How the Orioles Closed Out the 1983 World Series

ORIOLES HISTORY

Eddie Murray supplied two home runs, Rick Dempsey delivered two extra-base hits and Scott McGregor finished every inning. Baltimore’s 1983 championship clincher was a compact display of power and pitching.

The Orioles needed only five hits to finish the 1983 World Series. Three cleared the fence, another went for a double, and the Phillies never scored.

On October 16 at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia, Baltimore won Game 5, 5–0, completing a four-games-to-one Series victory. The archived MLB box score gives the afternoon its clean outline: Murray went 3-for-4 with two homers and three RBIs, Dempsey went 2-for-3 with a homer and a double, and McGregor threw a complete-game shutout.

Those five Baltimore hits all belonged to Murray and Dempsey. It is an unusually concentrated offensive record for a championship-clinching win—and a reminder that a decisive score does not always require a long procession of singles.

Power established the lead

Murray opened the scoring with a solo home run in the second inning. Dempsey followed with another solo homer in the third, moving Baltimore ahead 2–0.

In the fourth, Murray homered again, this time with Cal Ripken aboard. The two-run shot doubled the lead. Through four innings, the Orioles had three hits, all home runs, and four runs.

That sequence explains more than the final hit total alone. Philadelphia did not need to allow a large volume of baserunners for the game to move away from it. Baltimore turned its early contact into immediate runs.

The fifth run arrived in the fifth inning on Al Bumbry’s sacrifice fly, which brought Dempsey home. The Orioles would not score again. With McGregor on the mound, they would not need to.

McGregor supplied all 27 outs

McGregor allowed five hits and two walks while striking out six. MLB’s archived pitching line records 113 pitches, 83 of them strikes, across nine innings.

The shutout gives the game a second kind of completeness. Murray and Dempsey supplied every Baltimore hit, while one pitcher handled the entire Philadelphia lineup from the first inning through the last. No relief appearance appears in the Orioles’ box score.

The Phillies recorded hits in five separate innings, but none became a run. That distinction matters when revisiting the game: McGregor’s performance was not a no-hitter. It was nine scoreless innings in which the available traffic never reached home.

The last out was a Garry Maddox lineout to Ripken at shortstop, according to MLB’s archived play-by-play. The record ends there: Philadelphia still at zero, Baltimore with its fourth victory of the Series.

Why the box score still rewards a closer look

A championship is often remembered through its final image. This game also deserves to be remembered through the distribution of its work. Murray’s two swings produced three runs. Dempsey’s two extra-base hits gave Baltimore another source of offense. McGregor kept every Philadelphia inning off the scoreboard.

There is no need to make a single afternoon into a universal roster-building formula. The more useful historical point is specific: Baltimore won this clincher with concentrated extra-base damage and a starting pitcher who completed the job.

For readers following the current club, our 2026 pitching review examines a different question: how to read earned runs alongside total runs allowed.

Sources and historical context

• MLB archived Game 5 box score, line score and play-by-play, game ID 67826.
• MLB historical schedule and Series result, October 16, 1983.

This is a retrospective of the October 16, 1983 game, researched November 7, 2026. Research cutoff: November 7, 2026, 8 p.m. Eastern. Historical details come from the archived records; interpretations are Birdland Today analysis.

Photo: Rickey Henderson with Eddie Murray at first base and Cal Ripken in the background, circa 1983, by Gary Soup, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0. This archival Athletics–Orioles image does not depict the World Series game. Original unmodified; website resizing and display cropping may apply. The source’s 2009 timestamp is not the game date.