 5,000 fans for its first two seasons. The Bays would play their final season at Kirk Field, a high school football oval in Northeast Baltimore.

With the league in disarray, the 1969 season was split into two sections. The first section – dubbed the “International Cup” – saw the NASL import five top shelf English clubs to represent the five remaining NASL cities. During the International Cup, the “Baltimore Bays” were actually West Ham United, featuring Geoff Hurst and Bobby Moore, two of the great stars of England’s 1966 World Cup championship team. West Ham went 5-2-1 masquerading as the Bays in the round robin tournament and finished 2nd to the “Kansas City Spurs” (who were actually Wolverhampton Wanderers).

For the second half of the 1969 season, the Brits went home and the NASL clubs re-grouped with actual rosters of their own players. The club folded shortly after the 1969 season ended, having lost over a million dollars in three years for the Baltimore Orioles.

A lower-budget reboot of the Bays appeared for one season in the 2nd division American Soccer League in 1973, hosted a couple of international exhibitions against British and Mexican opponents, and then quietly vanished after one season.

All-Star First Team Selections

All Time goals scored: Welch 16, Guy St. Vil 12

All Time points: Welch 45, St. Vil 26, Fernando Azevedo 20

June 19, 1968 – Baltimore Bays vs. Atlanta Chiefs

The General Manager of the Bays at the time was the master soccer promoter Clive Toye, the man who would bring Pele to play in America in 1975. Toye was a journalist before becoming an front office exec and understood the value of a good promotion.

In this case, it was a post-game concert at Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium by The 5th Dimension, a mellow pop/soul quintet best remembered for their 1969 smash “Aquarius/Let The Sun Shine In” (i.e. the song covered by the cast during the closing credits of The 40-Year Old Virgin). Toye and Co. seeded interest in the concert with a “Date Night” promotion at a Bays game two weeks earlier: Males paid full price, but their dates got 50-cent tickets and the first 500 couples received a 45 RPM record of The 5th Dimension’s late single “Stoned Soul Picnic”.

The Bays beat the Atlanta Chiefs 2-0. The announced gathering of 10,000 for the game & concert was the Bays’ largest home crowd of the season.